I can almost hear the younger folks out there asking "What the hell is that ???" And the answer is: It's a better-looking version of the RCA Victor Victrola that we had on the workbench in the garage when I was a mean little kid about seven.
These were made in the 1920s and competed very successfully with another design of machine which used cylindrical drums instead of our more-familiar flat discs. It worked with the power of a big spring, sort of like your old-time wind-up clocks, and that hand crank on the right side of it is how you wound up that spring to make it go. The pick-up on the turntable arm used little solid metal needles, and if you didn't have a little tin box of them, you could always use a very small finishing nail from Dad's carpentry supplies. It was hell on the records, as I quickly learned, but it did play them with a small nail instead of the proper needle.
And it was on a rig like this that I first heard Jan Garber and his Orchestra playing that great old tune "All I Do Is Dream Of You", which more recently was the melody used in a local telephone company commercial - with modern rendition, of course.
'All I Do Is Dream Of You'
I hasten to add here that this above link isn't the Jan Garber version that I knew and loved away back when, but it's fairly close - It's Gene Raymond singing it from a 1934 movie with Joan Crawford and a cast of dozens. The Jan Garber version had a snappy arrangement that got your toes tapping, and it moved right along. This one sort of limps across the carpet and into the kitchen, but it will give you the idea of it.
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