 Welcome to Finding Happiness in Hard Times. I'm Ken Bernus and I'm coming to you from the North Shore. Today, we have a real happiness topic, the joy of cars, guitars, and life. To help me with that is my good friend and great hobbyist, Gary Sudden. Gary, welcome to the program. Thank you so much, Ken. So great to see you. It's great to see you. Gary and I go back a long time. I hate to say it, but 40 years, I mean, we still look young, I think, but it's been 40 years and it's been a great friendship. And periodically, Gary sends me pictures of his Jaguars, beloved Jaguar, which he got a long, long time ago. Originally, I was thinking of just doing the program on the joy of Jaguars, but then Gary told me, well, you know, there's a lot more to it than just Jaguars. There's hobbies and the joy that the hobbies give you and the creativity. So we've expanded that to include other hobbies. But first, let's start with the Jaguars and that beloved Jaguar that we just saw on the screen. Gary, tell us about that. So I owned it now for 50 years, which is almost impossible for me to believe. I was living in Columbia, Missouri at the time, working on my PhD. And a friend came down in the Jaguar Coupe from St. Louis to visit me. And I said, oh, wow, I'd love to have one of those. That would be amazing, but I sure like to have a convertible. So this frame that you're seeing now is a car that I built. It took me two years to build it from scratch. And I was 19 to 21 at the time. So I had built all these other different kinds of electronics before that. I don't know how many of you might remember HeathKids, but I had built stereo systems and color TVs and microwave ovens and all kinds of fun things. So this was me wanting to build something bigger than that. And of course, troubleshooting, all those things as well. This was all about education. This was all about creativity. And then a friend of mine came down to Columbia, Missouri, where I was working on my PhD at the time, and he was driving a Jaguar Coupe. And I said to him, if you could ever find one of these in my price range, which wasn't much, I was an impoverished college student at the time. And if it was a convertible, that would be really great. Well, about three weeks later, he called me long distance and had me come back to St. Louis to look at this car. And it was all rusted out. It was convertible. I was told that if I could get it started because it hadn't started in six months. And if it had a good clutch, then it was worth the thousand dollars they were asking for it. Took me three days to get it started. The clutch was good. And I ended up siding my life away for a thousand dollars, borrowed it from my parents, paid it off in six months, just working as hard as I could to make sure that I didn't owe anyone any money. And that then started a 20 year process to restore that car. Welding in new floor pans and eventually figuring out how to convert it from leaded premium gasoline to unleaded premium gasoline. On and on and on, bodywork and electronic issues and trying to make it more stable and more reliable, certainly. And all those things were accomplished, but it took 20 years. And some of that is because we had children and well, life got in the way. But that's what it looks like now, and it's been very reliable and certainly a lot of fun to drive. Problem today is that you just can't drive it to the grocery store. It's too much of a target, of course, and I don't want a grocery cart running into it. It's amazing that transition. I learned a lot. Yeah. You must have 20 years of working on cars. If I had a Jaguar, I would definitely email it back to you and say we're good for me. I didn't do all the work. I didn't do the bodywork and I didn't blueprint the engine. I sent those out. But pretty much everything else I did. Tell us about that joy of when it got toward the end, starting to look like the way you wanted it to look like. So fighting it after all, after putting it together. So it did turn out the way I wanted it to. It was a real accomplishment and it's a joy to have that type of accomplishment. Now, the other half of that, though, is that I've worked on this now for 20 years. Oh, there's nothing left to do. It's done. And what do I do now? Oh, well, gee, I have other hobbies. And as I like to say that I take all my hobbies to extremes. And that's completely true. And I have lots of hobbies. It's all about education. It's all about creativity. It's not about owning that car. When people look at it and say, oh, that's a beautiful car, I get to tell them, well, Enzo Ferrari was the guy who said that was the most beautiful car in the world. And so that makes me happy too. But it's about the car. It's not about me. It's the joy that people get from seeing that. It's the joy that I get knowing that I saved its life, that it didn't go to a, it wasn't simply melted down and turned into something else. So that's part of the joy of it as well. You know, the whole thing about, because I was, I was telling Gary when we talked about this and the show came up that I was into cars too. And I agreed that the Jaguar was certainly the most beautiful car around. But the car I was in love with was the 64 and a half Mustang that came out. And I was just going into the military, just got out of college, was going into the military and was going to earn some real money for a change. And so I was able to buy this car on time. And it was amazing because there were so few Mustangs on the road. It was so brand new that I would drive down the road. And if I saw another Mustang, they would wave at me and I would wave back. It was a real wonderful thing. But the trouble is I never had the talent that Gary has of getting into it and being able to keep it running and working. So my joy was, I had a lot of joy with that car, but it did not extend to all that. And that sort of brings me to the next hobby that Gary is famous for because it's about guitars. And I love guitar music. I always have because I was brought up in the age of rock and roll. But I never got into guitars and of course never was able to play them, both of which Gary did. And he really got into guitars. So I think now is a great time to sort of segue over to your hobby of guitars and tell us a little bit about that. Music with me started when I was five. I started taking piano lessons. No one in my family, my parents, my grandparents, no one had any musical ability at all. And somehow I had the ability, I started playing when I was five. I had lessons at that point. And by the time I was eight, I could play Rhapsody in Blue. And they thought I was a prodigy, but I hated my piano teacher, who was this older man who decided that hitting my fingers with a ruler when I hit a wrong note was a really good idea. I didn't appreciate that. So when I was nine, I was in Cub Scouts and other people were starting to play guitar. This was 1960. 1960 being the real beginning of the folk era. And people don't lug pianos around. People lug guitars around. And so I, I first in summer camp that year, played a ukulele and picked it up right away and then started playing. I begged, begged my parents for a guitar, but it was $45. And my, they couldn't afford it. And my, there wasn't money for that. My father was completely against the idea, you'll need lessons. We can't afford the lessons. I begged and begged until finally my mother relented and bought me that $45 guitar, which it wasn't long before it fell apart, but I was able to learn. I didn't know how to tune it. It wasn't like there was an internet to show, here's how you tune it. Here's, you know, you could go to the library, perhaps, but how do I get to the library? And our school didn't have any books on guitars. So I did what I thought made sense. I tuned it to an open G chord. And then I could just go straight across the neck and get chords out of it. And that's my first intro, entry really to guitar. And then there were two other guys in Boy Scouts who said, Oh no, no, you can't tune it like that. You have to tune it like this and then stretch your fingers like this and this and this to be able to make a chord. And I picked it up and learned how to do it. And I'd already been singing. I actually was, well, at that about that time, I actually sang in a choir with Leonard Bernstein. That's a whole story in itself. And so things like that, that I started listening that the choir, for example, it was a symphony orchestra and Leonard Bernstein and a full choir. And I'm listening to basses and baritones and altos and sopranos and high tenor, me. And wow, listen to all that, how it all works together. And he wrote that and this is amazing. It was like that with guitar too. Here's three voices now and three guitars. And it's education again, it's creativity again. How do you do this? How do you make it work? Who's going to sing what part? And so all that came together. I like to play fingerstyle as you know. And so fingerstyle guitar is, I learned that from the song Puff the Magic Dragon. And so if you go back and listen to that, it's do do do do do do do do do do do do do. And I actually made in class a piece of paper with six lines on it. And I would take my fingers and go do do do do do do do do do do do do. And practice that over and over until I figured it out. About 10 years ago, I got to meet Peter Yarrow, who wrote that song. And I told him that that's where my entire fingerstyle comes from. And he told me how honored he was to hear that. But that is really where it came from. So I learned different tunings. I learned fingerstyle. I started then trying to write my own material as well. And take other people's songs and be creative with how I would present those songs as well. And so then strange things. And so I finally bought a real guitar about 1964. And that was a 12 string guitar. And then a few years later, I realized I also needed to have a six string guitar. So I bought, I saved up, worked hard to save up and buy another real guitar. But by the early 1970s, I found that other people didn't want their old guitars. They wanted new guitars. And so they sell those old guitars at a discount. And I never intended to have a guitar collection. But that's how it happened. People would sell me their old guitar, they'd buy a new guitar and I'd have their old guitar and I'd fix it up, learning again how to fix it up, how to set the action, how to restring it, how to make sure it stayed in tune, the intonation, all those kinds of things, what kinds of strings that did I like and etc etc. So the point there is that again, education and taking a hobby then to extremes. And one interesting thing happened after a little while, that word old became vintage. That car became vintage. The guitars became vintage. And now it's a joy to come into the room where I have the guitars and okay, it's you tonight and play that guitar and create some sound. They all are like children. They're all have an individual characteristic charisma to them. And they sound better with the song or that song. And so it's, it's fun. And yes, I still have some ukuleles. You know, I have to tell the audience there's such an incredible gap between Gary's musical talent and mine that it's just awe inspiring. When I, when I was a kid and, you know, you have school choirs, you have church choirs and that and I was always the kid that the director would come to me and say, well, just move your lips, you know, take it all, you know. And then when my parents, when I was very young thought that I should know how to play music, they signed me up for music lessons. And they signed me up for, well, they asked one of the musicians that they knew and he said, I'm up for steel guitar. Unlike Gary's guitars, the steel guitars played on, you know, flat out, which is stuff that people in Hawaii know all about, except they're, you know, we do it with electronic stuff. But I was doing with regular guitar, but the everything was set up differently so I could play it like a steel guitar. And I took lessons for a year and I got lots of gold stars for, you know, coming prepared and everything and doing all my lessons and everything. So my parents went back to the instructor and said, well, we're ready to sign it for another year. And he said, no, I can't really do that in all fairness. Your son has no musical talent. And I can't take your money in good faith, which was absolutely true, you know, that Christmas I'd play Jingle Bells and nobody knew what I was playing. I was playing something so different. But the one thing that I did that Gary and I do at Rihanna and meld into is the joy of music. And I love music. I love listening to guitar music and Shed Atkins, for instance, which Gary is about to talk about. And it makes me, it brings me out of my depression. Music does that to me. I can't do it. I don't have the talent that Gary does, but I have the joy that it brings and I'm forever grateful for music on that. Maybe it's a good time. I know you've got a couple of pictures of guitars, including one of Shed Atkins, who's also one of my favorites of all time. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about the different guitars and how they're a little different. I was very fortunate to be in Seattle one time when there was a guitar auction. And the friend that I was with knew the person that was selling the guitars. So I ended up buying eight of them, including the one that you see there. That is a Paul Reed Smith. We'll see. Is that the Rosewood Limited? I can't see it from here. It may be the Rosewood Limited. It might be the Dragon 3. I think it's the Rosewood. I think that's it. And it's got flowers down the neck. And it's just incredibly gorgeous. It's made by a company in Virginia, Paul Reed Smith. And it's really lovely playing, lovely sounding electric guitar. I also was able to purchase a hand signed Shed Atkins guitar. That's the one there. And so it was actually played by Shed Atkins and then signed by him. And so very fortunate to have that. It's not one that I play because I would hate to accidentally mess up that signature by playing it. So I'm fortunate that I have some nice guitars signed by some very, very nice musicians. Shed Atkins, Leo Kottke, Roger McGuinn from the Birds. I have one of his 12 string Rickenbacker guitars. And these are all, again, it's all about creativity to play that Rickenbacker 12 string and play turn, turn, turn on that. And you sound like, you sound like Roger McGuinn because that was the way he did it. And it's brilliant how these musicians were able to create such sound out of guitars. I was fortunate a few years ago to be with a friend of mine in upstate New York and actually been on stage with Tommy Emanuel. And that's on YouTube. And I played that same song for him because he had that refrain written on one of his guitars. So he signed one of my guitars for me, which was very nice of him. Very, very nice man. What about the guitar you just played? So that's a guitar that I had made for me by the Taylor Company. And I was able to specify everything about it, the scale length, the neck width, the type of woods. You may not have been able to see that there's actually an arm rest on it. And so my arm isn't hit by that edge anymore. It's just nice and smooth there. I got to pick out the woods and just everything about it, the neck radius, so it fits my hand really well. And then when I was done, when I finally got it, I don't know if you can see it in the picture, there's electronics that's on the back here. But that does automatic tuning. And since I like to play in different tunings in four seconds, I can be in a different tuning by simply hitting a button. The person that made this guitar didn't appreciate that I put that on there because he wanted it to be a purist. But I play this guitar out. None of these none of these guitars sit in cases. They're not just a piece of artwork that somebody puts in the corner and never looks at. The whole goal is to play those guitars. That's what they're built for. That's what they're meant for. I get upset with people with car shows that show up with a trailer and roll the car off the trailer and put it in place. And when the car shows over and they've got their trophy, they roll it, winch it back onto the trailer. They don't drive it. No, the cars are meant to be driven. That's the point. Yeah. This has been such a great show with your stories and everything. It's amazing. But we're running out of time. And I was going to ask Gary about his other hobbies because I know he has other hobbies, but we're a little short. And what I like to do at the end of the shows, because we've recently had a tragedy in the islands, the Hawaiian Islands with the Maui wildfires and everything. And everybody all over the world is running into these tragedies and these traumas where people are losing everything and becoming asundered from their family and friends and support. I wanted to sort of end the show with asking Gary if he would recommend any, what kind of hobbies would he recommend and how would he recommend getting into those and enjoying those so we can sort of get our head out of all the negativity that's in the world right now and just enjoy being there and learning and being creative with a hobby. One of my hobbies is photography. And I started that because of my maternal grandfather when I was really 11 years old, I built my first darkroom. And I find that that's very satisfying to take a visual image worth a thousand words literally. So that's easy to do nowadays because your mobile phone usually has a camera in it and you can take pictures and you can deal with those and you can edit those easily with a computer. Travel is another really important thing. I think travel is very important because culture is within that travel and you're learning of other cultures. I see that we're running out of time so there's one more thing I want to say is that you are unique just like everyone else. I like it. I like it a lot. Gary, I just really appreciate you sharing and being with us and you know and especially the guitar playing and the stories about the Jaguar that's great. I hope we can. There's lots more stories. Yeah and I hope we can talk you into coming back again to hear some of those stories. Thank you so much Ken. Thank you and thanks to everybody in the audience for joining us. That's what you're you know that's what we're here for is to provide you with something maybe to help you to find some happiness in these difficult times and so if we succeed at all drop us a line at Think Tech of Hawaii. I'd be much appreciated and be sure and come back next week. Well not next week actually we come back in two weeks. Same time, same station, etc. And we're going to be talking about big ideas and big questions again because what I find is one of the ways to find happiness is to ask those questions of ourselves and we tend to sort of ignore those or avoid those and so I think you'll find a very interesting show in two weeks and you'll be able to join us. And of course thanks to Think Tech of Hawaii staff Michael Haley and Jay and Carol and everybody we appreciate your support on this and like I say just have a great two weeks and I hope to see you in that time back again to again find some happiness in hard times. Aloha.