Introduction

When writing these articles, I've had many occasions to pore over Anne and Richard Evers' useful little book about Hicksville .  The lead-in image to the Song in Our Heart section (shown below), which the authors note is an "old-time advertisement" for Hohner harmonicas, led me to believe that The Hohner Company, Inc. (as the book calls it) had been part of old-time Hicksville, and that it had manufactured harmonicas there.  Yet, as I repeatedly researched the village's "old-time" years, I never once stumbled across any local mention of Hohner or its harmonicas.  This month, I finally decided to look into things.

Foolish me; I was misled.  I assumed that the 1930-ish advertisement below coincided with the era in which Hohner was in Hicksville .  It did not.  It turns out that in the 1930s, Hohner's American operation was where it had been since the nineteenth century - in New York City .

Beginning in 1924, the American branch of Hohner used portraits of William Haussler, Jr., young son of a company Vice-President, in its advertising.  As he grew older, new portraits replaced the old ones.  A review of those portraits suggests that this image of the growing Haussler Jr. was painted around the year 1930.  Perhaps the authors came across it because it was recycled in 1975 for the cover of a well-known harmonica dealer's price guide.  Hohner actually did not relocate its U.S. headquarters from the City to Hicksville until 1958, when the Haussler lad was more than twice the age he appears above.

Incidentally, with the exception of two special harmonica models produced around 1980, M. Hohner, Inc. - the actual name of Hohner's American company - never manufactured harmonicas in its facilities on Hicksville 's Andrews Road , although it did repair them there.

Background: Harmonicas and Hohner

An ancient predecessor of the harmonica was first created in China , about 4,500 years ago.  It was not until 1800s, however, that an instrument with an array of reeds, able to produce discrete tuned notes and chords, assumed the convenient sandwich form of the harmonica.

The growth of watchmaker Hohner's new business was astounding.  For example, in 1862, only five years after he made his first "production" harmonica, his company had a distribution branch in the U.S. - and it was giving harmonicas to parents of Civil War soldiers, so that they could send the pocket-sized instruments to their sons in uniform.  Harmonicas had never been heard in North America before the 1860s, and now they would be heard everywhere that soldiers traveled.  In Hicksville and other places, new immigrants from Europe doubtless brought more harmonicas to rural America .  For the next thirty years and more, America 's appetite for harmonicas was insatiable: Referenceforbusiness.com reports that in 1900 alone, Hohner sold almost three million harmonicas to Americans.

Global demand was similarly high; by the late 1930s, the company employed five thousand workers.

U.S. Operations

The Hohner family long retained both ownership and management of the business, control passing from father to son(s).  For its international subsidiaries, control usually was delegated to brothers, sons, or nephews.  As with a nation, when a corporation is ruled by a "royal family," the capabilities and imagination of the people in charge may fluctuate significantly.

The U.S. distributor, M. Hohner, Inc., originally was headquartered in Manhattan .  It did not manufacture instruments, but it imported and warehoused them, supplied them to dealers, advertised them (via print ads, and also by sponsoring public events and harmonica competitions), and it maintained connections with community organizations that might link the business to customers, especially scouting.  For a while, it also sponsored a weekly network radio broadcast of a harmonica band.

Harmonicas were affordable and portable.  Hohner's advertising told young men that harmonica playing would enhance their love life.  Adolescents and boys were told that being able to play would make them the life of any party - nothing was said, however, about what to do when you turned up at a party and found that another boy (or perhaps even everyone at the party) had brought along a harmonica.

As Nazi Germany prepared for World War II, it redirected some of Hohner's production line to manufacture detonators for ordnance - but curiously, the company was permitted to continue the make harmonicas, albeit at a reduced rate.  Obviously, the war interrupted the flow of Hohner's instruments into most countries.

After the war, with Germany divided, the Trossingen plant benefited from being in West Germany .  It had relatively few difficulties increasing production, but the recent war made overseas sales awkward in nations that had fought against the Axis.  American news media were reluctant to carry advertisements for West German products; they thought that American consumers needed time to buy into the idea that West Germans now were allies of the U.S. in the Cold War.  Although Hohner resumed selling harmonicas to professional American musicians, it waited until late 1964 before it felt the country was ready for a new consumer advertising campaign.

The lack of post-war advertising makes it difficult to confirm just when M. Hohner, Inc. left New York City for Hicksville ; I have seen the year given in different sources as 1958 and as 1960.  Why did it relocate?  Hohner's business profile at Encyclopedia.com indicates that the move was made simply because "cost of doing business [there] was much lower."  An unspoken secondary factor may have been that the ranking Mr. Hohner of early 1950s lived in Oyster Bay . 

The Hicksville Era Begins, and So Does the Ride Downhill

During its years in Hicksville , the parent Hohner company would undergo great changes.  The retail market for musical instruments - the backbone of Hohner's profits - changed drastically during this era.

From the perspective of Hohner's retail market, the 1950s were the harmonica's heyday.  Many of the most popular blues and jazz performers used harmonicas.  Their pop counterparts were regularly booked into chic urban nightclubs, and frequently appeared on television variety shows.  They sold stereo LP albums, and their singles could be heard on Top 40 AM radio.  The theme from the movie Ruby Gentry* - orchestral, but with prominent solo harmonica work - had three different versions on the charts at once in the U.S. , and simultaneously was a hit in Europe, Australia , and Canada .  Clearly, the world loved the plaintive sound of a well-played harmonica.

*Readers may recall Ray Charles's later vocal recording of the theme, called simply "Ruby," which was released as a single in November 1960.

By the end of the 1980s, pop's dominance had been replaced by that of rock.  Whatever music young people listened to, whether Blondie, the Knack, ABBA, or the Village People, it did not inspire them to learn to play harmonicas or accordions.  They were buying electric guitars, amps, drums, and keyboards.  Hohner's feeble but costly efforts to diversify into the low-end portions of the latter markets had left it with colossal debt.  It's performance in the U.S. led M. Hohner, Inc. to take an unprecedented step - it passed its corporate baton to an executive who had no connection to the Hohner family.

Let's look at what happened during the years when the Hicksville arm of Hohner tried to ride the ups and downs of America's changing music scene.

As the 1960s began, Hohner concentrated on rebuilding its traditional rapport with America, not advertising to the public at large, but engaging with it in other ways.  This item appeared in the Penn-Yan, NY Chronicle Express on May 4, 1961 (at a time when much of America was listening to "Travelin' Man" and "Mother-in-law"):

The Accordion Symphony of the Kenneth Miller Music Studios... will be presented as part of the fifth annual concert and Variety Show of the Miller Studios.  Playing a new selection, "Bagatelle," the music for which was imported from Germany through M. Hohner, Inc., the symphony will make full use of the unique electric bass accordion and special arranging.
 
Thanks largely to the publicity people on Andrews Road, Hohner was much in the public eye by 1964.  At the New York World's Fair, it exhibited in the German Pavilion, where visitors received tiny souvenir four-hole harmonicas in special boxes.

Newsday, meanwhile, reported that the rise of folk music was increasing the popularity of Hohner's harmonicas.

"Little Stevie" Wonder sang and played his harmonica up the charts.  His popularity first earned him a part in Muscle Beach Party, and then one in Bikini Beach.   The latter's New York premiere was held at Manhattan's RKO Palace, where Hohner gave harmonicas to the first five hundred attendees.

Around the same time, a baseball story put harmonicas into the nation's sports headlines.

No, that is not a typo.  After appearing to be on their way to the 1964 World Series, the Yankees fell into a late-season slump, and manager Yogi Berra was fretting.  On the team bus from Comiskey Park after yet another loss to the White Sox, all was deadly quiet.  Phil Linz, a reserve infielder, took out a harmonica and began to play.  Berra yelled at him to stop; Linz didn't stop.  Berra confronted Linz, who disgustedly flung the harmonica at Berra - who angrily swatted it away, and into the eye of his first baseman.  For a few days, sportswriters and fans talked of nothing else; news of the fine that the club afterwards levied on Linz only stoked the flames.  A few days later, the Yankees and Mets played their annual charity game at Shea Stadium.

Many fans brought along harmonicas, a couple of which were tossed in the general direction of Berra, but everybody laughed.  Some time later, M. Hohner, Inc. announced that it had signed Linz to contract to publicize Hohner harmonicas, noting that harmonica sales had climbed sharply because of the incident.

Searching for a Viable Strategy

In October, advertising firm Smith & Dorian announced that it had agreed to work with M. Hohner, Inc. on Hohner's first advertising campaign to target the American consumer in forty years (i.e., since Hitler had first come to power).  The New York Times of October 20^th reported that the company was again reaching out to children as the primary American market for its harmonicas, and specifically to scouting.  The words quoted in the following excerpt are from Smith & Dorian executive Mort Wimpie:

The ads... put the accent on youth, and will appear in youth-directed publications, such as Jack and Jill, Junior Scholastic, and Boys' Life.  The basic intention is to re-establish the instrument as part of the cultural pattern of the country....  This will be in terms of the interest of youth in folk, country and Western music - and even rock 'n' roll to some degree.

Note that the truly remarkable object of the campaign was to stem the tide of cultural change - to "re-establish" a disappearing cultural pattern - through the pages of Jack and Jill, Junior Scholastic, and Boys' Life.  One wonders if the word "unrealistic" occurred to anyone at the time.  Regardless, readers of Boys' Life soon saw this full page ad, which told people to write to Hohner's Hicksville address if they wanted to learn more:

Another advertisement of this series featured Brian Jones.

Things were changing swiftly at Hohner.  Less than two years later, a different advertising agency was launching another campaign, targeting not children and teens but their parents, who read Life magazine and the Sunday New York Times Magazine. It featured not only harmonicas, but Hohner's newly expanded product line.  The venerable company, which over the course of one hundred and fifty years had amassed incomparable expertise with harmonicas and accordions, now was putting its logo on drums, keyboards (both electric and mouth-blown), and guitars (both acoustic and electric), about which as a corporation it knew comparatively little.

One imagines the difficulties which the changes inflicted on the entire business.  Hicksville, like the rest of Hohner, now had to deal with marketing, shipments, inventory, sales, and repairs of completely different products.  Teething pains were inevitable.  It was reported that when Hohner introduced a new Beatles guitar model, which bore pictures and names of the Fab Four, two of the four names were accidentally switched, and thus appeared on the guitar matched with the wrong Beatle's pictures!

The diversification of the business meant that many people were inexperienced in their jobs - either the jobs themselves were new, or the people in them had been transferred from elsewhere in Hohner, or the people were new hires.  Some of the traditional harmonica expertise got dispersed around the company, weakening expertise for the company's core product.

And Some "Harmonica People" Soldiered On

End of the (Andrews) Road

By the early 1980s, all of Hohner was in crisis.  It had not made inroads into the new mainstream guitar / drum / keyboard / amp market, and there was no way that selling cheap harmonicas to Cub Scouts would ever pay off its debt.  Every day Hohner sank further into the red.

M. Hohner, Inc. was put into the hands of an American executive, who tried to plug whatever leaks he could.  By 1983, he had moved the U.S. operation to Richmond, Virginia, where labor costs were cheaper, as were the costs associated with importing shipments from Europe.  He ultimately left and was replaced, not that it mattered very much - the cash flow of the parent corporation mattered far more.

By the 1990s, all of Hohner was acquired by a private investor, who in turn sold it to a conglomerate.  It had the resources to pay off all of Hohner's debts.  It then transferred production of the inexpensive harmonicas models, especially those meant for children, to Taiwan, which permitted the German operation to downsize, and focus on high-quality instruments for professionals.  The new, smaller Hohner concentrated on making harmonicas and accordions, as the old Hohner had, and it became profitable.  Although the Hicksville part of the story is all but forgotten, Hohner survives.

My Own and Final Word

This is my last Ancient Hixtory article for Hixnews - I need a break.

Over the last forty-eight months, I've written about 125,000 words of prose from scratch, and I've tracked down thousands of images (although I've used only about five hundred of them).  In total, I've spent about fifty work-weeks doing research, and more than that editing digital pictures and writing.  By leaving behind that level of activity, I hope to have more time for my family, for the demands my century-old house, and maybe even to travel some more.

I have my regrets about leaving, including not having written about several topics I wanted to cover.  They are, however, subjects which could not adequately be researched online, and the pandemic kept me from crossing the border from Canada to visit archives in the New York area.  Oh well.

I want to thank those of you who have given me feedback on these articles.  I especially want to thank both Buffalo Bob Casale (editor) and Roger Whitaker (webmaster) at Hixnews.com.  Their hard work and patience have made my monthly involvement a pleasure.  I wish them continued good fortune, and I hope that new (and younger) energy is offered to them, to keep Hixnews going strong in the future.

Ciao,
Ron Wencer