Walter Lippit makes music all over town. For a thirty-mile radius every jukebox makes music because Walter Lippit has put it there. He sets it up, rents it out, keeps it primed, and makes music. Money music. I help to keep up the beat because Lippit’s a friend of mine and because Lippit pays me.

It’s a fast-stepping job, since Walter Lippit doesn’t like too many helpers, but it isn’t often a rat-race kind of day because the outfit has grown up to run sweet and smooth. Though once in a while, by making everyone run around hard, Lippit makes it clear how a big, well-running outfit like his got that way. He pays me, so I run.

When we met he was reworking the juke market for himself. I was doing nothing. I was an agent I had been handling singers, doing publicity for a record hop, all of which sounds fairly busy considering the turnover in that entertainment branch, but it isn’t always so. I had just lost my star client and made a fair pot of money on her switch to a New York-sized agency, which-at the time-left me only odds and ends and boredom. The odds-and-ends clients were a no-talent vocal, for one, and then a combo which was much too demanding for the jukes. You had to listen to it I had respect for their work and soon sent them to somebody else, but I was still pushing the no-talent vocal when I ran into Lippit.

Now, the way you push a no-talent vocal, one way which might make you apt to run into Lippit at the same time, is to try and get discs of your vocal on all the juke machines you can find. I had the ins for it, at the time. I could go to half a dozen of the juke-machine operators and with just a little bit of this and that, they’d place my discs in their machines and you had to listen to my no-talent vocal. And then the d.j.’s would take it up, and that’s how I was an agent.