“I remember going there, seeing a microphone and getting up and singing,” Ms. Forman recalled. “I probably closed my eyes.” At the end, she was given the 78 as a souvenir, and that was that. Seven years later she married Joe Forman, an accountant, and they had two children and eventually settled in West Long Branch, N.J. The recordings from her wedding and the studio were put in storage and pretty much forgotten.
Until the pandemic hit.
After her discovery, Ms. Forman called her son, Glenn, 61, a physiatrist who lives 10 minutes away in Long Branch. They borrowed a friend’s turntable and listened to the record together. He was stunned. He and his sister, Adrienne, knew their mother had liked to sing, but they had no idea there were recordings. She had never even mentioned it.
“She would always tell me things were difficult and ‘I did what I had to do’ and leave it at that,” he said. “I’m playing amateur psychiatrist here, but I think the decisions that she made to stop her potential career were very difficult to make,” he said. “Her way of getting through life when she was growing up was to isolate the good things and just block out everything else.”
He called a cousin, Howard Forman, 63, a musician and producer based in Montreal, who has been nominated for two Canadian Academy Awards. Mr. Forman instructed his relatives not to touch or play the records again, because they could disintegrate.
Howard Forman put them in contact with a guy he knew in San Diego who restores old 78s and reel-to-reel tapes, Eric Van der Wyk of King Tet Productions. Mr. Van der Wyk, 65, has been in business for 25 years. Last year, he said, was his busiest ever.
“I’m working 11-hour days,” he said. “The pandemic has driven demand for what I do. So many people are cleaning out their homes.”
He was impressed with Ms. Forman’s records. “I hear recordings that sometimes sound a little amateur-y,” he said gently. “She has character and accuracy in her voice. This is pro level.”