Under a black-and-white 1950s album of The Four Lovers, Al Farleigh sat behind a desk in his St. Louis Cardinals regalia and pondered the future of Big Al’s Record Barn.

The Cardinals shirt was heartfelt. Farleigh, 79, has been a fan since he was a kid in Pennsylvania. It also engages customers. Big Al revels in the guff.

Just how much longer he can stay in business in his dimly lit shop on South Bascom Avenue, however, is questionable.

Farleigh says his landlady has not renewed the leases on the block — and he expects to fold up after 45 years of enjoyable and sometimes profitable haggling over vinyl.

He has marked down the prices of the half-million records in his shop, including his vast country collection, the four rows of male and female oldies, and the seemingly endless hoard of 45s.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he told me, explaining that one rumor has it that the shops will come down for medical offices. “The record men are waiting, salivating for my last month of business.”

Ann Sebastian, Farleigh’s landlady, declined to comment. “I really can’t say anything,” she told me. “We’ll see what happens, you know what I mean?”

It has been a remarkable run for a one-time carpenter who first got into the business after falling off a three-story roof and breaking a vertebrae.

As Farleigh recuperated, his wife got a job as a “record girl” for a jukebox company. They gave her a roomful of records and told her to dispose of them. Farleigh’s reaction? “Oh Boy,” he recalled.

Santa Clara store

After a stint at the Berryessa Flea Market, Farleigh opened up next to a Round Table Pizza near Kiely and El Camino Real in Santa Clara. Those were good years. People bought vinyl.

For the past 20 years, he has been hanging on with cheap rent at 522 S. Bascom Ave., in a faded strip of stores not far from Valley Medical Center.

Things are quieter now. Big Al’s is open only on afternoons. With an older assistant, he splits the shift, working 2:30 to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays.

Since he broke his hip two years ago while standing on a swivel chair to reach for an album, the ex-athlete has slowed considerably. But he still enjoys bartering.

“I don’t buy anything I don’t think I can sell in the next couple of months,” the bulky, white-haired Farleigh told me. “I’m buying cheap and selling cheap.”

Just at that moment, a man came into the store with a box of his father’s old records, heavy on Danish choral music.

Buying albums

Farleigh selected seven or eight albums and forked over $20. For the rest, he wasn’t very encouraging. “I would advise you to save your gas money,” he said.

Farleigh does have more memorable albums — and he let me peek at a box that included early LPs from people like Clyde McPhatter, the Chantels, James Brown and the Beatles.

He was mildly astonished when I correctly guessed that The Four Lovers was the early name for The Four Seasons. (Somewhere in the dim attic of my mind, I might have recognized Frankie Valli.)

In a business filled with casual chiseling, Farleigh hews to a kind of gruff integrity. But he urges people to look up prices first.

“When somebody brings in records and they’re not worth a lot, I’ll make an offer,” he said. “If there’s something really great, I’ll ask, ‘What do you want for this?’ I don’t take anything really rare and give them $1.”

In many ways, Big Al’s has defied history. Nobody has to remind him that vinyl has been supplanted by CDs — and CD’s have been replaced by audio files on the Web.

Farleigh thinks popular fashion may be returning a little to vinyl. Once the store is closed, he intends to auction his most valuable stuff on eBay.

I asked him whether he would stay if it weren’t for problems with his lease. “I’d gladly stay here,” he told me. “I love this place.”

Contact Scott Herhold at 408-275-0917 or sherhold@mercurynews.com. Twitter.com/scottherhold.