Presto
Issue: 1920 1747 - Page 7
PHCfifTO
January 15, 1920.
there is an industry, once superlatively great, at least commercially,
which has dried up under inadequate control until it is hardly a good
shadow of its former multi-millionaire self.
This year will try out both kinds of piano concerns. More steam,
better administration and wider vision, will this year guide and direct
the American piano as never before. And at the end we shall have a
new and enlarged vision of the workings of the ancient and honorable
law of the "survival of the fittest."
THE NEW PIED PIPER
PIANO HISTORY MAKERS
We believe that most men in this trade and industry found
interest in the interviews with famous piano men in last week's
issue of Presto. To every retailer of pianos there is some one manu-
facturer, or perhaps more than one, whose personalities have vastly
more than common interest. The piano industry has been pretty well
built up by men of especially strong personal attributes. From the
day' when John Jacob Astor, the first, opened his little piano,store on
lower Broadway, New York, to this day the mind easily reverts to
the great figures in the industry. There comes at once the bright
face of Jonas Chickering of whom a quaint picture was drawn by
Henry Phillips, the English baritone, during that singer's American
tour in 1843. It is worth repeating here. ' ' A>
"I had conceived Mr. Chickering to be a tall, stout man," said the
English artist, "somewhat proud and austere; good hearted, but with
an odd way of showing it—-seeming at times as if he were conferring
a favor on you by inviting you to his house, but begging you would
make yourself as much at home as the stateliness of the place, his
family's superiority, and his large fortune, would permit. Judge of
my astonishment when a little thin person walked into the room,
with a modest, almost bashful, cast of features, who shook me by the
hand as if he had known me all his life, whose hard palm bore the
evidence of labor, and whose dress might have been brushed to
advantage."
And that was the "father of the American piano." It is a grateful
picture of one of the immortals in the history of the piano. And, fol-
lowing in the long line of his successors in the industry, we catch
glimpses of other piano makers of Boston. There is Henry F. Miller,
the first, at his own piano, playing like an artist; and Jas. A. Vose
and C. C. Briggs, and J. W. Brackett—the original pedal-piano maker
—and Geo. M. Guild, inventor and impractical genius; and John Mc-
Tammany, with his first player-piano experimentations.
New York piano history is crowded with memorable figures. The
elder Fischer and his four stalwart sons; the succession of Bacons;
the Steinways from Henry, in 1857, to William and finally Charles H.
Steinway whose going is so recent that he seems still to be here.
And George Steck, serious-minded and thorough; Albert Weber,
small, dark-skinned and volatile; the Haines Brothers, of boundless
ambition; the Hazeltons, and others whose heirs follow over and join
the past with the present. No less has the West contributed some
great piano men, and large memories, from Julius Bauer, W. W T .
Kimball, the Cables, to the younger men now hard at it. So, too, with
Cincinnati and other piano points whose industries still contribute
their share.
It is to such men as are in a sense brought back to us in the
interviews recalled last week, that we owe existing advanced condi-
tions in the American piano industry. And, of course, conditions in
AND THEY NKVER CAME BACK.
the retail trade are equally, or more, to be measured by what the
manufacturers have done and are still doing.
If there is any man who is posted on events in the piano industry
Mr. R. S. Howard of the New York industry that bears his name is
all of that. That's why we suspect one of the trade papers has been
printing fake interviews with Mr. Howard and making him say things
that are not so. F'rinstance, the old Boston house of Hallett & Cums-
ton didn't start full-page trade paper advertising, nor did the late Marc
A. Blumenberg "start" the Courier. Don't let's get trade paper history
as badly mixed as an ordinary obituary column.
*
The death of Thomas F. Scanlan, one-time king of popular piano
production, recalls many incidents in the history of the industry. Mr.
Scanlan was at one time the Joseph P. Hale of Boston, and his factory
was the biggest in the industry. He would have been a multi-mil-
lionaire had he not taken to "kiting" notes with a big Texas piano
house and fallen short in his dates. His New England piano was long
a shining mark in the popular trade.
* * *
There is good news for some dealers in this issue of Presto. You
will glimpse it with gladness on page 17. "We have 100 straight
pianos ready for shipment!" Isn't that a cry of "water" in the desert?
And the oasis is in sight, and it's real.
dered from Chicago to Canada; has heard the coy-
ottes yelp in the night, and shuddered at the bones
of the buffalo piled high on the wind-cursed plains
of Saskatchewan. It has been ferried across the
South Saskatchewan river by a French-Canadian
and has shivered in the weather of fifty below zero.
It has warmed the hearts of the lonely Saskatche-
But Letter From Denver Only Suggests a Ful- wan
homesteader and caused music to ring in his
ler Story That Should Prove
heart. It has encouraged me when everything was
going wrong; frost bitten crops and droughts.
Interesting.
The piano has done all this and more; it has much
The following extract from a letter by a retail
to tell. Carried across the badger burrowed trails
customer of the Smith, Barnes & Strohber Co., Chi- by wagon seventy-five miles in Canada; stuck in the
cago, is not only a tribute to a Smith & Barnes Sand Hills; balked at by the tired horses in the al-
piano's durability under trying circumstances but is kali sloughs of that country. Yet in all this, it has re-
also a heart-felt expression of human feeling the tained its tone and excellent fine touch. There is
piano engendered. The letter suggests a piano story nothing that adds so much to a home as a piano.
interesting enough to be classed with trade classics.
This one has caused me tears of anguish, hours of
It is the adventures of a Smith & Barnes piano in a worry, and days of pleasure. Some day I'll try to
thrilling trip from a comfortable Chicago residence
give you a history of this instrument—it is worth
to a sod shanty thirty-five miles from a railroad in reading. Mixes the city of Chicago up with the cold
Western Canada:
pioneer life of Saskatchewan, and brings the rough-
The piano is a "hum-dinger" (pardon slang) and ness of the frontier into touch with the mad restless
it would have many a story to tell. Sometimes I spirit of Civilization as developed in Chicago. From
have thought it could not look me in the face be- a modern house in Wellington court to a sod shanty
cause of the worry it has caused me. It has wan- thirty-five miles from a railroad in western Canada.
EXPERIENCES OF A
SMITH & BARNES PIANO
* -! ;
NAMES SUBMITTED BY
NOMINATING COMMITTEE
A. M. Wright and Charles Jacob Nominated for
Secretary and Treasurer of N. P. M. A. of A.
In accordance with Article X of the by-laws of
the National Piano Manufacturers' Association of
America, the nominating committee, composed of
Warren C. Whitney, Geo. F. Blake and Sidney N.
Mayer, presents the following names:
For Secretary—A. M. Wright of Boston.
For Treasurer—Charles Jacob of New York.
For Membership Committee—William B. Will-
iams, New York; A. A. Mahan, Fort Wayne, Ind.;
Ava W. Poole, Boston; A. Dalrymple, New York;
Hobart M. Cable, La Porte, Ind.
The other officers and committees are nominated
at the annual meeting.
E. W. Furbush, of Chicago, traveler for the Had-
dorff Piano Company, spent Monday and Tuesday
of this week at the factory headquarters in Rock-
ford, 111.
Enhanced content © 2008-2009 and presented by MBSI - The Musical Box Society International (www.mbsi.org) and the International Arcade Museum (www.arcade-museum.com).
All Rights Reserved. Digitized from the archives of the MBSI with support from NAMM - The International Music Products Association (www.namm.org).
Additional enhancement, optimization, and distribution by the International Arcade Museum. An extensive collection of Presto can be found online at http://www.arcade-museum.com/library/
January 15, 1920.
there is an industry, once superlatively great, at least commercially,
which has dried up under inadequate control until it is hardly a good
shadow of its former multi-millionaire self.
This year will try out both kinds of piano concerns. More steam,
better administration and wider vision, will this year guide and direct
the American piano as never before. And at the end we shall have a
new and enlarged vision of the workings of the ancient and honorable
law of the "survival of the fittest."
THE NEW PIED PIPER
PIANO HISTORY MAKERS
We believe that most men in this trade and industry found
interest in the interviews with famous piano men in last week's
issue of Presto. To every retailer of pianos there is some one manu-
facturer, or perhaps more than one, whose personalities have vastly
more than common interest. The piano industry has been pretty well
built up by men of especially strong personal attributes. From the
day' when John Jacob Astor, the first, opened his little piano,store on
lower Broadway, New York, to this day the mind easily reverts to
the great figures in the industry. There comes at once the bright
face of Jonas Chickering of whom a quaint picture was drawn by
Henry Phillips, the English baritone, during that singer's American
tour in 1843. It is worth repeating here. ' ' A>
"I had conceived Mr. Chickering to be a tall, stout man," said the
English artist, "somewhat proud and austere; good hearted, but with
an odd way of showing it—-seeming at times as if he were conferring
a favor on you by inviting you to his house, but begging you would
make yourself as much at home as the stateliness of the place, his
family's superiority, and his large fortune, would permit. Judge of
my astonishment when a little thin person walked into the room,
with a modest, almost bashful, cast of features, who shook me by the
hand as if he had known me all his life, whose hard palm bore the
evidence of labor, and whose dress might have been brushed to
advantage."
And that was the "father of the American piano." It is a grateful
picture of one of the immortals in the history of the piano. And, fol-
lowing in the long line of his successors in the industry, we catch
glimpses of other piano makers of Boston. There is Henry F. Miller,
the first, at his own piano, playing like an artist; and Jas. A. Vose
and C. C. Briggs, and J. W. Brackett—the original pedal-piano maker
—and Geo. M. Guild, inventor and impractical genius; and John Mc-
Tammany, with his first player-piano experimentations.
New York piano history is crowded with memorable figures. The
elder Fischer and his four stalwart sons; the succession of Bacons;
the Steinways from Henry, in 1857, to William and finally Charles H.
Steinway whose going is so recent that he seems still to be here.
And George Steck, serious-minded and thorough; Albert Weber,
small, dark-skinned and volatile; the Haines Brothers, of boundless
ambition; the Hazeltons, and others whose heirs follow over and join
the past with the present. No less has the West contributed some
great piano men, and large memories, from Julius Bauer, W. W T .
Kimball, the Cables, to the younger men now hard at it. So, too, with
Cincinnati and other piano points whose industries still contribute
their share.
It is to such men as are in a sense brought back to us in the
interviews recalled last week, that we owe existing advanced condi-
tions in the American piano industry. And, of course, conditions in
AND THEY NKVER CAME BACK.
the retail trade are equally, or more, to be measured by what the
manufacturers have done and are still doing.
If there is any man who is posted on events in the piano industry
Mr. R. S. Howard of the New York industry that bears his name is
all of that. That's why we suspect one of the trade papers has been
printing fake interviews with Mr. Howard and making him say things
that are not so. F'rinstance, the old Boston house of Hallett & Cums-
ton didn't start full-page trade paper advertising, nor did the late Marc
A. Blumenberg "start" the Courier. Don't let's get trade paper history
as badly mixed as an ordinary obituary column.
*
The death of Thomas F. Scanlan, one-time king of popular piano
production, recalls many incidents in the history of the industry. Mr.
Scanlan was at one time the Joseph P. Hale of Boston, and his factory
was the biggest in the industry. He would have been a multi-mil-
lionaire had he not taken to "kiting" notes with a big Texas piano
house and fallen short in his dates. His New England piano was long
a shining mark in the popular trade.
* * *
There is good news for some dealers in this issue of Presto. You
will glimpse it with gladness on page 17. "We have 100 straight
pianos ready for shipment!" Isn't that a cry of "water" in the desert?
And the oasis is in sight, and it's real.
dered from Chicago to Canada; has heard the coy-
ottes yelp in the night, and shuddered at the bones
of the buffalo piled high on the wind-cursed plains
of Saskatchewan. It has been ferried across the
South Saskatchewan river by a French-Canadian
and has shivered in the weather of fifty below zero.
It has warmed the hearts of the lonely Saskatche-
But Letter From Denver Only Suggests a Ful- wan
homesteader and caused music to ring in his
ler Story That Should Prove
heart. It has encouraged me when everything was
going wrong; frost bitten crops and droughts.
Interesting.
The piano has done all this and more; it has much
The following extract from a letter by a retail
to tell. Carried across the badger burrowed trails
customer of the Smith, Barnes & Strohber Co., Chi- by wagon seventy-five miles in Canada; stuck in the
cago, is not only a tribute to a Smith & Barnes Sand Hills; balked at by the tired horses in the al-
piano's durability under trying circumstances but is kali sloughs of that country. Yet in all this, it has re-
also a heart-felt expression of human feeling the tained its tone and excellent fine touch. There is
piano engendered. The letter suggests a piano story nothing that adds so much to a home as a piano.
interesting enough to be classed with trade classics.
This one has caused me tears of anguish, hours of
It is the adventures of a Smith & Barnes piano in a worry, and days of pleasure. Some day I'll try to
thrilling trip from a comfortable Chicago residence
give you a history of this instrument—it is worth
to a sod shanty thirty-five miles from a railroad in reading. Mixes the city of Chicago up with the cold
Western Canada:
pioneer life of Saskatchewan, and brings the rough-
The piano is a "hum-dinger" (pardon slang) and ness of the frontier into touch with the mad restless
it would have many a story to tell. Sometimes I spirit of Civilization as developed in Chicago. From
have thought it could not look me in the face be- a modern house in Wellington court to a sod shanty
cause of the worry it has caused me. It has wan- thirty-five miles from a railroad in western Canada.
EXPERIENCES OF A
SMITH & BARNES PIANO
* -! ;
NAMES SUBMITTED BY
NOMINATING COMMITTEE
A. M. Wright and Charles Jacob Nominated for
Secretary and Treasurer of N. P. M. A. of A.
In accordance with Article X of the by-laws of
the National Piano Manufacturers' Association of
America, the nominating committee, composed of
Warren C. Whitney, Geo. F. Blake and Sidney N.
Mayer, presents the following names:
For Secretary—A. M. Wright of Boston.
For Treasurer—Charles Jacob of New York.
For Membership Committee—William B. Will-
iams, New York; A. A. Mahan, Fort Wayne, Ind.;
Ava W. Poole, Boston; A. Dalrymple, New York;
Hobart M. Cable, La Porte, Ind.
The other officers and committees are nominated
at the annual meeting.
E. W. Furbush, of Chicago, traveler for the Had-
dorff Piano Company, spent Monday and Tuesday
of this week at the factory headquarters in Rock-
ford, 111.
Enhanced content © 2008-2009 and presented by MBSI - The Musical Box Society International (www.mbsi.org) and the International Arcade Museum (www.arcade-museum.com).
All Rights Reserved. Digitized from the archives of the MBSI with support from NAMM - The International Music Products Association (www.namm.org).
Additional enhancement, optimization, and distribution by the International Arcade Museum. An extensive collection of Presto can be found online at http://www.arcade-museum.com/library/
Future scanning projects are planned by the International Arcade Museum Library (IAML).