THE JUKEBOX

    One rarely sees such contraptions these days. For the youngsters I will provide a picture of one, along with the best description you will ever find. Although I recall well the one in our parent’s restaurant, I would never have thought of the glass panels as being full of orangeade or Chartreuse...

    “The evening of our arrival ended in a bar on the waterfront, where, in a setting of vaults, chintz curtains and indirect lighting, a number of sailors were clustered in silent homage around a jukebox. It was the first time I had seen one of these wonderful machines. The barman called it a Wurlitzer Nickelodeum. It was a shrine of steel and bakelite and glass, six feet high, and a queue of sailors were waiting to insert their nickels. At the drop of a coin, an unerring steel hand inside the tabernacle grasped the chosen record from the shelf and placed it on a disc that rose like a magic carpet. A needle-bearing arm descended and unleashed a muted throbbing and the voice of a crooner. The air was filled with etherialized treacle. Glass panels were illuminated in shades of mauve and pink, and liquids that must have been orangeade and Chartreuse and Grenadine syrup bubbled and glowed softly through a maze of decorative glass-piping with the intention of attuning the listener’s bloodstream to the mood of the music. Sailor after sailor slipped their coins into this engine, their eyes becoming every second mistier with Sehnsucht and Heimweh. The Nickelodeum is in its infancy. When it is perfected it is to be armed with slowly turning rollers of satin and fur and plush for the palms of the hands, and a battery of little scent sprays, while, from a bakelite orifice, an inch of barley sugar or Turkish delight, antiseptically sheathed in cellophane, will emerge, in order that all five senses, and not only two, may be simultaneously gratified.”

Source:

This passage is found in Patrick Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands. The journey was taken in the late 1940s and the waterfront bar is in St Thomas.
Post Script:
It looks like my Penguin paperback was picked up on an island - the Black Sheep book store on Salt Spring Island, BC. It is, by the way, a wonderful book.