 Welcome to the drum history podcast. I'm your host Bart van der Zee and today I'm joined by our old friend of the show Rob Cook. Rob, welcome. Well, thank you, Bart. Always a pleasure to have you here. You're kind of always on the show in spirit because you come up in probably every third episode just because of the legacy you've built for yourself as an author and the founder of the Chicago drum show, which is really kind of what we're here to start talking about. We were going to talk about some other stuff later, but this is a weird year, right? Oh, man. Yep. Yep. And it's reinventing things. That's for sure. When people say they want to get back to normal and other people, I'm more in the camp that thinks there'll never quite be the same normal again. But nothing is ever really the same year after year. So we're ready for bigger changes. Yeah, that's a good point. And like you said, things are going to be different. And I know you're getting a lot of questions about this year. It's 2020 about what happened with the COVID-19 stuff and your decision and what you without a doubt made the correct decision. I mean, legally, I think it would have been a nightmare. So why don't you just tell us about it? What happened this year? Okay. Well, I want to say a few words first about how we got up to this juncture. So that's going to go back and I'm not going to get real deep into the history. But the first four years, the show bounced around a little. And year five was when we first went to the Kane County Fairgrounds in St. Charles, Illinois. Now, that's straight west of the loop about 30 miles. So it's a little bit farther out and a little bit harder to get to, frankly, than the Odium Expo Center, which is over by the airport. But it's kind of like renting a VFW hall. They've had numerous different buildings that we've been in as the show expanded. But basically, it was always a blank slate. We walk into an empty room and we're expected to leave it the way we found it. But other than that, we can do whatever we want there. So we were there for 20 years from the fifth through the 25th show, we're all there. And people get used to that. And we don't just bill it as the family reunion as a marketing thing. The numbers are kind of interesting. When I was working on the show program, which will now be next year's program rather than this year, I looked up all the past exhibitor records and so on. And it was kind of interesting. We've got one exhibitor, Skins and Tins, from Champaign, Illinois, that's been at every show. So ReBeats and Skins and Tins. This will be the 30th one coming up in 2021. Joe Cilla from Detroit has been at 28. I think Randy Rainwater has been at 28. But there are a dozen that have been there over 20 years. There are 27 more that have been there 10 years or more, and 24 more that have been there four years or more. So it is quite literally a gathering of old friends. And they got used to the fairgrounds partly because it's a neat little town, St. Charles. It's a suburb of Chicago technically, but it's a small town. It's got a thousand seat historic theater. There's a lot of neat clubs. All the hotels are kind of in one little area and people get used to staying out the usual hotel and hanging in the parking lot and yada yada. So there was some blowback when we left. Some people weren't too happy about leaving it. But we didn't really, after the 25th show, have much of a choice. Some of the problems we were running into, the first was space. We were just playing out of room. There are two exhibit halls in the biggest building, which they had just put up about five years before we left. And we managed to fill it up completely. One of the two halls was all exhibits. The other half of it we turned over to the clinic area. And we had to bring our own infrastructure. Again, it was a blank slate, so I had to bring in staging, audio, video, pipe and drape, backdrop, pipe and drape for the booths, all of the cafe and infrastructure, which was kind of a second stage area. So that meant another stage, more pipe and drape, audio and video support for the cafe, custom tables. And on and on and on. But the downside of having half of an exhibit hall full of the clinic area is you have to tell everybody in there to be dead quiet for three hours, three clinics per day. And when some guys weren't too happy about paying for a booth to use for 16 hours and then being told, oh, by the way, six hours, you've got to be quiet. So there was always a scramble to be in the main room rather than the other room and so on. So the number one problem that drove us out was space. Next was shipping to the show. As the show grew, more and more people wanted to ship, especially some of the corporate exhibitors. And for a while they shipped to a local UPS store and we would go over and pick it up in our van and it grew to where we had to send our truck over. And at the 25th show, we took a 26-foot penske with all the show infrastructure and I needed another 12-foot penske just for the all the merchandise that had been sent in on pallets and so on. Some exhibitors needed to have taken to the show. So the odium was closer to the airport, closer to downtown, and it's a regular expo center. So they were able to accommodate the shipments to the show. They had a separate room upstairs for the clinics and it looked like it solved all of our problems. So fast forward to this year. What happened? Things obviously started getting a little bit hairy by the end of February and beginning of March, I was getting maybe every couple of days I'd hear from a clinician or an exhibitor or an attendee saying, you know, what's up? Are you going to be okay with the show? Sure. And the reply was, well sure, until we're told, you know, by the authorities that we can't do it, we're planning on doing it. But those as the days ticked by and things were mounting, it was getting more and more tense and I was getting more and more of those. And I was really surprised that I hadn't heard from one exhibitor about a cancellation. But my son, one of my main consorts and inspiration really, and he's did the concession area at the show from when he was about nine years older. So, well, he's stuck in Nairobi, he works for a division of the World Bank. And he was kind of worried, pointing out to me that even if legally it was okay, he was concerned because from what they're saying about high-risk individuals, I'm up there. I'm almost 70. I've had some hard issues. And he was, his travel had been forbidden by his employer. He wasn't going to be able to make it back. And he pretty much made me promise, you know, let's pull the plug in. I didn't want to just say it's canceled. I think it's really important to announce not only that the show isn't going to happen at a certain time, but what is going to happen. I felt it was really important that we look at it as a postponement of the 30th show rather than a cancellation. And so, March 20th, that's a Friday, I believe. I called the Odeum to let him know. I was thinking about pulling the plug because at their website, all of the events up through May 1st already had notices saying that the directive of the governor of Illinois and the health department, this event has been canceled. And everything up to May 1st at that point had that notice. So, I called the Odeum to see if there was somebody they could refer me to at the state to discuss it in terms of a prognosis for May 15th and what the Odeum's policy would be and if I could guarantee that week the same usual weekend for 2021, et cetera. And they told me that they were in the same boat as everybody else. They couldn't tell me anything definite, but they understood if I needed to cancel as far as the date for the 2021, my contact needed to check with ownership of the Odeum before he could give me the okay. So, I asked him to let me know by Monday because I felt things were moving pretty fast and I really needed to make a decision by the next Monday. Well, Monday came and I got my first exhibitor cancellation and by this time, again, the pressure was growing and I could see that in the next few hours I envisioned things just spiraling out of control, three or four people cancel, word gets around that they have canceled. And I still hadn't heard from the Odeum. So, I looked around at other venues, other expo centers and unfortunately the kind of features that I mentioned that the Odeum offers are generally only found in corporate type settings, pretty expensive settings and that's why PASIC and NAM charge so much for a booth because it's a lot more if you're paying corporate rates. The Odeum was relatively inexpensive and enabled us to keep the exhibitor rates reasonable and so on. So, I looked around at other venues and then I thought, well, there's always the fairgrounds. People were happy there. It might be a good backup. I called the fairgrounds. They had a contract to me within about 20 minutes. The dates were open so I went ahead with it. It turns out later in the day someone from the Odeum with their hair on fire called to say, what in the world is going on? We just saw in social media that you've moved and I explained what had happened and they said, oh, that's a misunderstanding. We meant we had to check with ownership before we could guarantee that your contract could be rolled over and your deposit and so on. So, we may have had a miscommunication and a misunderstanding but the call had already been made. Another thing I wanted to do was let everybody know at the same time. Nobody wants to be the last to know and so there had to be several announcements, one for the clinicians, one for my staff, one for the exhibitors, one for the prepaid exhibitors explaining all the options that the prepaid exhibitors were given the option of rolling their payment over to the next year and having a bit of a savings if they do that to thank them, et cetera. So, all those announcements had already gone out and so we left it as a return to Kane County. Some of the issues with Kane County remain, it's still in the same place obviously, which is farther from the airport and farther from downtown. I no longer have the infrastructure and to allow all of the exhibitors to have a space, it just wouldn't work to have the clinic area and I don't have all that infrastructure anymore anyhow. It would have all had to been leased or borrowed or whatever and trucked down. So, the show is going to be a little different. It's going to be kind of a throwback show. There will be no clinics. There is a large conference room on the second level that we were using as a master classroom and also some presentations and that's going to be called the break room and there's going to be not formal events but it's going to be kind of zoned like in two-hour intervals and we're going to have, it's going to be like a meet and greet. There's going to be some drum kits up there and it'll give people like Kofi Baker an opportunity who was, he was really disappointed that he couldn't do his clinic this year. He's endorsing WFL three drums so we're going to have Kofi and B3 and a drum set up there for a couple hours each day and you can go up and hang with Kofi and there's not going to be a formal timed clinic type presentation but it'll be more like a meet and greet and a hang and the same with Jim Catalano and probably Gary Astridge and so on. So there'll be a hangout up there and and people go up and you know hear some drumming, meet some people and and so on. The raffle program will still be taking place. There'll be a show program but there will not be formal clinics or timed presentations and so on. So that's what's happening. We'll be back in St. Charles. Yeah. It's nice to hear from the source about what's actually going to happen and I think the exhibitor thing, it is what it is. Obviously you got to make do and it's a weird, I mean the world is a weird place right now so I'm just happy to, to, we all have something to look forward to. Anticipation is building already. I should point out that the, one of the very first things I did as soon as those announcements were out was I, oh my god, people are going to be contacting me about their space. So I revisited the last layout from the 25th show and came up with a new floor plan and had that done within a matter of hours and by that night people were already contacting me saying I went the same space I had five years ago so it started filling in immediately just with people that were contacting me. So it was like three or four days before I actually put the word out, hey you can sign up for spaces now but it was already, there were probably already 20 or 30 spaces and of the 170 spaces I'd say within 72 hours it was 50% full and at this point as I talk to you there are only seven spaces of the 170 open. Wow. And there are still some corporate folks like Sonar and DW who have been furloughed and aren't even responding to emails or phone calls now so we'll probably end up locating some of those in the lobby area. There's room for another 10 or 12 spaces there but virtually all of the exhibitors, there are a couple that either didn't confirm or weren't able to confirm yet but for the most part virtually everybody who was on the diagram for 2020 is already on the diagram for 2021. Gosh, that's awesome. I'm just very impressed too because I think, I mean you're the guy in multiple aspects but it's just funny because like, so I'll be at the show like last year I'll be there with Vincent Leaf from Vitalizer Drums we're going to be sharing a booth and it's just funny because like I just love how you're the guy who is just, you know, people can reach out to you and get this all set up and you're just so on top of it and I feel like everyone feels like they're not getting, I don't know, some like they're not leaving a voicemail and then some strange person calls them back and says yeah you can be in this spot it's very personalized attention probably because you've built all these relationships with people. So and I know with Vincent's actually been great because he's handled basically all of the like scheduling or I should say the setting up of the booth and stuff so I'm really excited to be there and I think we're going to plan something cool for our booth and be a part of it and on another note it's really interesting how you said some of the bigger companies are furloughed because I've seen that trying to schedule some episodes one in particular I've been talking to someone at Meinl and he was like we got to do it after this is over because he left his microphone his USB kind of microphone at his office and he wanted it to have good quality and he's like I can't get back in my office so kind of a strange turn of events but I think it'll be great I'm really looking forward to it it's it's such a centrally located such a well respected show and I think it's going to be awesome. I think so I think we've we've got a plan and should be a lot less work going into next year I've already got the custom key made actually I just came today the key that was cast in the Czech Republic and we've got some drumstick key rings made for the 30th anniversary show so I'll still need some new signage and banners and that sort of thing but the goal is to make everyone not only a little better but a little bit easier to do logistically yeah I think we have a plan oh man I just think it's funny you could probably just slap some like gaff tape on the zero of 2020 and just like sharpie on a one that's funny cool well I think this is a good resource now because the plan is and I'm hoping people are listening to this on either Saturday May 16th or Sunday May 17th because we're recording this on Friday May 15th we just wanted to this kind of came together very last minute just to give people kind of an update and get a little of the the the vibe of the Chicago show now do you have any fun like before we move on to our other topics do you have any fun kind of like you know absolute moments of chaos in your 30 years of doing this of just things that went crazy or are anything fun like that definitely the one like I mentioned that we used to have people shipped to the UPS store and then as soon as we unloaded my van I would send somebody in my van over to the UPS store to pick up all the stuff that people had shipped in well it got to be too much for the van so then we would wait until the truck was unloaded send somebody over in the truck well it exploded one year and it was a disaster I mean my truck was gone for a long time and it was almost time we started at 8 a.m the exhibitors were planning to get in at noon and the truck wasn't back yet and when the truck came back they said that when they got to this UPS store which is one of these little storefronts in a mall yeah you couldn't see into the store it was nothing but cardboard and and they had received several pallets dw pearl and a couple other companies had sent pallets and the only way then it was one guy working there by himself so and and he was in his mid 60s so to get the stuff off the truck off the pallet they had to cut the plastic bring in boxes one at a time which meant dozens of boxes that weren't labeled because the pallet had been labeled yeah so my truck finally gets back and they're calling they're screaming for me like and I'm used to being called in you know five directions at once but they said you've got to come over to the truck we can't get this stuff to the booths and I went over to see what they were talking about and the 26 foot penski that we had brought downloaded with the show infrastructure it wasn't full to the top but it was full front to back about four feet deep just hundreds of boxes and a lot of them unlabeled or labeled with a corporate name that wasn't the same as the exhibitor name so there was nobody in the building that could sort that out and and call which box was going to go where except me so I had to get the whole staff together line them up and and have them grab boxes one at a time as I took them out of the the truck and told them where it had to go but that was the last year that UPS gave up they they wouldn't talk to me anymore after that I think I quit his job yeah so you can't ship here anymore so so the next year I had to rent the a second truck to bring stuff down but yeah there's there are some surprises now and then with an event like this of course I mean doing it for this long man what was your what gave you this idea originally to do the Chicago drum show like I mean obviously you're an author you've been doing this stuff I know you do multimedia stuff with rebates but like what what was the first thought that said I could maybe do a drum show I there was no such thought it it was started by a guy named Jack Hutchinson he had a business called the drum hutch jack has passed now but he had a little swap meet and there were maybe 10 or 12 of us there I don't know if you'd even call us exhibitors we were just participants and it I thought it was really neat I think Joe Chiller was there Randy and Bunny were there Jack Brand from percussion express uh Chuck Scalia and uh I thought I had a great time drove down from Michigan with my van and sold a few books and so on and uh the next year I called Jack about three months before the the date and and they find out what the date for his next get-together was and uh he said uh no I'm not gonna do it I lost money on the thing if you you can have my mailing list if you want to do it and so I thought oh geez I'm not I'm not in any position to do that in Illinois by the way it was in loves park right not too far from where Bunny lives so then the second year I took him up on that I I Jack gave me his contacts and I announced that it was going to take place in my shop in Alma Michigan so the second show was in Alma and I could see that if it was going to grow and and attract more attendees and so on that it I really should get back to the Chicago area so it went pretty well in Alma so the third year I had a couple of partners and we put on a show there were three of us together and we did it at the hillside holiday Inn and it was much bigger and then it started to look like hey yeah this is taken off this this has possibilities um and the partnership end of it however any any decision that was made we had to check with the other two partners and the other yada and then I kept after them about the date for the the third show and they weren't getting back to me and so I finally decided to go ahead and do the third show by myself and we we did it in downtown Chicago the DePaul Music Mart was the venue and I thought that was a great idea because we'd be downtown and more people could get to it and dad would come to the show while mom and the kids went shopping yada yada it was a terrible idea the load in and load out was in an alley and with freight elevators and nobody wanted to drive downtown yada yeah so that's what led to the fourth show uh or fifth show finally being back at her not back but out at the cane county fairground so it it just kind of grew a little bit at a time from from that little swap meet in uh Love's Park and then it just uh was out of control yeah now it's gone it's gone nuts um no that's cool to know and and I agree with uh obviously you'd think in theory it would be really neat to have it in downtown Chicago but for most people who've been to downtown Chicago you realize that it's just I mean even parking like if you want to park your car for the day it's like $50 I mean it's just yeah bonkers so um well that's great I'll never never forget that that year that it was downtown uh Bill Cardwell was was packing and repacking in the alley and there just wasn't any space to to do it any other way but uh he called me the next day to say oh man I'm sunk I took my wife's camcorder it was packed in the van but as I was packing and repacking I had to take it out of the van and I set it down on something and uh there was no hope of course 24 hours later probably 10 minutes later it was already gone but oh my god that's funny it just was no fun uh getting everybody in and out one at a time uh in an alley if you're afraid elevator and all that no no I know it's uh it's a big undertaking and and I think you've you've kind of um I think can be seen as like a a template for what people should be now that you're really up and running and you know 30 years later you you have it down pat um so that's great this is awesome so everyone can look forward to that um what are the dates for 2021 it's the 15th and 16th we were always the weekend between mother's day and memorial day got it occasionally leap year puts two weekends in there but last few years it's there's been just one weekend between mother's day and memorial day one year it was on mother's day and I was told over and over again by a whole parade of people okay we did it this year but just a heads up you know if you do this again I won't be here I can imagine from this being my first year with a kid how big of a deal it was for my wife you know obviously that'll go down but it was like uh it felt like her birthday or something and I'm like isn't isn't it isn't it his job my son to be doing this obviously he's eight months old so he's not doing it but I'm like come on um okay now uh that's great really looking forward to it um we are also going to talk about George Way you you said you had some more information that you'd like to bring to the table yeah about this yeah and I I got to give kudos to Ron Danette and I'll do that again towards the end of this section but Ron pretty well nailed it but there are a couple things I do want to touch on to round it out and I would encourage people to go back and listen to Ron Danette's uh George Way podcast and also uh Don Familaros I'm going to kind of refer to some things there uh I found really fascinating but uh one of the main things with George that I want to make sure to get in is his performance situation and his status as a performer and a percussionist um like Ron mentioned he insisted on being a drummer he was one of these guys like so many that you've interviewed already and will interview in the future that didn't have any other choice they can just tell they're a drummer that's what they're going to do and uh that's uh George was a prototype of that kind of individual he was forced to take piano lessons like Ron said he was in a very wealthy upscale household they forced him to take piano lessons he always wanted to play drums his parents wouldn't budge on it finally a friend of the family actually took George and bought a small drum for him it was kind of a toy drum almost but the the next step then was George was determined to learn how to play it correctly and he asked around and was told that the best drum instructor was George B Stone uh and again George B Stone as opposed to George L or George Lawrence Stone the guy who ended up writing stick control and and so on who was about the same age as George well George B Stone um we won't go into his background but he was a an all around musician he could play multiple instruments and uh was a band leader and so on in addition to uh building drums his main reputation now of course this has a a drum builder of the early days so the story actually as told by George L Stone who remained a lifelong friend of George's uh and they I have files of correspondence had files of correspondence Rhonda net has all of that now uh and uh so according to George L Stone young George Wei puts on his uniform he went to a military academy and he marches with his drum into the the Stone facility and asks for George B Stone the the best drum teacher in Boston and at the time George B Stone was playing poker with his buddies which he was known to do when he had some free time and uh there was a musician's union office upstairs I might that's where he was playing cards and this all of his buddies look at him like well are you going to be a jerk until this kid you don't you don't teach kids or are you going to be nice to him or you know they were all holding their breath well George B Stone uh cut young George Wei some slack and went and gave him the lesson and agreed to teaching and that became George's second home in short order he became a gopher a companion for George L Stone and one of the GHW catalogs has a picture and I think I used it in the leading way of George L Stone and George Wei as young boys uh with a bunch of the sound effects that the George B Stone company made but uh I can't say enough about the musicianship and the quality of drumming that George B Stone was capable of they talked about him doing a buzzroll that sounded like tearing a piece of paper and being able to play these intricate solos on the dime if somebody held their fingernail on the dime to hold it in place and then George B and George L Stone could play a solo with one of them playing the left stick the other playing the right stick part on that dime if you can imagine and he taught a lot of things other than just technique and rudiments those were important but he taught total musicianship uh the basics of mallet instruments uh the use of effects and timing you know how to how to play with a band how to how to accompany uh silent film clips and supply the special effects you know you got it so I uh fast forward uh George was a good student a natural born talent and devoted and dedicated and became a professional drummer in short order and he was playing in uh you know the vaudeville houses of Boston and that's all detailed in uh the leading way uh well a guy showed up uh and from New York and in Boston and mentioned that he had just left a job in New York that was playing I don't know $15 a week or something pretty good money for a young man told George if he wanted that gig he could have it George immediately went to New York and uh this would be probably 1906 he was born in 1891 so he was a young man mid teens or so when he landed in New York now uh Dom I loved learning about uh the statue to George Cohen and so on the guy who kind of made Broadway in terms of the home of the musicals but if you look into the history of Broadway actually all the vaudeville houses and everything had started as far back as the mid 1800s and in fact George Cohen's parents had a vaudeville show so uh Cohen grew up in a musical family and uh there were there were no movies obviously no no uh Broadway musicals as we know them today as Cohen kind of pioneered but there were there were a lot of opportunities for a gig and drummer and George played all over New York including some places uh near Broadway and he worked with with people like uh he worked for William Fox who ended up putting his name on of course you know the Fox Entertainment Empire oh wow Jack Lowe the Lowe theaters grew out of that uh lineage Adolf Zooker who founded the Paramount Movie Studios in fact years later uh George uh sent a letter to to Zooker and explained who he was and that he had worked for Zooker back at the Crystal Hall in in the Broadway region and near Times Square and asked him if he could send him an autograph picture because he was one of his first employees and Zooker uh complied what Zooker had there he had had a penny arcade and decided that he would start showing uh these these silent film clips up on the second level and everybody told him that's that's stupid nobody's gonna go and it's on the second level to boot so what he did to draw people up there he put in a glass staircase and underneath the glass there was water running so it was like a waterfall with colored lights on it and it drew people up there and that was one of George's first gigs uh and and these gigs were not uh 20 minute gigs he talks about gigs where he was playing 12 hours a day for seven days a week and uh there would be a piano player and a drummer and the drummer was doing all the effects uh doing the uh fire whistles the uh he said he wore out multiple pairs of knives doing the sword fights so uh so George's musicianship was still being uh perfected at this point and he ended up uh not staying there and doing the the Broadway musicals as they started coming out but becoming a road musician uh he went out with a couple of George Cohen shows like uh i'm gonna blank out on names of them but anyhow he became a touring drummer uh after a few years in new york and as touring drummers went George was pretty much at the top of the heap uh and he was on his game and that it led to not not just the touring musical presentations but uh gigs like uh the largest uh mississippi showboat that was in operation the wonderland and uh circus drumming uh circus drumming is a whole other topic yeah uh but he he spent several years with uh the ringland brothers and the big name in circus drumming directors or conductors is a guy named Merle Evans and uh George fit the bill for Merle Evans so well they became lifelong friends and George would often go out decades later and sit in with the circus band Merle Evans actually carried a spare uniform with him always in George's size so George was always welcome to come and sit in circus drumming if that's that's worth looking up if anybody really wants to uh get an education because these guys had to do you know and it wasn't just an umpire umpire they had to do these gallops and uh of course they were there was a regular concert before the show began so the concert band but they had to do all the cues uh um for the acrobats and everything it it kept you on your toes and uh that was this was something that he shared uh as far as a background goes with senior uh William F Ludwig uh yeah that's right senior uh he had a background in circus drumming and uh there there are those that said that that's what led him to develop that pedal he just couldn't play a gallop fast enough with the existing stage of the yard on a bass drum pedal so he had to develop his own but George had a great love for the circus and always would go out and sit in when he had a chance and was welcome to but uh he did a lot of traveling over those those few years that he was on the road before he ended up in Edmonton Alberta and kind of settled down there and then uh you can pick up the story as as Ron explained it then that brought him to Lidi uh and I'm going to kind of fast forward because between what I've said with the Lidi sec Lidi podcast and what Ron has built us in on that would kind of cover that but I'm going to jump up to 1927 and he's with Lidi as a and they haven't become a division of Khan yet and I think I mentioned before John it's like George always saw 1927 as the point he wanted to get back to uh he was in a company that was independent that could act quickly had great customer service he was ahead of marketing and so on and he would get involved with a couple of other drum companies of his own in the future and work for many other companies and he would never have that range of options open to him again but uh as I as I read these different proposals that he made to for to raise money uh sell stock and so on I I always had it in my head what he's trying to do is get back to where he was in 27 that's so funny but um so anyhow uh Lidi and Ludwig and Ludwig merge with Khan in 29 George makes the move to Elkhart continues up until the war is kind of displaced and uh for a while he had his own company running out of his house basically selling drum heads and a few other accessories and single-handedly sold almost as many drum heads as Lidi had the the previous year but that led him to a tighter association with Amaraco uh American rawhide in Chicago so he joined them as an employee moved to Chicago and was with them for a year or so and that wasn't going to be a fulfilling career just working with the rawhide company doing drum heads uh that led him to Slingerland he was there maybe a year and again a lot of companies that needed somebody they kind of already had their positions filled and they were if they had an opening they wanted somebody for that opening they didn't want somebody to totally remake their company and take charge yeah so uh George found himself working for Slingerland and not being able to do marketing and design work and everything he did design the HH pedal that Slingerland put out and a and a couple other minor things but uh he finally decided to strike out and moved to California start the drum shop uh and by this time his wife's health was kind of starting to fail uh Elsie got pretty ill George had to drive her from California back to Edmonton Alberta and then back to California again take up the shop and uh I have some pictures of that shop uh well they're in the the book the leading way it's neat as a pin and it's pretty impressive the way it's laid out and uh he just didn't take the retail and I was talking to uh Remo Belly at one point uh Remo was an old friend of George's because he's from the Mishawaka area so he was a young man and and met George when George was in Elkhart and I and Remo had a shop at about the same time that George was going out there it was called Drum City with Roy Hart so I asked Remo about George's shop and and uh Remo kind of shook his head and and said well George was starting to get a little bit past his prime and and consider we're at the the wartime era the late 40s now George was born in 1891 so he wasn't a kid anymore he wasn't getting old per se but he kind of had a vision for this shop and he didn't want to become in a hangout they didn't even have chairs out in the main part because they it bugged him that these jitterbuggers had come in and just sit there and and hang out so damn jitterbuggers yeah and uh so uh Remo said that his place he and Roy's place was a hangout people came in to just hang out see what was going on more like what people think of this Frank's drum shop in some of these places yeah but George's wasn't like that it was it was a kind of a sterile setting and you came in and you you either bought something or left now so uh uh it was no surprise that you know George didn't succeed at that and uh he decided if he was that retail wasn't for him he wanted to get stay in the drum industry but he figured he better go back to the chicago area the war what it was now over he wrote to his old friend uh senior uh William F Ludwig uh and asked him if it didn't just ask him if he had a position he had a plan he wrote to senior and said here's what i want to do i want to go on the road for for uh Ludwig and uh well wfl at the time and here's what i proposed he had the whole plan all laid out how much he was going to get on commission and how much he would have to make to break even and blah blah and and uh Ludwig wrote back and said yeah okay that'll work um uh if George had also written to Dave Boyer at the con company letting him know he was coming back and Boyer kind of jumped at the chance to get uh George back uh on the end of slightly different capacity now he was going to be basically a traveling salesman uh that looked like a better deal uh so George wrote back to Ludwig and said i'm sorry to do this but you know i i'm gonna go with uh con and and do leading sales uh so uh that was fine with Ludwig they didn't really need him and Georgia'd approached them and they were just trying to accommodate but there was a very gracious letter that senior wrote back to the George saying best of luck you know i'm i'm sure you'll land on your feet and we wish nothing but the best for you and you know welcome back that's nice so uh then it didn't work out that well George kind of chafed there was some uh conflicts with uh the level of customer service and the the schedule he was asked to perform but but he stuck with it and uh he stayed with uh con and oh they uh they joined Leedy with Ludwig and Ludwig made it into the new division Leedy and Ludwig George was in the middle of that that's been discussed with his nob tension drums and so on well uh come 1955 and con decides to just wash their hands of the drum business all together and i think we've gone over that in in other forums uh or other people talked about it they sell Ludwig uh Ludwig and Ludwig to the Ludwig family they sell Leedy to Slingerlin and George is kind of displaced but he's right there in Elkhart he's looking at an empty building now that's been used for drum production so that's when he decides to start his own drum company he uh had not made any fortune along the way obviously he had to borrow the money when he moved to California he was still working on getting that paid off and uh you would think that a guy who was in the middle of the drum universe for all these decades it'd be really rich by now but you know it doesn't work out that way for a lot of drummers yeah so uh so uh George sold shares in his company and started up and he had a lot of investors i think there were 30 we even have you know lists of the who who the investors were and so on and then i i'll i'll defer to Ron's explanation of what happened then George since he didn't really own the company outright was kind of finagled out of it by this guy George Richon so he's displaced by Camco and he can't use his own name anymore he went to work for Rogers briefly and you'd think he would have learned after working for all these other companies and so on but uh he saw it as a as an opportunity and he he it was not too far away and he went to work for uh Rogers over in Covington but they pretty much wanted him to you know organize the warehouse and the the distribution so on they already had a designer they already had marketing people and so on so George wasn't too happy there decided he'd be better off back in Elkhart and and another financial set back in the process because he had bought a house there already and it took him years to get out from under that he rented it out and had a series of bad tenants and yada yada but but anyhow he moves back and um again time is kind of running out now we're up to you know 1960 and remember George was born in 1891 so uh Elsie's and his wife is in real bad shape so uh George starts his own little uh business to keep busy the GHW drummer supplies and mainly selling accessories and heads and so on like uh Ron mentioned uh well uh George when George passes uh the business was left to Elsie uh Elsie was in very bad health now she was legally blind she moved back to Canada to be to be near her sister and they had had one employee an old gentleman named uh Frank Reed and so she worked out a deal with Frank that he would buy it by the company but they did that on the QT so it wouldn't alarm suppliers and you know put the guy through uh having to fill out new credit apps and all that she just had him keep on running it as it was and they were going to gradually do a transfer of ownership and and that's what happened and uh Frank Reed ran it until he died and eventually uh it simply got boarded up well because of the the sequence of events with Elsie moving back to Canada George having died all of George's archives that had been accumulated over the years his scrap books his files of correspondence with the stones and uh all these other people uh his catalog collection is his instruction books and everything you know Elsie wasn't able to take all that back uh to Canada with her and it pretty much went into storage and uh I've uh long and boring story how I came across it but I went down to visit the guy who had become the caretaker of all that and after several five-hour trips to Elkhart and back to to access the archives and asked this guy all kinds of questions he finally said well make me an offer I just want to sell all this stuff so I bought it all it was equivalent of maybe a couple of four-door filing cabinets of mainly documents but uh some hardware and parts and so on and one of the really neat things that's in there as an aside was a keg drum it's it's an oak keg that George had made into a snare drum and it has a beverage dispenser inside made out of copper and it had a tap on it so it was a playable marching snare drum with a beverage dispenser built in with a leady name tag on it and uh it was in pretty bad shape but one of the surprises for the 30th anniversary show was to present that drum in all its glory and Ron DeNet has refurbished it for me and has restored it I think he's even going to make it a functional beverage dispenser again which will mean coating that copper canister with something on the inside to prevent wow who poisoning this stuff yeah I it's kind of a mystery drum because I I never saw any picture of it never saw any mention of it by George and any of his letters or anything but but that drum will be at the 30th anniversary show in 2021 oh man for a long time I thought I had everything that George left but it turns out I learned years later that Jim Catalano the long time what a good employee ended up with a big box a case of all of George's instructional books from back from the 1800s and so on and all of it George's scrap books and a lot of rare catalogs like UG leadies genuine leather uh leady catalogs with his name stamped on them those all went to Eddie Knight in Elkhart or in South Bendron uh but both Eddie and Jim were very accommodating in and making those resources available to me and as I researched George's life but um so that's the whole story of the the George way archives and Georgia's story up right up through Ron Danette that's fascinating and if people are listening and they don't really know what we're talking about um there's multiple resources right here on this show that you can check out Rob did an episode uh we did that was pretty early on we did one called the leady way which was based on your book which you referred to about George way and leady um and then more recently um I spoke with Ron Danette who um obviously does Danette classic drums but he also does um he now owns George way drums um and now puts out oh yeah I think I neglected to mention there that uh about two years ago right after I finished the leady way we also were moving and uh squeezed for space and I had had it in the back of my mind for for many years that all of this these George way archives the leady sales records all these letters and everything which should be go to a museum or something but by by this time Ron was up and going with uh George way and I thought that would be appropriate to make him the caretaker of all this stuff so I sent him all these big boxes and everything from George's uh personal writing utensils to uh all these files of correspondence hundreds of pictures a lot of drawings and and on and on and on so it was a fitting place for all of that and uh for Ron Danette to be the uh the caretaker of all things uh George way yeah he's doing great stuff obviously with with George's legacy and and like I was saying for people who don't know who George way is maybe you're just now getting into listening to drum history and you're just now learning about um the history of our instrument George was an absolute visionary icon in the drum world um so go back and check out those episodes um as well to get more supplemental info um and learn a little bit more all right Rob well um this has been great I'm sure you're obviously disappointed that you couldn't do the drum show but um I think people are just disappointed all over the world about multiple things being canceled um I was supposed to go to see the Rolling Stones this summer and then Rage Against the Machine was playing and it's just and then the Chicago show was canceled everything was just like at least we're in good company I mean the Olympics uh the Tour de France uh everything and and people asked me about delay it well geez why cancel you know just delay it 90 days or six months and oh man all the moving parts can you imagine and then and then have it happen again uh on top of all the scheduling I I think it was better to just you know pause for a year yeah and do it right I think you did the right thing I was listening to a podcast earlier where they were it was in March and they were talking about um how they were like some places they were like oh we're gonna we're gonna close down for maybe a week and then we'll reopen and now we're in May and it's like you know you really don't know and and here in Cincinnati things are actually starting to open like this weekend for outdoor seating or something and we'll see what happens so yeah yeah well stay safe man thank you thank you so much Rob I appreciate you being on the show and uh I will I'll talk to you before then but I'll see you in uh Chicago in 2021 yeah thanks Bart 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