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Dick Garrison, a musician and former businessman and movie sound man, is fascinated by electronics and mechanics.

"He was born that way and will probably die that way," said Peggie, who still retains a lilt in her voice from her native Ireland. "We have push-button drapes and a push-button fireplace."

"This is an electronic nuthouse," Garrison, 79, said. "Everything is radio-controlled."

Well, not everything. Just ask, and Garrison will pick up his trombone, turn on his music system and play along with the jazz - the floor-to-ceiling speaker reverberating and emanating colored lights.

Garrison, who came to Juneau from Seattle in 1941 with the Army Signal Corps, helped install a faster IBM teletype communication system here and in Adak. At that time, the only contact with the outside world was through teletype - typewriters that receive radio signals.

About 6,000 people lived in Juneau in 1941. Another 25,000 to 30,000 troops were camped in the Mendenhall Valley, then mostly farmland, Garrison said.

Garrison, a music graduate of the University of Washington, played the trombone five nights a week at the USO dance hall, once rehearsing with the little-known Debbie Reynolds and Brenda Lee.

In college, he thought he might make a career out of music. "But boy it's good I didn't, because I would have starved," he said, thinking of the competition. He was, however, one of the original musicians in the Juneau Symphony and played in nightclubs here.

"See these two trombones there?" Garrison said in a recent interview. "I tell people I play in stereo."

Garrison was born a tinkerer. While in Adak in the Aleutians, he cashed in on his talents by fixing several hundred watches from the Third Fleet. It paid for his first house in Juneau, he said.

Garrison has owned a number of businesses here, including a music shop.

As a sideline, "I bought a whole bunch of jukeboxes, and I put them in 11 cathouses," at a time when prostitution was legal in Alaska. "Sometimes they had a customer, and I had to go in the back door."

Garrison also owned a furniture store, bars, apartments and land. He retired at age 44 and hasn't had a problem with boredom. He and Peggie travel on cruise ships, so they can dance in ballroom contests.

Dick and Peggie have been married for 42 years.

"He was a patient, I was a nurse," Peggie said. "And we met and got married and lived happily ever after like a cheap melodrama."

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he served as a sound man for Chuck Keen, a local businessman and filmmaker. Keen and Garrison sometimes hosted in Juneau the stars they worked with, such as Tab Hunter and Cesar Romero. They worked with John Wayne on a documentary about communism.

Garrison said he didn't make money working with Keen, "but I tell everybody I got a million-dollar education and experience I wouldn't trade for all the tea in China."

Garrison has two workshops on the ground floor of his house. One is a small room lined with tools and materials. About 170 boxes are marked with items such as "ballast transformers" and "pressure relief valves." There are drawers of jewelry parts. A thousand clock hands fill a cigar box. Eight tape dispensers are lined up on a metal chest of drawers. Jars are nailed by their lids to the door frame.

"How'd you like to take inventory here? In this place here I can do anything. I never have to go to a hardware store or electric store," he said.

The other work room holds the toy robots, clocks and half-million-volt Tesla coil lightning machine. "Something you very seldom see," he said, perhaps unnecessarily.

Turned on, the machine emits little, crackling lightning bolts, and a nearby row of unplugged fluorescent bulbs lights up.

Walk into one of the garages and mechanical, caged birds sing, colored globes twirl and a red laser light draws ropes on the wall. It's all triggered by a motion detector.

Garrison said he has two patents - for a blinking flashlight and an oyster knife - from which he's never made a nickel.

It's not that the light from the flashlight's bulb blinked - what's the use of that? It was the body of the flashlight that blinked, so you could find it in the dark.

Eric Fry can be reached at efry@juneauempire.com.