August 19th, 2024

Good mornings folks,

     I’ve been buying and selling string instruments for most of my adult life. I took a hiatus in 1985 to 86 while I taught at The American School of the Hague in the Netherlands. When we returned, I decided to pick up the business again. Julie and I were a new couple and she decided to leave her job as a legal secretary and take up the business with me. That fall our inventory fit on the back of a postcard, but we were determined to be back in business and work from home with a mail order business. We received a phone call from a good friend who knew about a collection of instruments. The people wanted to sell it but they didn’t want to consign anything. They had been only offered consignments from all the other major dealers. They wanted to sell it out right. The collection belonged to a lawyer whose claim to fame was that he was the counsel for Sugar Ray Robinson! He had a collection of 25 tenors, 25 five strings, and 25 mandolins and they were all very, very high-quality. The price was as much as I had paid for my first house! We took a second mortgage out on our house in Penfield, drove down to Long Island and purchased the entire collection. Within a short time, we were back on the map as vintage instrument dealers and by the early 1990s I had left my teaching career in the rear view mirror to devote full-time to the business. As the years went by, we had the opportunity to buy many major collections and traveled far and wide for them. Some were all high end instruments, some were just banjos, but most were eclectic accumulations of stringed things.

   And so it was this past week that Julie drove a giant cargo van 1000 miles across New York State through Massachusetts and back home. Our goal was to assess and hopefully purchase a collection that was just north of Boston. The owner was a longtime customer of ours who  passed away in April of this year. His wife desperately needed to downsize as stringed instruments were only one of his collecting habit…there were toys and fishing gear and paintings and antique of all sorts. Over and above the business side of looking at a collection, there is an emotional side. This is sometimes harder than the laborious work of packing and shuffling instruments in and out of second story windows. This entails talking, thinking and sometimes crying. So it was with lots of empathy, that we purchased this entire collection. There were cases packed with all sorts of stringed things, and we agreed to clean out the entire amount regardless of condition. As we were packing up his wife turned to me and started to sob…. I hugged her tightly and promised her everything would be OK. The difficulty with purchasing collections is they are reflections of a person’s personality. They contains all the foibles and nuances, all the successes and all of the aspirations and of course, all of the unfinished projects. Are we measured by what we do in life, or what we leave behind? I think that this is an important question and one that I will spend a good deal of time pondering upon as I approach the age of 77.

With peace,

John Bernunzio

Ryan Yarmel helped me organize things and smartly pulled out the caution tape!

Home….

We can never pass through Massachusetts without stopping and seeing our granddaughter Skyler and her mom, Beth. She is entering her junior year in high school, plays volleyball, is over 6 feet tall! She told me that she has aspirations to become a surgeon…specifically a neurosurgeon. Of course I told her that’s very exciting news because by the time she’s, finished with school. I’ll be ready for a brain transplant!