Angola to Zydeco: Louisiana Lives

Inside Santy’s Studio

34 Inside Santy’s Studio At ninety-four, Santy Runyon can still swing an ax. february 6, 2002 H e can tell you the story behind every ax resting at his feet or he could go into detail about all the cats he’s played with, but Santy Runyon would much rather just blow. At ninety-four years old, he’s at the age where whenever “I go into a restaurant and order three-minute eggs, they make me pay up front.” But it doesn’t show. He wears a red baseball cap with a fishing hook attached to the bill. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his bright eyes follow the notes on the sheet music in front of him, and his fingers run up and down the keys of his alto saxophone. He blows into one of the mouthpieces manufactured by Runyon Products, a company he created more than sixty years ago with only an idea and a piece of chewing gum. Runyon’s small studio sits in the back yard of his modest home in a quiet neighborhood in Lafayette. A plaque on the studio door reads “Santy’s Studio.” The room is full of woodwind instruments, mouthpieces, music, and stories. The pegboard walls are covered with framed and signed photos from the likes of Jimmy Dorsey, Betty Grable, Harry Carney, Alvin Batiste, and Edgar Winter. In between playing his seven alto saxophones, two tenor saxophones, a baritone saxophone, four soprano saxophones, 35 • Inside Santy’s Studio a clarinet, three flutes, and an alto flute, Runyon recently reflected on his life—a life that’s always been filled with music. “You see,” he says, “I’ve got a story connected with everything .” line #> Before he was Santy, he was born Clinton Runyon in Chanute, Kansas, in 1907. He was raised in the small town of Barnsdall, Oklahoma,—Osage Indian country—where he learned to ride ponies bareback and about music. When he was six, he took up the violin. His sister, June, was only two years older, and she altered the direction of his musical studies when she shut a car door on his pinky finger. It was a Saturday night in Barnsdall and “the only doctor they could find was stoned, and he sewed it on crooked.” His father was an engineer in the oil fields, but he dreamed of owning his own movie theater. The elder Runyon even traveled to nearby schools with his gasoline-powered projection gear on a horse-drawn wagon. He would present the silent films on a white sheet for students in the school’s auditorium, until the day the generator caught fire and consumed itself. One time he tried to show the movies in a tent and a cyclone rolled through town and took his gear with it. On his seventh attempt, he established a movie house in Barnsdall. At the age of eight Runyon began his musical career. In the pit of his father’s darkened movie theater. His father instructed the fiddler of the small orchestra to teach his son to play the drums “or I’ll get myself a new damn fiddle player in here.” Runyon was a trap drummer, providing the beat for the other musicians and the sound effects for the silent pictures. During scenes of rain, he rattled a large piece of tin to mimic thunder . He also imitated birds whistling, trains chugging, cows bellowing, and guns firing whenever William S. Hart or Hoot Gibson fired their weapons on the screen. Runyon was a bright child and managed to skip two grades Inside Santy’s Studio • 36 in elementary school, much to his older sister’s dismay. At the age of ten, he picked up the saxophone and taught himself to play. When he was eleven, he read about the Bernoulli Effect and how it applied to aviation. Bernoulli, a sixteenth-century Swiss scientist, observed that when air flowed horizontally, an increase in the speed of the flow resulted in a decrease in the static pressure. In other words, when air moves faster it exerts less pressure than slower moving air. The Bernoulli Effect would later be used in designing the airfoil of airplanes. The shape of an airplane wing is designed so that air flowing over the wing travels faster than the air flowing under the wing, which means there is less pressure on the top than on the bottom of the...