Saturday, September 9, 2017

The Gregory Mouthpiece Saga Part VII

When we last left the Saga Part VIwe were discussing whether Malcolm Gregory was ever involved in Gale Products, Inc. (GPI) and the rumor that Cesar Tschudin's Gale (CTG) was in possession of the "M.C. Gregory" molds and subsequently sold them to Charles Bay in 1969.  

We have direct evidence that shows the improbability of Gregory being involved in Gale (any Gale).  Why wasn't Gregory listed as a officer or director in the Articles of Incorporation for Gale Products, Inc.?  Why was he never added as an officer, director, or shareholder of the company?  We now know that some assets of Gale Products, Inc. were sold to a local jeweler, Cesar Tschudin, within one year of GPI being incorporated and subsequently failing.  Why wasn't Tschudin brought on board as a Director?  Or sold shares?  Or sold the corporation?  Why pay an attorney to incorporate a Gale Products, Inc. and then liquidate its assets and allow the corporation to dissolve within a year?  Why sell any assets if Malcolm Gregory was actually running the operation, i.e., if Gale was simply a continuation of his existing business?  

And look at what was sold to Mr. Tschudin.  Thousands of unfinished mouthpiece blanks.  Why didn't Gregory just help out his son-in-law if Gregory had his own mouthpiece business or was in any way involved in Gale?  Gregory is alleged to be a successful producer of mouthpieces (he rented a very nice house and, according to Gale Satzinger, was a neighbor of the actress and Hollywood sex symbol Jane Russell).  He could have simply taken all of those unfinished pieces "in house" as he was already employed in mouthpiece production for Rico Products.  And if Gregory owned GPI, why the apparent infusion by Rico of $17,600 in capital shown in the Articles of Incorporation?  And the kicker for me, if Malcolm Gregory had been directly involved with either Gale Products and/or Cesar Tschudin, why would Mr. Tschudin need to recruit an experienced partner like Elmer Beechler in 1949?   (Well, we actually saw why in Part VI, but I'm going to ignore that for the present.)

In light of the documentary evidence, continuing to claim that Gregory was involved in Gale doesn't make sense without a very elaborate (some might say fanciful) explanation.  It appears that Cesar Tschudin may have provided some of the required story.  And it could be that Charles Bay "filled in some of the gaps" where Mr. Tschudin didn't know the history.  In order for Malcolm Gregory to be connected to Gale Products, the M.C. Gregory Saga needed to go something like this.


Malcolm Gregory, a great studio woodwind musician, makes mouthpieces, some of which are distributed by Rico.  Gregory decides to change his business name to Gale Products, Inc., gets glaucoma, commits suicide in 1950, leaves his business to his devoted daughter Gale, she immediately dies in a house fire, and the family attorney (Mr. Tschudin) runs the "M.C. Gregory" business for 20 years.  In the end, JJ Babbitt makes the blanks and so ends up with the real "M.C. Gregory" molds.  Charles Bay buys what is left of Gregory's old company.  


There's your story.  We would need to ignore a lot of factual evidence that we have uncovered in order for this story to still seem plausible, but you can see that this tortured narrative is really the only way to make a tenuous connection between Gregory and either Gale Products, Inc or Cesar Tschudin's subsequent mouthpiece business.  

Most of the Rico advertising that we found only stated that Mr. Gregory was part of a design team on the Rico mouthpieces with little information on him as a fabricator.  Even the text of the M.C. Gregory Saga only states that Gregory designed a mouthpiece with the help of musicians.  It was the claim in the Saga that Gregory committed suicide in 1950 because of glaucoma that implied that Gregory was involved in the fine finish work. But from the incorrect glaucoma claim, people have since concocted an "M.C. Gregory factory" where M.C. personally performed the fine finish work on "his" mouthpieces. In effect, Malcolm Gregory only became a fabled mouthpiece fabricator after September of 1992, when people continued to embellish the M.C. Gregory Saga as it appeared in that month's Saxophone Journal.  We only found a few instances where Malcolm Gregory stated that he was involved in the manufacture of woodwind mouthpieces, sometimes on his "own account" and sometimes as an employee of Rico.

I don't think that Mr. Tschudin came up with the whole M.C. Gregory Saga by himself. He was aided by the passage of time, the interpretation of Charles Bay, the retelling by Ralph Morgan, and possibly the narrative provided to him by a "company attorney." After all, there actually was a company attorney involved.  Remember Nathan Snyder, the attorney who signed the Articles of Incorporation as a member of the Gale Products, Inc. Board of Directors?  He would likely have also been involved in the sale of any Gale Products, Inc. assets to Tschudin.  He wouldn't have to reveal the identity of his clients (the Rico principals Roy Maier and Frank de Michele) and they, important though they were, simply never appeared in the M.C. Gregory Saga.  Maybe Mr. Snyder even knew that Malcolm Gregory's daughter (Maxine) had died in a house fire the year before (it was national news for reasons unrelated to the mouthpiece business).  And somewhere along the line Malcolm Gregory's suicide got moved backwards from 1955 to 1950 in order to make the story plausible.  And Carl Satzinger became just some engineer and not Mr. Gregory's daughter's ex-husband and a founding principal in Gale Products, Inc.  And Mr. Gregory suffered from glaucoma.  Things had to get really, really jumbled up in order to claim that Gregory was ever involved with Cesar Tschudin or with Tchudin's decision to resurrect the Gale brand name for his own mouthpieces.

Speaking of jumbled up, let's go back and look at another alleged Gregory/Gale mouthpiece.  On several websites, the Rico "Reloplex" is alleged to be a Gregory/Gale mouthpiece with no explanation or factual support.  As we have seen, both the "M.C. Gregory" and the "Reloplex" brands were Rico mouthpieces.  

Fortunately, there is no mysterious Mr. Reloplex, a fine studio musician, about which we can make up a saga.  The Reloplex is just a Rico mouthpiece.

There isn't any evidence to indicate that the Rico Reloplex was made by either Malcolm Gregory, or GPI, or CTG.  The only "evidence" that we could find is that these two Rico mouthpiece advertisements appear on the same page.  The Reloplex is reported to have been available from 1950 into the 1970's, at which point Rico introduced a new line of mouthpieces.  The above advertisement is mid-1955, so Gale Products, Inc. had been out of business for six years and Mr. Gregory was dead.  For the Reloplex to have been made by CTG, that would mean that Rico Products went to Cesar Tschudin, the ski instructory/car washer/jewelry salesman who had purchased some of the assets of their defunct business venture, Gale Products, Inc., and contracted with him to produce their new flagship injection molded Reloplex mouthpiece.  I had my doubts, given Judy Beechler Roan's statement that "Tschudin was a jeweler and knew nothing about mouthpieces."  

Then, in a subsequent email with Judy, she mentioned that her father had once contracted to produce mouthpieces for Rico.  That contract was for the fabrication of the injection molded Rico Reloplex.  

It is time to take another look at Elmer Beechler.  Like Maier and de Michele, he was a musician from Chicago and showed up in various directories listed as a "dance hall musician."*  Married and with a small child, his wife died suddenly and he moved to New York.  In New York, he remarried (Sadie Roan, mother of Judy Beechler Roan).  From Judy's email:

"My Dad was playing with Joe Venuti and my Mom said he had been on the road long enough. Arnold Brilhart was a friend of his and offered him a job in the business he was starting.  My Dad, along with a gentleman named Dave Brucato made all of the original Brilhart mouthpieces.  My Dad worked with Arnold until we moved to California. We came to California around 1947."

We learned in Part VI that Elmer partnered with Mr. Tschudin for a very short time but left to continue his own mouthpiece business.  A few years later, when Rico Products was looking for somebody to produce a new model of mouthpiece for them, they approached Elmer Beechler.  Elmer had experience with the fabrication of both hard rubber and plastic/resin mouthpieces, something that Mr. Tschudin appears to have lacked.  In fact, during the start-up phase of Remlé Musical Products, Inc., Beechler had taken on contracts for the production of injection molded items in addition to mouthpieces (some for the aviation industry).


By 1953, Elmer Beechler's mouthpiece business was up and running.  He had earlier incorporated as Remlé Musical Products, Inc. (notice the acute "e" pronounced like the French word for father "pére".  (Sounding French is still good business).  No similar advertisements have been found for Gale Products, Inc.  I have never found even a mention of Cesar Tschudin's subsequently named Gale business.

Correspondence with Judy Beechler Roan is ongoing, and she is coming up with some more rather remarkable documents and evidence.  Some of it has to do with the Gregory molds.  The 1949 Tschudin inventory, shown at the end of Part V, lists a die (presumably a mold) and nothing is listed that has anything to do with Rico Gregory mouthpieces.  We have seen that it was also unlikely that Malcolm Gregory had anything to do with Gale Products, Inc. and its collapse, so it isn't likely that GPI had any "Gregory" molds to sell to Mr. Tschudin.  

But the Gregory Mouthpiece Saga implies that Mr. Bay ended up with the mold(s) that were in Tschudin's possession.  What exactly did Tschudin have?  Based on the documents and time line, it is unlikely that he had the Rico "M.C. Gregory" molds.  If the Gregory molds were the property of Rico, as it appears, it is unlikely that Rico would approach a jewelry salesman with no knowledge of mouthpiece fabrication, who purchased part of their failed business (Gale Products, Inc.), and whose first mouthpiece business venture (Remlé-Tschudin) also failed, and contract with him to make additional Gregory mouthpieces, including the new "Master by Gregory" (during Gregory's lifetime) or, still later, the new Rico Reloplex (also during Gregory's lifetime).   

And if Mr. Tschudin had sold any M.C. Gregory molds to Mr. Bay, that would mean that Bay could reproduce the mouthpieces used by Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan, Art Pepper, and others.  That was sort of hinted at in the Saga, but then there was this odd statement.  "In 1969 the making of mouthpieces was done in part by the J.J. Babbitt Co."  Does that mean that J.J. Babbitt ended up with the Gregory molds?  

There must currently be 10 different knockoffs of the vintage Otto Link Slant Signature hard rubber mouthpiece, so the demand is out there for famous vintage "tribute" pieces.  If you were in the business of making mouthpieces (like Mr. Bay) and you were a big fan of Gregory mouthpieces (like Bay) would you use the Gregory molds?  What would you do if you had the mold necessary to begin production of the very mouthpiece used by Paul Desmond?  Just think if you had any Gregory mold.  If only, if only, if only.  Yeah, it doesn't look like that part of the Gregory Mouthpiece Saga is accurate, either.  
Sure enough, when the molds in the estate of Charles Bay were liquidated, there were no Gregory molds.

What would those old M.C. Gregory molds look like if we were to find them?  They would look like these.  Hey, look!! Right in the middle is the alto 18 chamber plug we could use to make the exact chamber for a new Paul Desmond tribute mouthpiece!






Those are recent pictures of the mold pieces used for making the various Rico "M.C. Gregory" chambers.  They are stored in old cardboard tubes that are stamped with the "M.C. Gregory Los Angeles" diamond logo (a Rico Products trademark).  That's what we would expect Mr. Bay to have purchased if Mr. Tschudin had run Malcolm Gregory's mouthpiece business for 20 years.  But these didn't come from Bay.  They came from boxes that Elmer Beechler had in storage.  After our contact with Judy Beechler Roan, she decided to go back through some boxes that her father had in storage. 

We now know that Mr. Beechler was retained by Rico to produce the Reloplex.  It appears that Rico may have had other molds in their possession, some of which ended up with Elmer Beechler.  Hmmm, we should look more closely at old Beechler hard rubber mouthpieces!  It is more likely that those old Beechler pieces are M.C. Gregory clones than it is that Gale ever produced any Gregory pieces.  Wait, I'm just kidding!  You can see how easy it is to start new saxophone lore. 

After Charles Bay passed in 2016, the molds in his possession showed up on Ebay.  As expected, they were the molds used for the Gale Companion and other pieces not associated with Rico's M.C. Gregory line of mouthpieces.  And further, many of the finished and unfinished mouthpieces were blanks produced by Babbitt and Riffault.  So Mr. Bay's statement that "In 1969 the making of mouthpieces was done in part by the J.J. Babbitt Co." might more accurately be interpreted as Cesar Tschudin had been purchasing blanks from Babbitt for years, maybe decades, as did Mr. Bay after purchasing Mr. Tschudin's "Gale" business




I'm going to end Part VII here.  I think that I said at the start that there would be three more parts, and now I have already written four.  And I'm going to write a fifth, maybe a sixth.  Along the way, I've included some of my best guesses as to what happened just because it is difficult to not make conclusions when presented with new facts (or maybe the only facts).  In Part VIII, I'll give my theory of what probably happened and how one might further find out what actually happened.  




* Although the original Saga states that M.C. Gregory was a "fine studio musician," he is really the only "player" in the Saga for which there is no evidence of this.  Roy Maier is listed all over the place as a sax player.  Frank de Michele was listed in various places as an orchestra leader, had copyrighted music scores to his name, and was given credit as the clarinetist Walt Disney's classic Pinocchio.  Even the early Rico partner Lloyd Broadus is listed as a musician (from the age of 14).  Malcolm Gregory's known musical experience is several months in the army and (after working in an L.A. shoe store) three years working as a "department manager" in an L.A. music store.  We could find no musical credits to his name.

3 comments:

  1. Enjoying the investigative saga! Looking forward to part VIII.

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  2. I have a Simpson Hollywood tenor sax mouth piece. Was it made by Gregory ? Any idea of value ?

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  3. There is no evidence that the Simpson Hollywood mouthpiece was made by Malcolm Gregory. It, like the Gregory line of mouthpieces, was a Rico Products, Inc. mouthpiece and, because of the garbled history about Malcolm Gregory, the Simpson mouthpiece is sometimes claimed to be a Gregory brand mouthpiece. Rico produced several "endorsed" mouthpieces over the years. One had Roy Maier's name, one had Mickey Gillette's name, one had Jimmy Simpson's name, and there were probably others. They all found their admirers, probably because Roy Maier was knowledgeable about mouthpieces and reeds. By the time the Jimmy Simpson piece came out, he had been in the business at least a decade and he knew where to obtain quality pieces. For me, the value is in how it plays and whether the facing is one that I would like. For others, it's a collector item. So the value is somewhere between $40 and $200, depending on the purchaser.

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