The Birth Of Loud by Ian Port

Author:Ian Port [Port, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501141768
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

28.

“PRONE TO LOOSE TALK”

FULLERTON, 1962–1963

In 1963, none of Fender’s handful of salesmen earned less than $35,000, the equivalent of more than $270,000 today. One had earned $100,000 for more than three years straight, nearly all of it on commission. The company hadn’t hired a new salesman since 1957, and in that time sales had grown by about 600 percent. If the sales reps were doing a good job, Don Randall was happy to let them keep their territory. Mike Cole, who handled the East Coast, owned a sportfishing yacht that he kept down in Florida.

Nine rectangular buildings stretched across the Fender factory’s three-and-a-half-acre plot, but all of that space—some seventy thousand square feet inside—still wasn’t enough. With no room indoors, finished amplifiers in their cardboard shipping crates were stacked outside the factory buildings in the dry Fullerton sunlight to wait for a truck to take them away. The perpetual struggle between the Fender factory and sales office was approaching a crisis, as the plant struggled to keep up with orders. By the following year, the company backlog was pegged at fourteen to sixteen weeks for many products, estimated at $1.5 million. Randall had to tell the salesmen not to take orders for more amps and guitars than they thought the factory could produce.

Leo rented other buildings around Fullerton to get more space, but things just kept growing. Fender started an acoustic division, with instruments designed by a German luthier named Roger Rossmeisl, who’d built hollow-body electric guitars for Rickenbacker. That needed a plant. For some years, Leo had been intrigued by the experiments of a fellow tinkerer named Harold Rhodes, who was trying to build an electric piano. The technology was enormously complex, and most everyone but Leo and Harold thought it would go nowhere, but Leo invested anyway. That project needed space.

George Fullerton would now wake up in the middle of the night, terrified he’d forgotten to lock one of the factory doors. There was a chain-link fence around the parking lot these days for security, but that didn’t help him sleep. He’d replay Leo’s admonition in his mind. “Are you sure everything’s locked? You’re really sure?” It took an hour every morning and every night to unlock and lock up, with two men doing it: George Fullerton and Forrest White, who had other projects aplenty, and hated each other besides.

And there was still more to the operation: A distribution center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A service center in Flushing, New York. Randall’s sales office was planning its own expansion, a larger Santa Ana home for Randall’s forty-seven employees and the goods they shipped. The Fullerton factory’s 270 workers were now churning out a thousand amplifiers and a thousand electric guitars every week—as much as the company had sold over an entire year in the 1950s.

No matter how much more they made, though, it was never enough. Leo Fender’s company had become a behemoth, its daily operation an almost unimaginable contrast to the rickety operation he’d started in downtown Fullerton. He’d become a rich man, a homeowner, with a new yacht every two years.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.