 Hello, and welcome to the Drum History podcast. I am your host, Bart van der Zee, and I have the pleasure today to be joined by Rob Cook of ReBeats, and you may know him from the Chicago drum show. Rob, how are you? Good, good. Good to talk to you. Awesome. Well, thank you for being here. Our goal today is to go through the history of leady drums, and you have a book coming out this year. It is called The Leady Way. So yeah, why don't we just go ahead and dig right in to the history of leady? So I'll let you take it away. Okay. Yeah, we might want to talk some other time about a man named George Way, because he's pretty well tied into it, and in fact it's a good 40% probably of The Leady Way book, which is the reason for the title. And there's a lot of reasons why George was an integral part of leady, but that's quite a book title, and we'll talk another time about George's background and so on, because there's plenty of leady to fill up a podcast, I think. But one of the striking things about leady in a parallel with Ludwig, and I've done so many of these books that the parallels seem more and more to hit me in the face and the commonalities of these companies. The thing with both Ludwig and leady is that they were started by percussionists who had a need for improved equipment and managed to do it, and then kind of listened to voices and follow their dreams and end up producing not only their original product, but a bunch of other things. With Ludwig, it was the pedal, the folding pedal, the portable bass drum pedal, and we want to get into the significance of that, because it's not about Ludwig right now, but by the same token, with leady, it was the folding snare drum stand. Drummers often were just putting their drums on a chair or wearing them, marching drums, of course, and then putting that drum when they were in a stationary setting on a chair. So it seems like an obvious thing that would have been invented with the drum way back when, but the folding drum stand was a pretty big deal, and one of the keys to leady's success. Now, he had been making drums before that. His father was a cabinet maker, so he had been around woodworking skills, and his father, it said, even helped him with some of the early drums. But at that time, he was a performing percussionist from a very young age. A leady was a professional percussionist and a well-known one, a very well-trained, very competent percussionist, and that ultimately led him into manufacturing. And we're talking about Ulysses G. Leady, correct, or U. G. Leady? Correct, correct, yeah. Cool. And so he started working out of his apartment. He shared an apartment with the clarinet player that he performed with often in different settings around Indianapolis. And their apartment was full of stuff. I was fortunate to have met and interviewed early on, early on for me in the course of these books, all three of the four children of U. G. Leady, and one lived in Michigan. And he told me that originally, in that apartment, that his father had shared with this clarinet player, Sam Cooley, that it was just so cluttered there that Cooley became his partner kind of by default. He had no choice because their apartment was full of stuff. They were always climbing over it and so on. But initially, it was the Leady and Cooley manufacturing company. With the address of the apartment that they were sharing. And they grew out of that. I mean, it just got overwhelming with all the woodwork going on and the metal work of putting these stands together and so on. So U. G. Leady moved to a location in a Cyclorama building. Huge building that was, I think it was within the first decade that it then created and a big round building that had murals all the way around. And that there was a, their presentations would change. And as part of that building, there were a couple floors of offices and shops and so on. And they took a location on the lower level of a Cyclorama building. And things are a little bit foggy about the exit of Sam Cooley. But we do know that about the time that U. G. Leady relocated from the apartment to the Cyclorama, he incorporated. And that was in 1903. Wow, that's unbelievable that he starts in an apartment and then goes to big, large scale manufacturing. I mean, that's just like an inspirational story. Well, it didn't happen quite that fast. I mean, because they went from the apartment geared up to making the snare drums and the folding drum stand. And it wasn't an overnight thing to make in everything that a percussionist could use. But things really started to happen when he incorporated in 1903. And moved to the Cyclorama. And this is an area that I think is pretty much new information to most of the drum historians out there in the vintage drum community in general. And that's that it wasn't that U. G. Leady had a couple of employees who weren't very important. But on the first catalog he put out, it's got on the title page that Leady Manufacturing and it's got three names, U. G. Leady and Herman Winterhoff and Charles Wanamaker. Well, Wanamaker and Winterhoff weren't just run of the mill employees. They were keys to the expansion over the next few years. And as it turns out, we've we've discovered that Wanamaker, Charles Wanamaker already had an office in the Cyclorama. And it's possible that they even met Leady there or it's possible that since they were both Masons that they knew each other from the Lodge or something. But at any rate, Wanamaker was had to look at a 20, 30 years older than U. G. Leady and already had experience with patents and setting up corporations, setting up machine shops. A lot of a manufacturing know-how that would be critical to Leady. Leady undoubtedly knew a lot of those things over the next 10, 20 years. But I really think that the meeting Wanamaker and hooking up with him was a big key to the expansion and success of Leady. The other guy, the third guy, Winterhoff, Herman Winterhoff, had perfect pitch and was a mallet instrument specialist. And he ended up really kind of shepherding Leady through the introduction of their vibraphones, marimbas, chines, all the tuned percussion instruments. And he was a close personal friend of U. G. Leady. They often vacation together and would stay up late at night discussing classical music according to some of the stories of the Leady children that went along on these lake vacations to Clinger Lake in Michigan. But now those three were also not just casual partners, but they were legal business partners. It wasn't like they were just employees. Like I've seen written occasionally. It sounds like they weren't just like they were each all three of them integral parts with business mind, more of the percussion side of things like mallets and stuff to come together to make basically all parts that were necessary for this company. Yeah. And they they had a bit of capital to to goose things along in the cyclorama that the we don't have the percent of ownership as of the articles of declaration of incorporation rather being filed in 1903. But we do have a stockholder list and breakdown of 1906 shortly after that. And that shows Winterhoff at twenty four percent, Wannamacher at twenty three percent and Leady UG Leady at thirty four percent. And really, UG Leady never in the course of his career and life actually owned much more than that of the Leady manufacturing company. There were a number of other smaller stockholders. A couple of them were recognized as integral part of Leady. Once it got up and running, Roy Jeffries was an engineer and Al Kirst was the the money guy, the treasurer. But they were they were also stockholders in the original Leady company. We got a lot of documents from the archives of the state of Indiana, dormant corporation filings and so on. And we found that by 1929, Winterhoff was still a significant stockholder. UG Leady was down to twenty eight and a half percent. I'm referring to twenty nineteen twenty nine just before they were bought out by Khan. And actually Khan by this time owned forty nine and a half percent of the company. So we speculate that he bought out Charles Wannamacher, who would have been past retirement age by the end of the 20s and that Khan, little by little, was buying more and more of the company well ahead of the the famous acquisition of 1929. Yeah. And back to the the actual manufacturing and so on. They again were were making items that the percussionist needed. And as they expanded, they became the only manufacturer that made virtually everything that they sold and distributed. There were a few things like Chinese Tom's and symbols and so on that they did not manufacture. But they were the only company that had their own trunk department to make these, you know, we would think of as cases, but they were actually like large touring luggage trunks and so on for all manner of instruments to be transported by train and wagon and so on. Well, who was their competition at this time? Just like to kind of get an idea of the the landscape there. Khan was was big and there are there are Khan drums and timpani and so on. Khan was bigger in the bulk of their their empire was in band instruments and orchestral instruments of all kinds. And in fact, some of their products were even sourced from Levy, but in ways they were competitors. And none of it was happening in a vacuum. There was also the Warlitzer Company and Warlitzer was had a significant block of stock in Khan. So there was a lot of buying and selling back and forth between manufacturers, but I would say Ludwig probably loomed as the is the largest and most significant competition. Yeah, they also had their own tanneries as its leadies so they could process raw skins through to finished drum heads. At one point or another, both Levy and Ludwig were the the world's largest drum companies of the 20s. Things kind of shifted back and forth. But those are the big ones. Gretch was in business, but they were at this point in the 20s more of a distributor of all kinds of musical instruments. You look at a Gretch catalog from the 20s and you'll find accordions and pianos and that's interesting. You can think of and they wouldn't, you know, become a real competitive force in drum manufacturing for another decade or two. Rod Rogers kind of the same way. Rogers goes back to about the turn of the century. And originally specializing in drum heads only in skins. And a lot of the other companies around it in that day, drum companies that sold drum would get their skins from Rogers. Or if they got multiple levels of skins, the highest quality were always, you know, the Rogers. And they didn't get into manufacturing and become, you know, known as the Rogers drum company, et cetera, and so much later. So through the 20s, the two biggies were really Levy and Ludwig. And in your history, I know that in the 20s, Levy was it looks like they were making like over $250,000 a year in 1920, which is obviously a huge amount of money for a drum company to be making. And so they're they're doing pretty well. Yeah, yeah, they peaked interestingly enough in 1927. The reason I say interestingly enough is when I was doing this book, it seemed like time after time, significant changes or shifts in the the landscape that the musician was working in and that this manufacturer was producing in had seismic shifts in and around 1927. It got to the point where I started making separate notes every time this happened. And I had to include a page in the book that's just titled 1927 because there were there were so many quantum shifts. Let me just scroll through them real fast. One is our radio cripples the piano industry, the invention of radio and its its domination destroyed piano sales. So that really set the musical instrument manufacturing business at the year, the invention of radio, and it really took a toll on piano sales. Well, that didn't affect the drummer so much, but talking movies certainly did. Yes, absolutely. The jazz singer released in 1927. And I know Kelly talked about that the other days. We won't dwell on that. Sure. That was here. Here we are back in 1927. Next day, the banjo plunged in popularity and both Leedy and Ludwig. I should say Ludwig and Ludwig because at that time it was the Ludwig and Ludwig drum company. So both Leedy and Ludwig and Ludwig independently and as competitors geared up to produce the banjo and in a big way, they both made very expensive banjos gold plating and engraving. They had, of course, cheaper ones too, but both companies had a whole line of banjos and it was not inexpensive to get into. And 1927 is started to hit the fan with the demand for banjos. And the Leedy sales in 28 and 29 just plummeted. Twenty seven was the all time high and they had just remodeled the factory, expanded it by now. Actually, we jumped ahead from, you know, a long way from 1906 in the cyclorama to 1929. But in that interim, they they built a small building and expanded on it over and over again until it was a city block square with multiple additions. And in the book, I have diagrams of each stage of construction with that are shaded so you can see what was added when. But anyhow, the the the last huge expansion was 1927. Well, and then the Great Depression is like right around the corner. So that can't be can't be good for business. No, although they did seem to weather it fairly well. By that time, they were a division of Khan and and sales surprisingly, it's not like they dropped down. But so the the expansions peaked, the catalogs peaked back to just a touch on George Way for a moment. 1927, to me as his biographer, seems like to be the point at which he spent the rest of his life trying to get back to because he was pretty much in charge of marketing, advertising and a lot of things to do with production at Leedy by the late 20s. He had developed this marketing organ, their publication, the Leedy drum topics. He edited that and put it together and put out, you know, it was full of new product introductions and local endorsing news and and so on. So after Leedy was bought by Khan and he was pretty much a much smaller cog in the the whole machinery of Leedy production and distribution, he started coming up with proposals for the start of a new drum company. And I have a whole file of proposals that he did in thirty thirty six and thirty eight and forty one and fifty five and so on. And he always seemed to be striving to get back to 1927. But the world changes. You know, it was it was a pretty much a quantum shift. I mean, when we in our lifetime, it's been, you know, the convention of the computer and everything going digital. But at that time, it was the shift from silent movies to the radio and it changed lives pretty dramatically. And there there wasn't really a way to get back to the way it used to be anymore. Well, and backing up just to clarify, what when was George Way brought into the fold with Leedy? Because I know he obviously worked with him a lot and he's a he is Canadian, correct? He had his own. He had George Way drums in Canada, correct? How did that? I know it's a whole episode in itself, but how did he kind of briefly? How did he get brought into the into the company? Well, he was kind of needed in that we'll jump all the way back to when it was Winterhoff, Wannamacher, and Yuji Leedy and the Cyclorama. And they they're broadening their line. They're making more and more products. They're they're producing a bigger catalog. And they got some major contracts with the government that goes to Milan. And they didn't pay much attention to advertising because they were making a good product and the world was beating a path to their door to an extent. But they did realize that Ludwig was a strong competitor and growing stronger. And they were advertising. George was actually from Boston and became a touring musician. He traveled with minstrel shows and vaudeville and so on and settled after a few years of that in Edmonton, Alberta. So his and his wife was a native Canadian, but George was actually from Boston. And and on the side, he was I mean, he was the house drummer for the Pantages Theatre and so on and played in the Edmonton Symphony and was pretty much making a home for himself there and started on the side again with a couple of partners, a company doing electroplating and making drums. And then that kept expanding, expanding. And he was buying parts from Leedy to make his his drums. And the more he bought and the bigger he became, the more he caught the eye of UG Leedy, although this was long before there were trade shows or obviously websites or anything like that. But just from when you're in that kind of business like UG was, you're you're aware of somebody starting the drum company, even though it's on the next country to the north. But they they built up a business relationship when George kind of out of the blue got the letter from UG Leedy that's printed in the book, a copy of it, saying that they're looking at getting into they feel they've gotten to a point where they need a man for advertising and so on and marketing and they want to talk to George. So he went right down to talk about it and they came to an agreement and he was basically brought in to kind of guide it in that direction. But he he did more than a share of new product innovations coming up with the Pearl drum covering and the floating head concept and so on. But so he was he was brought in in 1921 and things things just took off like a rocket for the next eight years. And like I said, 1927 and not so much. Yeah, really. Well, that's OK. So that's a good I'm sure there's a lot more, but that gives us a good picture of of George Way. So I think we're back jumping up to I believe you said 1929 when Khan got in the picture, right? Yeah, I kind of was was already in the picture to a pretty big way. And that, you know, the the Levy children even did not really fill me in them as much as what I learned from the corporate documents from the state of Indiana. And they can't be blamed because women and girls were not involved in the business at all. And and children in general, even the the male children were often dispatched from the dining room when it was time for the adults to eat. So they had they had the Levy household had a parade of famous guests. They had, you know, everyone from John Phillips, who was two members of the Ludwig and Jill Jin families. And so I know Paul Whiteman and on and on and on coming for dinner at the Levy household. But usually the kids were ushered out so that the the adults could dine and discuss the music business. But the again, the Levy kids never even mentioned any involvement like Khan. They pretty much presented it as 1929. Their father was ill and he was so ill that, you know, he needed to get out of the business, so he sold to Khan. Well, as I mentioned a little earlier, by 1929, Khan already owned forty nine and a half percent of of Ledy. So it didn't take much for them to, you know, be considered as having bought them out at the time it was announced as a merger. And at the same time, actually, on the same day, they'd worked on this, these things don't happen overnight. So obviously they're working on it probably at least six months. But on the very same day, the papers were signed that merged Ledy with the Khan corporation and Ludwig and Ludwig with the Khan corporation. So assurances were made by Khan to UG Leedy and to the Ludwig family that everything would continue as it had been. But in other words, they would say they keep manufacturing in Chicago of Ludwig and Ludwig and keep manufacturing of Ledy in Indianapolis. And this was a particular concern for UG Leedy because he didn't want to dispatch all of these employees and this big building he had built and everything and have it all crumble away just to be a division of a far away company. But they assured him that they would be keeping manufacturing in Indianapolis, which would mean pretty much the same staff and so on. But that didn't happen within a year or so. They announced that all Ledy manufacturing was being moved to Elkhart and the same with Ludwig and Ludwig. Now Ludwig and Ludwig retained its sales offices in an advertising salon in Chicago. And the casual observer would never even have known that all of these moves were being made because the Ludwig drums continued to say have a Chicago address because that's where the advertising was. But actually, Mr. Ludwig personally moved here himself and his family to Elkhart and we're working there under the same roof with George Way because when when the company was merged UG Leedy and the Leedy family were no longer involved. George Way pretty much became the Mr. Leedy because he made the move to Elkhart and was pretty much in charge of Leedy operations, especially as it related to marketing and advertising and new product development and so on. But so it led to a certain amount of tension because now the con company was in the position of selling Leedy drums and Ludwig and Ludwig drums. So they were allocating space and budget and marketing allowances, all of these things for two different drum companies. Yeah, and they're both they're both major competitors under the same roof. So that has to have some a little bit of tension. Yeah, I would think they I had heard it reported or seen it probably once that there were disagreement specific disagreements between Way and Ludwig that caused Ludwig to throw in the towel and quit. But I've never been able to document anything like that. What what is well documented is that both men really chafed at being a corporate stepchild. And this is this is one of the patterns that is repeated, not only repeatedly, just with these two companies, but with Slingerland and Gretsch and Rodgers, all of them at one time or another became a division of a corporation that didn't really understand the drum business or maybe in some cases, even the music business. And it makes it hard for, especially for guys like Ludwig and Way, who had pretty much been able to make a decision and carry it out the next day by telling people what to do. But now they have to apply to corporate higher ups and justify and rationalize what they wanted to do and what it was going to cost and so on. And it was just so frustrating for Ludwig that he finally gave up, he quit and moved back to move he and his family back to Chicago. And then a couple of years later, of course, started WFL. But yeah, that that's a theme that I like to say, that's being repeated over and over again, where a corporation buys a drum company as an investment and the drum company just doesn't continue to thrive and evolves like it did up until that point. Yeah, no, you're because you then you become an employee and obviously for WFL won in 1937 when WFL was founded. It's I mean, I guess that's his way out is saying, all right, I'm done with this. I'm doing my back to my own back to my own thing. Yeah. Yeah. So Wei continued, though, through the thirties, right, working for Khan. He's and he was basically the the original guy from the leady, you know, the old school leady and he stayed. Yeah. Yeah. And a few others I keep people state too. John Yooka, who was doing the drum heads and I better not show out names and without consulting my book. But there were there were three or four other really key department heads that moved. So it wasn't like he was out there on an island. Lee Wright Jeffries, amazingly, was on that 1906 article corporate report as a stockholder. And he stayed with the company all the way up until just 1950 or something like that. Now, things slowed down. You know, they had a pretty good thirties, but the end of the thirties, of course, comes World War Two and everything slows to a stop. And and George stayed with Lady and in my mind was kind of Mr. Lady and until Lady really kind of slid off the rails when when the war started. I mean, they had a series of war time drums that were made mostly of wood. But finally, George left all together. He just there was nothing much for him to do there. So so he he worked briefly for Slingerland and just started a drum shop in Hollywood and eventually came back to come in a similar but downsized role in the late forties. Post World War Two, that is when Ludwig and Ludwig and Lady joined forces or they get they get put together to be one company, basically. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. They they combine the divisions and decided to call on Lady and Ludwig. And amazingly, Leigh Roy Jeffries was still there doing engineering work. He's getting quite elderly by this time, I think. But George Way was was back in the picture and and I think it was 1951. They introduced the Leigh and Ludwig and their their feature product, or the the crown jewel of the new Leigh and Ludwig line, unfortunately, was the now tensioned drum. And George had come up with the idea and had some early versions of it in prototype and drawings form, but the actual blueprints and drawings were drawn up by Leigh Roy Jeffries. And I believe that it wasn't quite what George envisioned. Clearly, it didn't work. The the you turn the knob and the the basket inside the drum pushes up against the drum head to raise the tension or raise the pitch. But the innards were made of aluminum and tended to bend if you really reefed on it. And you did have to kind of really reef on it again, where these were calfskin heads. So the knob tension was they were heavy. They didn't work very well. They spent a lot of money in developing them. So in retrospect, it wasn't the smoothest introduction to your brand new drum. Do they? Yeah. But but and and George sometimes gets a bad rap for that. I've seen it pretty much written that George Way introduced this drum that killed Lady or something like that, but after cutting a little bit of slack there. Now, it seems like kind of similar to the banjo kind of debacle where it's happening. You're going full steam. You think it's going to be great. And then it just doesn't quite pan out. Yep. And they they were definitely looking for ways they be in calm, looking for ways to save money. And people are profitable. And it had come to the point where Jesus, what's the motivating factor for having two different drum companies? And then we've still got the Ludwigs competing with us down the road. They've just started up this WSL company. So they just tried to I don't know if I it's appropriate term to say cut their losses, but increase the profits but make use of that space a little bit differently than having two drum companies. Let's just have one drum company. But then they gave up on it all together short four years later or so by 1955 and then kind of decided that it just wasn't worth keeping the sawdust factory around. Is the chief, the Ludwig II used to say that they referred to the drum division as the sawdust factory. That's funny. The people over in the horn division had no respect at all for for the drum makers. So they they sold it off altogether. They actually George stayed in the same building and started his own company on the heels of that that George Wade drums and that would eventually morph into a camco and drum workshop. Yes, another long story. But what happened was George stayed there with presumably some of the stuff, but the slingerland or the leading name and and a bunch of assets went to slingerland and the Ludwig name went to the Ludwig family. The leading name went along with the leading name went to slingerland along with some assets and the Ludwig name and some assets went to the Ludwig family. Bill Ludwig talks about that in his memoir, The Making of a Drum Company. And both he and but slingerland made weekly trips to Elkhart and they'd spend a few days down there two or three days and then they'd take the train back. And they were mortal enemies in many ways in many different arenas, but at this particular time they worked together and traveled together and spent a lot of time in Elkhart just going through the assets piece by piece and deciding which piece of the equivalent which would go to slingerland and what would go to Ludwig. And Bill Ludwig told me that at the end of all of this things were pretty well wrapped up and Bill asked about slingerland and he said, you know, now that we've gone through all this what was your motive? I mean, it's obvious that I wanted the Ludwig name back for my family, but why did slingerland want Leedy? And but looked him in the eye and said, well, the way I look at it right now most every town has a slingerland dealer at the top of the heap and the secondary dealers carry Ludwig. But now we're going to have slingerland in the number one dealers and the number two dealers prepare a Leedy and you can have the third rate dealers. Yeah. So whether he was just insulting him or what, I don't know, but it kind of typified Bill's opinion of Bud. Yeah, a lot of no love loss there. Yeah. So the Leedy story, should we continue the Leedy story through the slingerland days or? Yeah, I mean, I think just taking it through basically what happened after that because I know it's in that kind of era with slingerland getting tossed around to different companies and being bought and sold with just basically the name. Yeah, I say just onward. Let's take it to the end basically. Yeah. So Bud, slingerland ends up with the Leedy end thing seems to Leedy name and whatever assets that Ian Bill agreed upon that they would take. And I have no idea what those were. But at any rate, slingerland did publish a couple of Leedy catalogs and they had some endorsers of note, Shelley Mann I think was on the cover and there were some Shelley Mann models, some Barrett Deans models and so on. But I think there were only two catalogs and I don't think it was any more than five years. I'd have to check myself on that. It might be 10 or 15 years even that they were technically available but they certainly didn't set the world on fire. And I think in the end, slingerland pretty much decided that it didn't make sense to have two drum companies under one roof. Yeah, really? Unless they could have learned from history but at any rate they stopped marketing and selling Leedy drums and stopped publishing the Leedy drum catalog but it remained an intellectual property and the rights to all of the Leedy patents and so on all remained part of that package and under the ownership of slingerland. And we won't go through all the fortunes of slingerland. That's for another time. But it's important to remember that Leedy remained a part of slingerland through it all up until the point at which Fred Gretch separated them. Fred Gretch ended up buying slingerland and he never did... Well, when he bought slingerland he got Leedy also and all of the intellectual properties. He concentrated on slingerland and building it up and they made some drums in the Gretch factory in South Carolina and they were distributed by HHS as the slingerland light series. And mainly under the direction of Buzz King who was at HSS and the brains behind the whole slingerland resurgence. But unfortunately he was so successful and built it up to a thing of such value that Fred was able to sell it to Henry Jeskowitz of the Gibson Corporation. And it was kind of a shock to Buzz. It was like having the rug pulled out from under you. But Fred is a very smart business man, really knows what he's doing. And he sold slingerland to Gibson but not Leedy. So he still to this day owns Leedy and has discussed with various people the possibility of maybe licensing the name for a line of drums or a few were even made. He in conjunction with Steve Maxwell there were some drums that were made by Sam Backell of Nashville. He's a drum maker and restore vintage expert. And I think he's the principal with the Nashville symphony still. Sam's a very knowledgeable guy and it worked on a lot of old Leedy drums. So he made a few drums with Leedy USA badge for distribution I think to Steve Maxwell in conjunction with Fred as the owner of Leedy. But I don't think it's gone much further than that. I think they've had a couple of custom chips for Trey Cool and it looked like they were kind of on the edge of breaking through into something bigger but I haven't seen anything really develop any further than that. I think a Gretch production facilities are pretty busy making the American made Gretch stuff. And I haven't heard any plans by, I haven't heard of any plans by Fred to do anything more with Leedy drums himself. Although anybody listening that wants to start a drum company I'm sure Fred would work out a deal with you for licensing. Yeah or take over Slingerland. I'm sure Gibson could use a little extra money but I know they're holding onto that trademark as well. So it's kind of like a weird holding pattern for everything right now. But who knows if they would be, I mean it's kind of a weird market right now where hopefully everyone knows about Leedy drums but to come out and say Leedy has new drums people who knows if people would be excited for that. I mean obviously vintage guys would but you can never tell how well they would do. Yeah, yeah clearly the name has faded and that's a part of why this book took me so long to do is I kept running into other ideas that were more market driven or IE profitable. You know taking time out to do the Gretch book and the Ludwig book and so on but really I started this book, The Leedy Way or portions of it especially the George Way biography almost 30 years ago. So a lot of the early files of correspondence and so on are handwritten letters and dot matrix letters that I lost to people. There was no internet and no computer yet to speak of but so I kept shelving it and shelving it and it was partly because I knew that you know even though it seems in many ways like it's my life's work and it's the thing I'm proudest of and the most complete thing I think I've done to date I'm not ignorant of the fact that you know its marketability is pretty limited because a lot of people just have never heard of Leedy. Yeah, but I mean it is definitely a piece of history because even I mean everyone knows about Ludwig and then the more you look into Ludwig you see the combination of the two companies and it kind of draws you in a little bit to learn more about it. Yeah, I think it's important when anybody is considering the whole landscape like you obviously are to watch the trends it's kind of interesting that Ludwig like I mentioned before Ludwig and Leedy had both been the world's largest drum company in the 20s and then Ludwig and Slingolin managed to both become the world's largest drum company at one time or another in the 60s and then you see this same pattern you know we saw Leedy, Ludwig and Ludwig and Leedy both merge with Khan and then how well it worked out for a corporation to run a drum company when we come again when the Ludwig family sells to Selmer in 1981. Oh, now we're a division of the corporation again as is Slingolin and I think I'd have to look up the date when they sold to Calier Crowell McMillan, the publishing company and they became a division of a larger corporation that didn't understand the drum business or the music business. So now we've got some downward spirals. Ludwig it could be argued to survive that and they're still keeping their head above water but there's still a division of a corporation that not too many years ago was acquired by venture capitalists and that always makes me nervous. So we'll see, they've got some good people in place and hopefully they'll listen to them and Ludwig will remain strong in the marketplace but I see yellow flags. Yeah, history just keeps on repeating itself which is wild but it's cool to look at it after the fact and say oh this happened then and then it happened again and then again and again and it wouldn't be as fun to be working for the company as it's being sold but well wow, we just went through the entire history of leady drums. That was amazing. Yeah, there's a lot more, more little, we went down the main street. There's a lot of little alleys to poke around in and I probably should have spent a little bit more time speaking about actual products and product developments but that's all there in the book and you'll probably pick up a lot more. Actually, some of these guys like Mark Cooper and Mike Carrotto are more knowledgeable than I am by far about the dates of the different coverings and the variations of the coverings and I depend on guys like that a lot for doing these kind of books. With Gretchen it was John Sheridan and Lee Ruff and there's a lot of good leady people out there but definitely Mike Carrotto and Mark Cooper are big help. Well, it's all about the community and everyone helping everyone out because I'm sure people are gonna hear this and then be interested in future books of yours and stuff. So now is a perfect time to tell people where they can find your books. Yep, all of the major books, I have a few smaller things like catalog reproductions and stuff like that but everything is available from Rebeats, just Rebeats.com and then click on the books tab and there's buy it now tabs, et cetera but not too many bookstores or music stores stock and a few drum shops do, Drugans and percussion exchange in Chicago and so on, Pro Drum in Hollywood, Steve Maxwell and so on but all of the major books, the Rogers book, the leady way, et cetera are distributed by Hal Leonard Corporation and almost every music store and bookstore is set up to get publications from them so people should be able to go into a corner bookstore and order anything from Hal Leonard's Rebeats catalog. But whatever they're inclined to do, they can go to my website, I even list most of the books on eBay so they might catch a little bit of notice there if they don't find the Rebeats site. Cool, yeah, and to spell it, that's R-E-B-E-A-T-S dot com. Yep. Well, Rob, this was incredibly informative and you were the first person I thought of to interview for this entire show but I kind of wanted to get my bearings and get a couple under my belt before I talked to the, some would say the master. So, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to talk with us today, me and the listeners and I hope to have you on soon to cover some other topics because I know you're a wealth of information on pretty much all major drum companies. Well, thank you, I appreciate it. Then I'll try not to go too far off the path and try to stick with what I know to be fact rather than those traditional narratives that tend to get a little warped at times but keep up the great work. Yeah, I've listened to all of the existing podcasts and I definitely learned a few things and really am enjoying them but keep up the great work. Well, that's great, awesome, thanks, Rob. Uh-huh, we'll talk to you. If you like this podcast, find me on social media at Drum History and please share, rate and leave a review and let me know topics that you would like to learn about in the future. Until next time, keep on learning. This is a Gwynn Sound podcast.