RICHMOND, Va. -- The sounds from another century are music to John DeMajo’s ears. The 76-year-old man has been tinkering with the past ever since he can remember and his Chesterfield home is filled with old radios.
”When you walk in this house you’re in 1950. You’re actually listening to a 1938 Zenith Radio,” DeMajo said. ”This radio right here is 80 years old. You heard it. It plays. It came back from the dead.”
Old-time radio shows are DeMajo's specialty.
The retired engineer broadcasts programs from his very own transmitter, a low-wattage bridge to a bygone era.
“A lot of these inventions were engineering marvels in their time,” he said.
But the New Orleans native’s passion for the radio reaches another frequency.
He started amassing and restoring radios as a six-year-old boy and hasn’t stopped. Hundreds of rare artifacts line the walls, floor to ceiling, not in a museum, but in his house.
”I love this stuff and everything in here tells a story. That is the thing,” he said. ”Right now, since I’ve retired this is my life."
Three-quarters of the DeMajo home is dedicated to his hands-on hobby.
“I have an agreement with my wife I don’t put radios in the bedroom, the dining room, or the kitchen,” he said. ”I’m still adding to the collection, but I’m out of room."
His daughter, Kathleen Adams, admires her dad for saving American broadcast history even if it means fewer square feet of living space.
“There is always more to collect. Every week there is a new radio,” Adams said. ”These radios, they don’t make them like they used to. You can’t just throw these things away.”
While DeMajo relishes his radios, he laments the loss of one beloved keepsake.
“He thinks about it every single day. He brings it up,” Adams said.
In 1995, DeMajo purchased a broken Wurlitzer theatre organ and brought it home.
The retired engineer spent 10 years and $100,000 resurrecting the rare instrument that was made in 1923 and was used in a Tennessee theater.
But in 2005, Hurricane Katrina and broken levees washed away DeMajo's New Orleans home.
“The thing sat under water and it was laden with battery acid,” he said. “We had metal pipes that disintegrated when you touched them."
His mighty Wurlitzer was no match for Mother Nature.
“It was devastating,” he said. “It was devastating to see all of that work go down the drain.”
After he relocated to Richmond, a miracle for the musician. DeMajo found another Wurlitzer, this one from 1926.
He installed the mighty Wurlitzer in his Chesterfield living room. The pipes piled high into a second-floor bedroom.
“It is a theatre pipe organ,” Adams said with a chuckle. “Have you seen it?”
The tunes from this one-man band can carry out of his home and into his neighborhood.
“I had an agreement with the lady across the street when she had a baby that I wouldn’t play during certain hours when the baby was sleeping because the floor in the baby’s room vibrated,” DeMajo said.
DeMajo found joy at the controls and lost in his music.
“It soothes the soul. It is relaxing,” he said.
But DeMajo says the song will end sooner than he would like. DeMajo lives with serious lung damage from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Doctors have given him about 18 months to live.
“This is why I want to be able to share this with people once I’m not here anymore. I want people to see this and enjoy what I’ve spent my life collecting,” DeMajo said.
DeMajo's next act is finding a home for his seven decades of labor under one roof.
”That is what this is about, trying to figure out what to do with this,” DeMajo said.
Till then, the musician said the song will go on.
John DeMajo enjoying the sounds of happiness one note and radio at a time.
“I would say that if I hadn’t done this I would have a real problem saying I didn’t fulfill my life," DeMajo said. "If you have a dream that you want to do something like this, do it. Do it while you can.”
