Thanks Roger, and Ted. This is interesting reading. I still can't believe that if a record was
actually sold at retail and made it "out into the wild" that it just disappeared without a trace, no
copies exist anywhere and none ever existed to be dubbed to another medium. So I'm wondering if
these lost Willie Brown sides were never put into the retail distribution system, and died in that
Chair Factory #2 pile?

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message -----
From: "Roger Kulp" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2011 6:18 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] How many 78s to the Matrix


>From the article on the Mainspring Press site:
The metal
masters, thousands of records, record sleeves, and recording ledgers
laid dormant in Chair Factory # 2 for almost a decade, until the summer
of 1942. The United States had declared war on Japan after the Pearl
Harbor attack in December 1941. Now, with shellac, metal, copper, and
paper drives being organized by the war department, WCC president Otto
Moeser realized there was some money to be made.Brian Wilburn, June 2002:
“When
 we were kids, Chair Factory # 2 was closed and all they used it for
was storage. Of course we found our way into it. Kids were going in and
out all the time, we weren’t supposed to be, but we were. Empty
buildings are a magnet for kids. There was no security at all. In those
days Port Washington had a police force of three cops. Nobody knew the
meaning of the word security in those days. We were in that plant all
the time and I probably destroyed two to three thousand records. We made
 frisbees out of them, we sailed them off the roof. And when we got a
little older we used a shotgun. You could get away with it, using a
shotgun in city limits. The building was right next to the railroad
tracks. There was nothing around it so it was not dangerous.” [Close to
the Chair Factory # 2 there was a small garage-like building next to the
 railroad tracks that was used to store records, and these were shipped
from this building after orders came in. In the 1960s collector Dennis
Klopp saw a wood eagle-on-a-globe on top of this building which
resembled the Paramount logo. It was one foot high and orange in color.
Klopp took it off the building and still owns it.]“They
 had all the masters, the castings, the bronze and brass, stuff to
produce records, stored in Plant # 2 on the west side. It was all in one
 great big room. After the war started they started scrap metal drives,
find bronze and brass, that kind of stuff, for the war. They suddenly
realized they had a load of that stuff they didn’t need. So it all got
loaded in a couple of freight cars [and was] shipped off. I am sure it
got sold to some scrap dealer. That was the end of that. This was during
 the summer of 1942.
http://www.mainspringpress.com/nyrl.html






--- On Sun, 1/23/11, Ted Kendall <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: Ted Kendall <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] How many 78s to the Matrix
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Sunday, January 23, 2011, 3:54 PM

In the specific case of Paramount, the reasons are not too far to seek. The company was a small
scale operation, selling to very local, poor audiences, hence small sales, especially after the
crash. The change to electrical recording had already devastated Paramount's finances to the extent
that its hitherto fine pressing materials were abandoned in favour of something that looks and plays
like a cinder track. The repertoire was Gebrauchsmusik, and ephemeral Gebrauchsmusik at that, played
with brads or thrice-turned needles (economic pressure again), so the survival rate is depressingly
low from the original market. When the company collapsed, its repertoire did not pass to one of the
majors, and most of the remaining stock got Frisbeed over a marshalling yard one boring summer.
Collectors have dug, combed and cajoled for nigh on fifty years to find some of this stuff, with an
intensity which frightens me. Although one should never say "never", I wonder
 whether some of the rarer Paramounts will ever surface. The Charlie Patten canon is still
incomplete, too, I believe...


----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Fine" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2011 4:35 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] How many 78s to the Matrix


> Sorry if this post has been received in other forms, I hadn't received it yet so I assumed it was
> killed off by the ARSC server for some reason.
>
> I have a question along these lines.
>
> There was a recent article in Goldmine magazine about Willie Brown blues 78's on Paramount that no
> copies exist anymore:
> http://www.goldminemag.com/features/willie-brown-where-are-you
>
> How is this possible? How many copies of these records were pressed? Were they only sold in a
> small
> region? And no one saved any of them, not in attics or old general stores or old jukeboxes? If so
> few were pressed, how was that commercially viable? It seems to me like once you make a stamper
> you
> just as soon press more copies than you expect to sell and then hope you get lucky. The business
> model I always understood for records is that extra copies are cheap, what's expensive is the
> recording, mastering, plating, etc.
>
> -- Tom Fine
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2011 10:02 AM
> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] How many 78s to the Matrix
>
>
>> Excellent question. Why not photo-admittance? Well, they don't call it that, but they do use it,
>> too...
>> Wiki has a page on CD glass mastering and explains that there are two kinds of photoresist
>> (positive or negative) that can be washed away, after laser developing, but there is also
>> NPR (non-photoresist) glass mastering, which uses an organic polymer dye as the laser-beam target
>> layer. This dye layer is deeper than a pit, much the same as the lacquer layer, on a blank
>> destined for vertical or stereo cutting, is deeper than the most deep, intentional embossing
>> (gouge?). The pitch on a CompuDisk or Zuma is set to avoid hitting the bedrock of the supporting
>> layer, whereas I believe that the photoresist layer, in the former-mentioned CD glass mastering
>> method, is washed away clean down to the substrate - unlike a well-cut lacquer. Fortunately, the
>> CD player is only trying to make a variable strobe light display, rather than musical wiggles...
>> at that point in the chain.
>>
>>
>> Andrew
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jan 23, 2011, at 7:49 AM, George Brock-Nannestad wrote:
>>
>>> From: Patent Tactics, George Brock-Nannestad
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- are they not etched into the glass afterwards? What is the photoresist
>>> resistant against?
>>>
>>> George
>>>
>>>
>>>> Regarding CDs, the pits are in a thin photoresist layer that is spun onto
>>>> the glass substrate.
>>>>
>>>> Jerry
>>>> Media Sciences, Inc.
>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
>>>>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of George Brock- Nannestad
>>>>> Sent: Saturday, January 22, 2011 6:09 PM
>>>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>>>> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] How many 78s to the Matrix
>>>>>
>>>>> From: Patent Tactics, George Brock-Nannestad
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>>
>>>>> Stewart Goodeman wrote [quote]:
>>>>>
>>>>> I know in 1943, when they recorded the Rodgers and Hart
>>>>>> revival of "A Connecticut Yankee" they actually used glass.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> ----- just to avert any confusion: glass means that the disc that
>>>>> supported
>>>>> the layer that the cut was made in was made of glass. The layer could
>>>> have
>>>>> been lacquer, or it could have been wax, both were used. It has been
>>>>> thought
>>>>> that glass was a cheap substitute for aluminum that was the most used
>>>>> material for lacquer mastering discs, due to other uses for aluminum
>>>>> during
>>>>> the war. But in fact, the quality of the cut in glass-based discs was
>>>>> better
>>>>> than for aluminum, because the surface of glass was much smoother.
>>>>>
>>>>> This is very different from the use of glass in the manufacture of CDs;
>>>>> here
>>>>> the pits are really represented in the glass as a stage of manufacture.
>>>>>
>>>>> Kind regards,
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> George
>>