THE MISSIONARY TIMES No. 4 Tuesday, 22 June 2010
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Dear visitor,

Almost a year has gone by since the launch of this website…
We are still enjoying ourselves and hope the same applies to you!

We thank all people who visited our website, and especially those who made valuable contributions in the form of comments or unique material.

We still have a lot for you in store, and as long as new information and material keeps coming in, we keep updating www.recordingpioneers.com.
The website is growing and growing and will never be complete.
A very reassuring thought…

What’s new?

We have created a new item on the HOME page, called “DOCUMENTS”
The aim of this new category is to enable visitors to quicker access a number of interesting documents, which, by the way, can also be found on the pages of the relevant pioneers.
In many cases these are documents which were published long ago but were never reproduced since.
It will also include documents which were never published before.
“DOCUMENTS” contains the following new items:

(1) Accounts of the recording exploits of Thomas John Theobald Noble for Pathé in Europe and Asia. Noble later worked as a journalist for the Daily Sketch and the Sunday Graphic. Thank you Bill Dean-Myatt (England) and Philip Yampolsky (USA)!

(2) Unsere Reise um die Erde: Heinrich Bumb’s account of the 1905-1906 Beka expedition. This travelogue was first published more than a hundred years ago in the Phonographische Zeitschrift. The next update of this manuscript will contain many unique illustrations!

(3) John Want’s excellent English adaptation of Heinrich Bumb’s Unsere Reise um die Erde, as published 34 years ago in Ernie Bayly’s The Talking Machine Review.

We have re-styled our newsletter, The Missionary Times.
Definitely a change for the better. Thanks, Lourens!

The item SUPPORT has been “renamed”, or rather, replaced by a new icon ().
The aim of this item is to ask visitors if they can help us out with specific problems we cannot solve.
In the future these problems, questions or requests will be more explicitly formulated.

Another new icon is the green camera () in the righthand top corner of a pioneer’s page.
This icon was introduced to indicate that there are illustrations (original photographs or documents) to be seen.
In most cases these can be found at the bottom of the pioneer’s page.

We continue the practice of “greening” pioneers, to indicate which pioneers have undergone major changes (see our newsletter of Sunday, 13 December 2009).
Here are the names of the pioneers who were updated or added to the already existing files:

AVERY, Elmer
BARRELL, Walter Sydney
BECKETT, Robert Edward
BECKWITH, William James
BROOKS, Arthur Henry
BULKLEY, Francis Cecil Addington (“Frank”)
CAPPS, Frank Lushbaugh
CHOWN, (Horace) Frank
COHN, Georg
COHN, Leo Bernard
COOK, G. W.
COURLANDER, Harold
CRAIES, Constantine
DAVIDSON, Harold Edward
DEAKIN, George Woolliscroft
DICKSON, William Laybourne Ewing
DILLNUTT, George Walter
DITCHAM, William
FASSETT, Frederick Palmer
FLEMING, Harold (“Harry”)
FORSE, William Thomas
FOWLER, Edward (“Chick”)
FRANCIS, Cyril John
GEORGE, James Edmund
GIDINO, Giuseppe
GLUCKSMAN, Max / Mordecai David
GOODALL, Stanley James
GOURAUD, George Edward
GUESSARIAN, Aram
GUESSARIAN, Vahram
KRUGER, Otto(?)
LENNANE, Wyndham Quin
LILLEY, Arthur Williams Leonard
MECHIAN, Setrak
MITTELL, Brenchley Ernest George
MOORHOUSE, Herbert Douglas
NARAYAN, P. L.
NEWMAN, Alexander Morris
NOBLE, Thomas John Theobald
NOTOPOULOS, James A.
NOWILL, Sidney
PACKMAN, Percival James (“Percy”)
PÖCH, Rudolf
PREUSS, Oscar Carl
REDDIE, Lovell Newton
RINK, Emil
SINCLAIR, Ernest
SKELSON, Alfred
STAVRIDI, Alexander Theophani/John
STRAUS, Max
TAYLOR, Alfred Sydney
TUNN, Sydney Edwin
TYLER, Frederick
TWINE, Arthur James
WAITE, Barry
WHITLOCK, W. W. (“Billy”)
WINTERS, Francis
WYNEKEN, Carl Christian Ludwig
YOUNG, Jonathan Lewis

We still have not got round to installing a number of sound features.
Who knows, maybe next time...

Mary Junker (USA) – great-granddaughter of pioneer Frank L. Capps – recently contacted me and kindly sent scans of old photographs of her great-grandfather and also of his daughter and pioneer Isabel Capps-Rainey.

Michael Curth (USA) sent us many scans of pictures of his grandfather Georg Cohn (later changed to “Curth”) and his great-uncle Leo B. Cohn (also changed to “Curth”).

Photographs of Otto Birkhahn have surfaced in Finland and are somewhere in the pipeline between Finland and Holland.

Also in the pipeline: the correspondence between Columbia (USA) and pioneer Charles Wesley Carson.
Who will win, Lotz or Min?

Vahram Gesar (Turkey) kindly gave me interesting material on his illustrious ancestors Aram and Vahram Guessarian.

On 1 June 2010 Henry J. “Hank” Gloetzner, son of Odeon/Columbia recording pioneeer Hans/John M. Gloetzner, died in Norwalk, Connecticut at the age of 95.
I would have loved to meet him. Life’s too short and the earth too big. One cannot cover all bases...
Henry Gloetzner’s obituary can be found in the online newspaper “The Hour” of 12 June 2010.

Just to end on a happier note: Volume 2 of The Lindström Project is out!
This book contains articles on diverse discographical topics and has numerous illustrations in black/white and colour.
(The Lindström Project. Contributions to the history of the record industry / Beiträge zur Geschichte der Schallplattenindustrie. Vol. 2 (editors: Pekka Gronow & Christiane Hofer). Gesellschaft für Historische Tonträger, Wien 2010. ISBN 978-3-9500502-1-9)

We’ll be back!

Hugo Strötbaum & webmaster