00:00When I was working at Eschau Violinshop, I was working mainly on violins there,
00:07more the student level violins because I was doing all the school instrument repairs.
00:13So that was a good learning experience because you learn to deal with lots of instruments
00:22and not necessarily the highest quality repairs,
00:24but basically getting the work done on instruments and doing a good job at it,
00:33but it wasn't the same thing as working on a $500,000 instrument.
00:42But while I was there, they discovered that I had this background in guitars.
00:48So when I was working on guitars, or violins, whenever somebody brought a guitar in,
00:54I would be the person to do the repairs.
00:57At that time, this is in the early 60s,
01:04it wasn't common to walk into a guitar shop.
01:07And in fact, there weren't that many guitar shops that actually did guitar repairs.
01:13The conventional wisdom was to go to a violin shop if you wanted your guitar repaired.
01:18So I learned both about guitar repairs and violin repairs.
01:24And the guitar repairs, even though I had gotten some training in the guitar shop at Baikal,
01:32it was pretty much on-the-job training where you sort of talk to the people you knew,
01:39and there's no literature to go through, no web, no books.
01:44So you scratch your head and think,
01:48well, what would be the best way to repair this instrument?
01:51So I developed a particular way of doing guitar repairs.
01:59And all the other people I knew who were doing guitar repairs were doing the same thing,
02:04because it's just word of mouth and on-the-job training.
02:09There's no such thing as a school or a book or any kind of reference.
02:15But toward the end of when I was working at the violin shop,
02:21a friend of mine, and I'll drop a name here, his name is Stu Goldberg,
02:26had opened up a small music store in San Francisco called Marina Music.
02:32He had developed his business into a pretty good going concern,
02:39specializing in folk music instruments.
02:45And he imported guitars from Japan, Germany, not from China.
02:53That was before the Chinese.
02:57He suggested that I write a book on guitar repair,
03:01because at that time there was nothing available.
03:04And I had done work for him on the guitars that his customers had bought him.
03:12So I thought, well, you know, I'll just do this as kind of an exercise.
03:17I started that about 1966 or so.
03:23I was still working in the violin shop.
03:26When I opened my own shop in 67, I still continued to work on it in the evenings at home.
03:32But it wasn't until 1973 that I was introduced to Dave McComiskey, who worked for music sales.
03:47He showed it to his bosses.
03:50We drew up a contract, and they published my book after many revisions in 1974.
03:58So that was a fun thing.
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