VOA19980525.1800.3111 NEWS TRANSCRIPT Many experts say the success to living to an old age is to keep busy: continue working or have a hobby. Well, a 78-year-old businessman in the suburbs of New York City is taking that advice to heart. He has two hobbies which keep him busy: higher learning and music. And he spoke with the VOA's Martin Bush . At the age of 78, Mandel Fogel has just earned a university law degree. Once it's framed, he'll add it to seven other diplomas adorning the walls of his surgical supply store in Oceanside, Long Island, a New York City suburb. Mr. Fogel also works a 60-hour week and gives no thought to retiring. I enjoy going to school, reading, and sitting in class and giving my opinions, sometimes told to shut up, but, you know, we older people and the younger people, we don't see eye to eye. Mandel Fogel has another the deep-pitched brass instrument called the tuba. This self-taught musician not only plays the tuba in its several variations. He collects old tubas. Along with numerous slide and valve trombones, bugles, French horns, mellophones, and trumpets, he owns 24 tubas. Mr. Fogel has been accumulating wind instruments for 30 years. They now fill three of the four bedrooms in his home as well as the storage areas of his store. The amateur musician also is the drum major of several community brass bands. As you might expect of a dedicated collector, he's the owner of 20 ornate drum major uniforms, also a collection of antique snare and bass drums. Mandel Fogel played the trumpet and French horn when he bought his first antique tuba, a model which had not been manufactured since 1920. Its silvery coils wrap around the player's body. Its huge bell points diagonally to the musician's left. I fell in love with the tuba because I discovered an old tuba, the Helicon, which is no longer made. And I found that to be the most beautiful tuba sound that one ever heard. I liken it to the Stratevarius violin. Nobody I know has ever played the modern version of the Helicon. In my own collection, I have a total of six. I think I have cornered the world market on Helicons. The curio of the Fogel collection is a wind instrument once used by U.S. Army marching bands during the American Civil War in the 1860s. It's a tuba that faces backward over the shoulder of the player so the music could be heard better by the troops who the band is leading. This was developed during the Civil War when the troops complained that they couldn't hear the music. They used the usual what we call a bell-front instrument. So Adolph Sachs , I believe, redesigned the whole brass family and made the bells point backwards. It's known as OTS, or over-the-shoulder, horn. After the Civil War and the war ended, instead of continuing the manufacturer, they dropped it, the manufacturer, and went back to conventional tubas. Mandel Fogel took up the tuba as a young musician simply because he wanted to increase the number of times he performed with a band. It's, first of all, a background instrument that plays little melody. And, second of all, nobody wants to play it because it's unwieldy, it's heavy, and it's a thing you have to carry around, whether you play the upright or the circular tuba known as today the Sousaphone. So I says, well, I might as well make myself important. I studied the tuba. I bought a book, how to play the tuba, studied the fingering. And now I go around with tubas, and I'm in demand. How does Mandel Fogel keep his hundreds of old brass or silver wind instruments shining? He doesn't. When it's time to perform, he says: I pull out only the instrument I've decided to play and polish it up. This is Martin Bush, VOA News, New York.