[ Ref. http://www.mmdigest.com/Archives/KWIC/A/aeolian_american.html ]

(This is Hi Babit's Nov. 26, 2011, reply to Larry Doe's Nov. 25th
letter and subsequent correspondence.)

Larry,  A happy Thanksgiving to you too!  You have a lot of questions,
and I'm going to do my best to remember those happenings of those years
in the 1970's.

You mentioned that Lawrence Cook retired in 1972.  I remember that I kept
working at Aeolian until they stopped business in about the mid-1980s.
I could be wrong about when they went out of business, but I didn't
keep records of what transpired like maybe Cook did.  I think Cook
passed away in 1976 when he was only 76 years old.  I read somewhere
that Cook was born in 1900.

I think that Herman Kortlander was still at work for Aeolian [QRS?]
after Cook left.  Kortlander's job was to pick titles for rolls to be
made.  However, I think that I had control of what I wanted to make.

As for Clyde Ridge -- I never met him, but Cook told me that Ridge
would write out the arrangements and send them to Cook, for Cook to cut
the first masters for him.  Ridge had good arrangements, and I'm sure
that Cook also threw in some of his ideas when he was making Ridge's
arrangements.  This is a habit that most arrangers have when making
arrangements.

I remember that when Dick Watson was working on "Hello Dolly"
arrangement, he became ill, and Kortlander asked me to finish the
arrangement so that it could be released.  I finished that arrangement,
and I probably threw in some of my ideas.  That roll was QRS 9949.
About a year later I was asked to make another roll of "Hello Dolly"
which was QRS 9980.  That roll was in production for about a year and
then cut out of the catalog -- it was too similar to the earlier
rendition.  I assume Cook made a roll for Aeolian at that time also.

I have to add that I didn't meet Cook until Ramsi Tick bought QRS and
moved them to Buffalo.  I had heard of Cook, but after the QRS move,
Aeolian contacted me and asked me to work for them.

I think I mentioned in my previous letter to you that I first started
in the Bronx Aeolian factory with a machine that wasn't good for making
rolls, and Aeolian then sent me to the Manhattan building where Cook
worked, and that's when I met him and we had a good relationship until
he passed away.  As I said before, I had control of what I wanted to
cut.  They also asked me [to] cut some titles (which I did) but mostly
I picked what I thought would make good rolls.  I suggested that same
idea to Ramsi Tick in Buffalo when I went to work for them also.  In
those years, I cut rolls for both Aeolian and QRS.  For QRS I used to
fly to Buffalo (commercial or my airplane) and for Aeolian I just had
to go to their Manhattan office building on 57th St.

The roll of "Some Of These Days" was never published or put in the
catalog because the [composer's] estate wanted a big royalty of 25
cents per, so I guess they assigned that number of 1945 to the Beatles
title.  But, originally, number 1945 was assigned to my roll of "Some
Of These Days".  I guess this clarifies that.

When you get set and can produce some Aeolian rolls, I'd appreciate
getting some of my rolls, so that I can make another CD of what I like.
Remember that if you can find my roll of "Warsaw Concerto" I'd like to
get that and some others that I don't have, like "76 Trombones",
"Cactus Polka", "Fiddler" 1 & 2, "Till", etc., so I can make another
"My Favorites" CD.

It's good to talk to you, and let me know of your progress and stir my
memory with some more of your questions.

Hi Babit

 - - - -

Nov. 26, 2011

Hello Hi,  The girls and I had a delightful Thanksgiving buffet,
dining-out in Millbrook, New York.  Thank you for your quick reply.
I'll try to keep this brief.

I can certainly play some of the Mylar masters on my foot pumper and
record them for you in timely fashion.  I can record them as WAV files
for the best fidelity on a CD.  I can even burn a CD and mail it to you.

Regarding recutting the rolls, before Aeolian rolls can be recut,
I will have to scan the word layout rolls and reconstruct the punch
matrix, thus creating a MIDI punch master which will run the modernized
perforators.  I just got back from Pennsylvania with another 200 or so
masters and I now have more than half of them in Hyde Park.  My work
room is stuffed to the gills with Aeolian masters and, in a week or
two, 2,500 new roll boxes will be arriving.  It will be a while before
there will be space on my bench to set up the scanners again.

The modernized Aeolian perforator I have is running (that means it only
runs MIDI punch master files and can no longer run the Mylar masters).
I just have to resharpen the die, so I certainly could punch a few
88-note rolls for you without the words.  I haven't gotten the stencil
belt printer from Keystone yet and if any Aeolian word rolls are to be
made, it's more likely the printing will be done using the inkjet
system I provided for Keystone.  It would be better to cut the rolls
using Keystone's perforator with the large-pin Ampico die which should
fix the problem the vintage rolls had with the chain bridging being too
wide.

It's important that I get the remaining masters out of Keystone's
warehouse as soon as possible because they need the space on the second
floor of the warehouse.  Time is of the essence, therefore I plan to
make it my top priority to finish moving, cataloging and reboxing all
the masters.  When that is done, I will have found all of your existing
recordings.  While all this is going on, I will do my best to pause
once in a while, record a few of your tunes on CDs and send them to
you.  How does that sound?  You'll get to hear how well (or poorly) I
can tune a piano using Tunelab!

I shared some excerpts from my last letter to you with our fellow MMD
readers.  I felt I owed them a status report to follow-up on the
earlier announcement I had made about the Aeolian masters.  Would you
mind if I forwarded your reply to MMD?  I think the readers would be
very interested in seeing your answers to my questions.  Perhaps some of
the historians among them will be able to provide some new information.

I have one last question about Clyde Ridge: In what form would Clyde
and other artists have presented their arrangements to Cook for cutting
the first master?  Would the arrangements be in the form of hand-written
sheet music?  Could they have been marked on sheets or rolls of graph
paper?  No such items have been found with the masters I've inspected
so far.

Of all the Aeolian masters I've inspected so far, I haven't seen any
dated later than June of 1972 when, I suspect, J. L. Cook retired.  It's
still possible some later ones may turn up, but are you saying that you
continued working for Aeolian well into the 1980s?  Or did you switch to
working for QRS after 1972?  I'm getting the impression you worked for
both companies simultaneously.

During what period of time did Harold Powell possess the master library
and issue rolls under the Klavier label?  I saw a lot of charts under
the box lids which show the date and quantity every time a master was
run on the perforators.  All of these dates are in the early '80s.

I was thinking it might have been Powell who began keeping a record
of how many rolls were produced.  In other words, I'm asking if this
practice of recording the perforator runs could have been instituted
in the early 1980s by Harold Powell?  If so, it would explain why
earlier dates do not appear on the charts under the box lids.  Richard
Groman says the masters have been in Keystone's warehouse for about 25
years, so Keystone would have acquired them in or about the year 1986.

If you continued arranging rolls for Aeolian after 1972 and well into
the 1980s, it's strange that I haven't come across any Aeolian masters
dated later than June of 1972.  I'll keep looking though.  I can't draw
any conclusions until I've inspected them all.  Maybe we were incorrect
in assuming we had all of the masters.  All of the catalog numbers you
provided on your printed list also appear on my master library list,
which supports the idea that we do have all the masters.

Sincerely,
Larry Doe

 - - - -

(Hi Babit's Nov. 27 reply to the above letter.)

Hello again!  I'll try to answer all your questions.  As far as
I can remember, Clyde Ridge sent written manuscripts to Cook, and he
cut the masters from those.  It's the same as Dick Watson sending
written arrangements to QRS and Rudy Martin would then make the masters
from those arrangements.  As far as I know, Watson never went to
Buffalo to make the masters, only I went there because I considered
that going there was like a vacation for me, and I had friends in
Williamsville, which is a suburb of Buffalo.

I liked working the piano master machine, because I had control of
being able to make immediate changes to the roll, if it needed it.
After I would edit, I would either make changes or okay it.  I believe
that Cook would do the same thing with Clyde Ridge's arrangements.
I never questioned Cook about his making Ridge's rolls, since he was
making rolls longer than I had.  I don't know if Clyde Ridge ever came
to New York to meet with Cook.

If Cook retired from Aeolian in 1972, I don't remember if he ever came
down from his home in Mt. Vernon to the Aeolian building during his
retirement and until he passed away in 1976.  I think I mentioned once
before that I went to his home and tried to buy his Leabarjan machine
from his widow, but she didn't want to sell it.

I'm not sure about what year the Aeolian company went out of business,
but I think it was in the early 1980s.  I think that I was still
making roll masters for QRS until the mid or late 1980s.

Yes, I did work for the two of them [QRS & Aeolian] at the same time.
I also did a few rolls for Larry Givens for his Melodee name.  I did
the "Theme From The Apartment" and two rolls of "Finian's Rainbow".
I was supposed to make "I Left My Heart In San Francisco" but I never
did.  I still have that written arrangement with all the notes for the
punches of Larry's machine, because it was, I believe, a 3-to-1 punch
perforator.  I was told that the QRS and Aeolian perforators were
2-to-1 machines.  I never really delved into the exact workings of
those roll master making machines.

As for the Powell and Klavier time, it had to be in the late 1980s.
I once went to Los Angeles for a vacation and I think I went to see
Powell about my rolls, because that's when Aeolian was out of business
and I was told that Powell had bought all the machinery and masters
from Aeolian and was going to produce rolls under the Klavier name.

That's about the same time that someone in Redondo Beach [Dick Carty?]
had come out with a new type player piano.  I forgot his name, but when
I came there he had about 50 people come with their piano rolls for me
to autograph.  It was a wild night, but interesting.  A few years later
Baldwin put out his player piano with the Baldwin name on it.  It had
an electronic device near the transmission that would sometimes foul up
and cause trouble.

You can use any excerpts from my reply for the MMD or anything else.
I would appreciate any CD's of my rolls that I haven't got.  I'd like
to hear what I did.  Of course, if I didn't sell my whole collection of
rolls with my Stak-Raks to someone in 1993, I wouldn't have to ask for
copies.

I'll re-tell that story again.  I was living in Staten Island, New
York, and in 1993 I was getting ready to move to Florida, and I had my
whole collection of over 360 piano rolls and my Stak-Raks in the
basement of the house I was in.  I had already been out of the roll
making business for a few years and someone in Staten Island whose
piano I had just tuned, asked to buy my whole collection, because he
was in the computer business and wanted to put my rolls on floppy discs
(This was before CD's) and since I didn't have room for all my
collection in the new place, I sold it to him.

It was after I moved to Florida that I was told that I'm going to be an
honorary member of AMICA, and a few years later in 1997, I was invited
to an AMICA convention in Sandusky, Ohio.  That's when I found out that
people liked my roll arrangements and I suddenly became a celebrity!

I made rolls to make money and it was a challenge to get new ideas out.
I didn't know that it would escalate into fame, a book and notoriety --
but not a fortune.  That collection also had some original music and
experimental stuff.  When I tried to buy back my collection, I was told
that it had been sold, and they did not know the name of the buyer, or
where it went to.  I tried to place a blurb on the MMD, but I got
nowhere.  I'm still looking for that collection.

I think that's enough for this morning.  Have a good day and keep in
touch.

Hi Babit