Ampico Rochester Factory Recollections
By Bruce Clark
About 1952 I discovered a Fischer model B grand in a music store in Rochester, New York. They must have been very eager to sell it because they gave me an enormous trade-in allowance for my Cable Nelson. Right off the bat, the Fischer B had problems. It was a terror at tearing rolls, and the bass expression did not express.
The music store where I had purchased the piano sent a former worker at Ampico over to adjust it, Mr. Max Dechau. He was a nice man, and preferred the model A to the model B, saying that "You can adjust those A's just where you want them, but not the B's." He lived with his brother Louis, a piano tuner, and his wife. He was a quiet man and never said much, but he knew the Ampico inside and out.
The Fischer Ampico was my pride and joy for many years, and it too had it's original pneumatics and tubing which were beginning to fail. Money was scarce, and I contacted another former factory worker, Mr. George Binder. He was a player specialist and assisted me in removing the stack. I recovered all the pneumatics, and he was so impressed with my neatness that he hired me on a part time basis to do recovering for him. He did not understand the expression systems very well, but had a well-stocked library of blueprints and technical books that he allowed me to use. He would have me do the expression systems and he would do the pneumatic stacks, at which he was most fastidious.
I became acquainted with local music stores in the Rochester area, and was called on several occasions to remove Ampico units with no pay, but I got to keep the parts. I could not convince the store owners to restore the units. I remember gutting a lovely Mason & Hamlin and a few Chickerings. I had a nice stockpile of parts that I willingly gave to others who had interest in reproducing pianos. My parents were not too happy with me bringing all these parts home and storing them in the cellar.
The Ampico factory was in East Rochester, New York, not too far from my parent's home. I'd go there (this was in 1957) to obtain test rolls and have an occasional piano action part repaired or replaced. Most of the Ampico stuff was stored out in the foundry, where they once cast plates for pianos. Everything was covered in black coal dust and dirt, and looked like it had been there for many years. There were cartons of Ampico roll boxes and small parts. Boxes of unit valves, motors etc., that they were glad to give away before it was thrown out. I did not see any perforators at that time, so it might have been after that fellow rescued them.
There were separate buildings: one for Chickering, one for Knabe, and one for Mason & Hamlin, each having gold leaf lettering at the top of the building. Some of the workers were blind, and had sticks that they would hit together that they used as radar-like devices to get around and not run into anything. There were many foreign-born workers who took a lot of pride in their workmanship. The factory today has been converted into small shops, but the tall yellow brick chimney still stands with the letters vertically spelling out "AMPICO". I have a picture of it, but I am afraid that it too will be removed in the not-too-distant future.
Mr. Homer Bills, a friend of mine who used to work in the woodworking department, still lives in Fairport, New York. He told me that they were very fussy, and if any boards had knots in them they were thrown out immediately. He had nothing to do with players and worked in the piano department. The old-timers like the Ampico better because it was easier to work on. If the Duo-Arts had an action problem it could take hours to disconnect everything to get at the action.
Curiously, no one seemed to have any Welte pianos, or know much about them except Mr. William Pritchard, whose family had a Welte distributorship before my time. I knew Mr. Pritchard, and he never said much about the Welte. My own opinion is in favor of the Ampico for accessibility, and the Duo-Art for durability. For some unknown reason I never ran into more than a handful of Welte's. Very few that I ever heard worked very well.
Mr. Wells Benedict was head of the Ampico Service department in East Rochester. When I met him he was up in years and seemed to think I was a dumb kid who had no clue as to how an Ampico worked. Upon his death his widow called to sell me his tools. I bought several aluminum pouch setters, a factory tracker-ear gauge, boxes of unit valves, and a curious device to put a crown on a tracker bar.
Mr. Benedict told me that a tracker bar should have a crown, or "bow out" just a little in the center. (He stuttered badly and it was difficult to understand him.) This device was made of wood and had a screw-type device that would grab the tracker bar from underneath, and by tightening the screw in the center it would bow the tracker bar outward. I never tried it for fear of bending it too far. The pianos I worked on never had any crown problems that I could see, and I was afraid to bend the tracker bar too much, so I never used it.
The only thing I kept all these years is his vacuum gauge for setting intensities. I use it to adjust my own Ampico. For a time I thought it was all over, and I sold everything pertaining to the Ampico, but after semi-retirement I had the opportunity to purchase a studio upright Ampico, (a Haines Bros. in a Chinese art case) and I did so in 1994, restoring it completely, and have been enjoying it ever since. It is played daily; I enjoy the classics, and popular music of the middle-'twenties to the 'forties.
I do have a funny Ampico story: I had stripped the paint off a small Marshall and Wendall Ampico and had stained the case and bench. A woman came to look at it, not knowing that the stain was still wet, and sat on the bench in a pink dress. I never gave much thought until she went to exit and there was a big brown stain on the back of her dress. I thought of telling her, but I was so full of laughs that I could not say a word. I am sure she found out later!
A horror story with a Duo-Art _did_ occur when a fellow worker completed the restoration of a beautiful walnut Weber grand. He received an emergency call to come immediately as the Duo-Art did not work. To his horror, he found that the family had decided to paint the piano white with white _house-paint_! The paint had run down all over the keys and the electric plug and cord had fallen in the paint can. The metal prongs were covered with so much paint the electrical connection would not work! He scraped the paint off the plug and the piano worked, but he left the house in disgust.
Mr. George Eastman, who started Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, had a large Aeolian organ in his home. Yes, it had a Duo-Art roll player in the front hall. After Mr. Eastman's death, the curator of the house, a non-music-lover, decided to eliminate organ music once and for all, and they took a hack saw and cut the cables to the organ!
It is rumored that, to test the honesty of the organ service men, Mr. Eastman would place a $5.00 gold piece on a chest where the workers would surly find it. If they brought it to him, he then knew the maintenance men were honest. If they kept the gold piece he would fire them!
That about does it for my story. I'm retired now. I sold all but the basic tools to keep my little Ampico in top shape, sit by the fire, and enjoy the music. I leave my work to the younger set, hoping that they do not distort what was meant to be. Please do restorations with care, so that the Ampico may live on, and play music to generations instead of today's cacophony that is barely understandable.
Bruce Clark
[ Thanks, Bruce, for your fine article. History preserved here is
[ likely to be quite valuable to a researcher many years from now.
[ -- Robbie
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(Message sent Sat 21 Dec 1996, 00:49:35 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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