I am pleased to have permission to forward this engaging personal
insight into Ken's five months at helm of Q-R-S some years ago ...

 ---------- Forwarded message ----------

 Date: Sat, 14 Mar 1998 09:13:37 -0500
 From: euphonia@home.com (Ken W. List)
 To: Karl Petersen <kap@firedragon.com>
 Subject: Re: Shades of Ramsey Tick....

You wrote, "Well well, Q-R-S, eh?"  Your "Re:" line suggests that the
owner wore sunglasses, which he sometimes did.

Well, Ramsi was an old buddy.  It is spelled Ramsi, because Mr. Tick's
first name, as given by his illustrious political-figure father, was
"Ismar", but young Tick felt that that was too Jewish, so he changed
it -- legally, I believe -- to Ramsi.  His name always made me think
of the President of the White Star Lines who did NOT go down with the
Titanic, Bruce Ismay.  Ramsi would have managed to avoid going down
with the ship, too!

When I left Schlicker in 1974, fired by the then-dead Schlicker's evil
s-o-b son-in-law, I did NOT wish to do any more organ building ever.
Based on a lot of the experience in running certain things I had at
Schlicker's, I applied for the then-vacant position of Orchestra
Manager of the Buffalo Philharmonic, where I would have dealt with
"arrangements" for tours, music purchase and rental, hall management,
things like that.

Ramsi Tick was the head honcho for the Buffalo Philharmonic, and that's
where I figgered that I had an edge (I had known Ramsi socially for
several years).  I was wrong -- someone else was better qualified and
got the job -- but, when he called to say that I was not going to
manage the orchestra, Ramsi said to me that his company Q-R-S (which
I knew of but had never visited) was in need of a new General Manager.
The former manager, a close friend of Ramsi's, named Brian, went off in
a huff (an 8-cylinder Huff, if memory serves), and would I be
interested.

Well, it seemed too good to be true: musical related, mechanical out
the butt, and fun.  So I said yes, and for the next maybe five months
I was the manager.

I managed, did the advertising copy, started putting together a new
catalogue (to follow one that had featured a flapper pumping away at
her Pianola on the cover) and stayed long enough to do the "royalties":
a pain of a job whereby with a knitting-needle and vibrating platform
you sorted the punch cards upon which were recorded how many of each
run of rolls there were and to whom a royalty payment (of from 3 cents
to 10 cents per roll) was to be paid.

By then, Phelps had contacted me from Erie to come and be _his_ General
Manager, and I had gotten a wee bit tired of Ramsi's absolutely no-
system management style -- but he WAS the owner, after all.  Also the
nostalgia element got to me: I had a candle-stick telephone, a manual
Royal Typewriter (I brought in my own portable electric just to cope)
and a hand-cranked adding machine and a real-for-sure mechanical
comptometer.  (I once tried to get it to calculate 1 divided by 0, and
after it starting literally smoking from trying, I pulled its plug.
The oil in it couldn't take it.  But it didn't break down.)

So ... I left Q-R-S after about four point five months of introduction
to the wonderful world of Rolls (sounds like something they'd say at
Little Debbie Snack Cakes, doesn't it) to go start rebuilding the
Wurlitzer organ for Oral Roberts University at Phelps.

I met most of the greats whilst at Ramsi's place: Mr. Q. David Bowers
and Mr. Cook, and I held what's-her-name, the ragtime player's hand as
she hand-played rolls on the recording piano (*).  I missed out on
Liberace, but got to help Eubie Blake do his hand-playeds.  What a
swell old gent!

After receiving some really excellent instructions from Rudy Martin, I
even made a couple of arrangements of Bach organ fugues (pretty good
voice doubling and implied expression, too), but Ramsi would not put
them in the catalogue nor produce them; he said there would be no
interest.  Hummpf!

The best "meet" was with Larry Givens, really through the offices of a
good mutual organbuilder friend in Pittsburgh.  Larry was such a
charmer -- he stayed with me a couple of times in Buffalo when he came
through -- but we lost track after I went back to pipes and trackers.
I was working on a system for the perforators which would anticipate
the vacuum needs of large chords (encoded into the master-rolls) to
avoid the endless problem of short notes failing to punch and long
'chains' breaking up - but never got it done, and I suppose now the
perforators run off of computer things.

I never returned to Q-R-S after I left.  Just never did, although I had
a pleasant leave-taking; Ramsi was not happy, but I am sure he turned
right around and seduced someone else's interest.

The Q-R-S building in Buffalo was an old Streetcar Maintenance barn,
and the perforators were mounted over the grilles through which grease
and oil had dripped to the sub-floor, hence the punchings (which were
like kitty-litter in texture) fell through to be gathered up and
disposed of.  I think they fed them to cows or something.  We had to
sweep the scatterings twice a day into the grilles, and the biggest
problem came with the stray cats who would sneak into the building at
night, and use the immense piles of punching for a huge litter-box.
Sometimes the smell was really awful.

Everybody filled in running the perforators so there would be a minimum
of downtime.  I would work the noon-lunch break for young Eric, my
favorite person in the joint, and the best perforator-runner.  He
taught me all the tricks of running the perforator.  "Hand-tracking"
the rolls (which wander off the tracker-bar all the time) is like
driving a very fast sport car down a mountain one-lane road very fast
with only one eye partly open.  When they wandered too far, notes
dropped out, and you could have to scrap the entire run, or else get
out your straight-edge and X-acto knife and start cutting in chains.
If you ran the perforator more slowly, you did better, but the
production figures went down.

The smaller machine did two tracks of 18 copies each (the top and
bottom ones are thrown away since the entry and exit of the cutting
dies would mess up the paper on the outside layers), and the big
machine did four tracks of 18 copies each, so a big run yielded 64
copies in usually about one-and-half times as long as it took to play
the piece on the piano itself.  It was wild to mount the paper --
installing a new roll of blank paper after one had run out was a TRIP
-- and of course while there was always fear of fire, the greatest
ruination would have been the water-damage from fire engines.

Ramsi had one copy of each roll safed away in his home in Canada.  They
were _not_ underground and fire-proof, just safely stored -- heaven
help him if there had been a fire -- although one could have reproduced
masters from existing copies, but it was the ancient archives that were
most valuable.

We also had a special perforator which cut Duo-Art and Ampico rolls and
Welte's too, I think, with the expression perforations.  We were set up
to do custom rolls (like for band organs and 44 note rolls) but seldom
did because of the expense.  You had to buy a full 32 copies, of
course.

So, leaving out all kinds of things, that's my history with the Buffalo
version of Q-R-S and Ramsi.  Enough Tick talk for now.

Ken W. List