Pulling Strings: The Legacy of Melville A. Clark

9. The Collections

113 9 The Collections H U M A N B E I N G S collect things. The small boy begins by filling his pockets and the little girl her secret treasure box. Some people outgrow the habit. Others, who fancy an item really worthwhile, continue to pick up better and better pieces until they have accumulated a considerable “collection.” Melville Clark had three famous collections : antique music boxes, antique harps, and rare musical instruments . His early gramophone or phonograph collection became part of Syracuse University’s Audio Archive (now the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive). Stamp Collection Clark began to be an enthusiastic stamp collector when he was about five. He was too young to read but was fascinated with the occasional envelopes that came from abroad, addressed to his father. He would pull the impressive-looking envelopes out of the wastebasket to look at the colorful stamps. In his lifetime he amassed some thirty-five thousand stamps from almost every country in the world. He organized the collection and put some in cellophane envelopes, while mounting many hundreds of the rare items in proper stamp albums.1 Because of his close association with the harp, Clark made a special effort to secure stamps from countries that used the harp image on their stamps. There exist today nineteen perfectly preserved harpimprinted stamps on a page that was most likely separated from its album when the collection was sold. Five are from Eire (Ireland), four from New South Wales (Australia), three from Estonia, three from 114 | Pulling Strings Italy, one from Russia, and three from Montserrat (one of the Leeward Islands in the British West Indies). He collected the harp-imprinted stamps over a period of twenty-five years.2 The bulk of the stamp collection was sold to a dealer during Clark’s lifetime; it was not famous, but it did bring a substantial price to the collector. Early Phonograph Collection Melville A. Clark’s collection of twenty-eight early and historic phonographs and gramophones was viewed by most of the Clark Music Company store’s clients on a regular basis. They were displayed on the fifth floor in the antique room. There were Edisons, Victors, Reginaphones , Columbias, and Berliners along with seventeen thousand records. His friend Walter L. Welch also collected early machines and records.3 Their combined historic collections, the Clark-Welch Collection , became part of Syracuse University’s Audio Archive. Welch, the original curator of the archive from 1963 to 1991, was a nationally recognized authority on the history of recorded sound. Some of the early machines are still on view at the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive, which has grown to be the fourth-largest such archive in the United States, according to a current staff member.4 Clark wrote an article for the Christian Science Monitor, dated December 14, 1946, in which he delineated the history of the recording industry from 1877 to the present. He called it “Captured Sound,” explaining the huge contribution that recorded speech and music could make to our present and future world of music and to our cultural resources. Music Box Collection When Henry Ford was assembling antiques for his famous Edison Institute in Dearborn, Michigan, he hired Melville Clark as a “picker.” Ford would tell Clark about an item he wanted for his collection, and Clark would set off looking for it. He picked up antiques and appointed eleven pickers to assist him. Clark said, “Maybe it would be a straight-line engine, maybe a salt-box house. Syracuse, N.Y., was famous for salt houses.5 So, when I was no longer needed to pick up The Collections | 115 things for Mr. Ford, I developed an ardent hobby, with the same 11 pickers, of collecting music boxes.” He was particularly interested in the American music box rather than the Swiss music box. The notable difference is that the American one is a disc player, using flat fifteeninch discs; the Swiss one uses a cylinder.6 Clark assembled one of the best collections of American music boxes in the world. He owned sixty-eight of them and restored each one to prime condition. His collection was displayed at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts in December 1947. In three weeks twenty thousand people viewed the exhibit and listened to the music boxes.7 This type of music box, popular around the 1890s, was decorated with marquetry...