verdigris

[Tim Coates]

Horace,

Thank you for the words about Fred Drasche.  The older I get the more I 
appreciate him.  He was Class (with a capital "C").  His wife Mimi 
always traveled with with.  I first met him as I said previously in 
Chicago at Hendricks Music.  Otto Keyes was lucky enough to spend a 
week with him and then technicians were invited to one of his seminars 
at the store.   Otto invited Michael Wathen, myself, and I think Conrad 
Hoffsommer to the seminar.  Conrad, do you remember that?  We all drove 
from SD to Chicago in my old VW camper.  We were all quite a bit 
younger then (and I mean quite a bit).  He seemed to like the younger 
technicians along with paying attention to the seasoned techs.   
Information flowed out of him without talking down to others.

Tim Coates
University of South Dakota

Horace Greeley wrote:

A couple of other thoughts on Freddy, while we're at it:  With due 
respect to a few others, he was probably the last person at S&S could 
(metaphorically) have started at one end of the factory with raw wood 
and personally produced a finished, playable, musically useable 
product.  Anyone who had the chance to attend his classes came away 
with more than they bargained for...or, they simply were not paying 
attention.  Whether he was making his needles "sing" (which one could 
still do with factory hammers in those days), or taking great delight 
in the shocked faces as he beat sostenuto mechanisms into submission 
with an 8 oz. ball peen hammer, there was an artistry in his use of 
tools and his hands that was truly spectacular to watch.

If your memory is long enough, you may also remember that, in the days 
when the factory was busily telling everyone that, if there was a 
problem with their fancy new Teflon action, it was obviously something 
that they (the local technician) had screwed up, Freddy was the guy who 
was going around teaching people how to make their own 
crude-but-effective parallel reamers out of center pins rolled between 
files...Nope, it wouldn't fly at all in our latter-day, post-modern 
world of techno-nonsense piano work...but, it kept a large number of 
instruments functioning that would otherwise have died on delivery 
while the marketing folks figured out that they had made a mistake and 
tried to catch up.

Ah, well...I suspect it might be time to raise a glass in his general 
direction...

Best to all.

Horace