A Story about Olds

Submitted by an anonymous Olds aficionado in 2023 about visiting the Olds factory and living next door to Reg Olds

My Father started playing the trumpet in 1929 and I started in 1959. Our neighbor for almost a decade was Reg Olds and his wife. So, my dad and I were like two addicts with a dealer next door! Reggie got me my first horn, an Olds Studio trumpet, and he arranged for my father and I a VIP visit to the factory to pick it up. The Factory manager showed us around and we got to talk to a couple of the craftsmen, who each worked at their own benches making horns. That is the way it was done. There was no assembly line, nothing…the horns were bench made, like jewelers making a watch or tailors sewing a suit. And the manager told us how much of an improvement it was over the 30s and 40s when each craftsman made his own horn, and they were all a bit different depending on the availability of raw materials to make parts while “these days we have a steady supply of raw materials to make our horns.”  And Reg always said Olds were misunderstood, old time, old school, European craftsmen making the best horns in the world all by hand. “And we had a hell of a time finding people who had the skills, or youngsters who were willing to be apprentices. It took so long to train them and so long to make these beautiful horns.” Someone mentioned on FB today how all the Olds horns were so different. Yes, because they were made by individual craftsmen, they were “bespoke” hand engraved custom horns made like Calicchio made his horns.

Reg had a SR that he said was the first one made and he was proud of it. He said it was made before the war in late 1940 as a prototype. We used to marvel at it. I am pretty sure there were no SRs made before then. But I don’t know for sure. Reg was pretty much a golfer in his retirement, and so were my dad and I so we used to see him at the Hacienda CC from time to time. And he collected old Cadillacs, there were always tons of them in his driveway and garage. My grandfather loved Caddys too and used to drive by and show Reg his cars. Reg organized for me to take my whole class at school on a factory visit. All the kids were so impressed, it was a great day. I would have loved to pick Reg’s brain about horns, but he was a bit of a recluse after a while and we did not see him much, only his wife and then he passed away. He had been sick for a long while.

When I visited the Olds factory on two occasions in the early 1960s, I saw a barely semi-industrial production that was still firmly rooted in artisanal origins. And from the stories I heard, the instruments made in the 30s and 40s were completely artisanal, hand crafted, one off, bench made by highly skilled craftsmen in a process that had more in common with the 19th than 20th centuries. And that is what these vintage Olds horns, that we happy few are lucky to possess, look and play like. So, in my view, we must separate ourselves from the image of current mass production processes and imagine a nearly Edwardian one to understand how many horns were actually made in those years. And with respect to other makers from that time, Olds was always behind the times in terms of process and that turned out to be a good thing…until they were acquired a couple times, and everything changed as they tried to mass produce like the competition.