Yaaay, excellent! Now you'll have a new Kirby AND a new friend!!
I remember the first Dual-80 I ever saw. My second job in high school, in 1973, was working for Keystone Shoes at Parole Plaza in Annapolis, Maryland. It was a part-time, after-school and Saturdays job. Part of my duties after the store closed was to vacuum -- and the owner had a Dual-80. I thought it was ugly, I never did like that green color, but it was a very nice machine and fun to use.
Turned out that he had bought it from a friend ... who was a Kirby dealer! The man stopped by from time to time and eventually figured out that I like old vacuum cleaners because I was always talking his ear off about them.
He told me he had a lot of old Kirbys and I could come by to see them sometime, but he lived in Fairfax, Virginia so it would have been a bit of a drive. I never did go see his machines. Wish now that I had!
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My -first- job was working as an usher for Capitol Theater in Annapolis. That was an unpleasant job in many ways, but one of the plus-factors was that using the vacuum cleaner was also part of the usher's job. The usher crew was supposed to rotate, but I always volunteered to do it! The vacuum cleaner was one of those cast-iron Hoover Commercial 913s. I always loved that big fat bag and the long wind-up and wind-down of the motor.
The theater also had about six electric blowers, for blowing the popcorn and junk from under the seats. These machines were adapted from old Kirbys (early 513 series), with a long rigid metal pipe permanently attached to the blower port. The fan was a modified piece with no belt shaft, and the opening was covered with some sort of steel mesh. The lighthouse assembly had been removed, and they had some sort of metal handle attached to where the long handle would have gone [but were not the old portable-size handle]. They did not appear to be home-made units, so there must have been some company who went into business "re-purposing" old Kirbys into movie theater blowers!
