Re: Mirafone fantasy
Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2026 5:44 pm
That was a whirlwind non stop trip so I could be wrong about what stop that was - we were constantly either playing or moving. We did stay somewhere in the LA area in the middle of that tour, but I’m at loss to remember where about in the LA area we stayed.Rick Denney wrote: Thu Mar 19, 2026 10:10 am I tried to identify anyone at Mirafone USA that would have been located in Whittier during the Sun Valley years, but could not. Mirafone USA was founded by Howard Lockie, who was the owner of Lockie's Music in Los Angeles. He had partnered at some point with Roy J. Maier, who was a saxophonist and reed-maker who had taken over or merged (or something) with Rico Reeds. During WWII, he even started growing his own cane in California because French supplies were interrupted. Eventually, he had a building in the Sun Valley neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley, and the vestiges of the old sign on the building still makes "Maier Corporation" possible to pick out. That became the location for Mirafone USA, which was the first and main importer of Miraphone tubas from about 1960 until what was left of the company relocated to San Antonio in the 80's. Who would have had 40 brand new Miraphones in their living room? Dunno. But it's clear from the receipt from Bill Rose above that various professional musicians around the country were given resale rights to Miraphone tubas as (probably) a side hustle. I'm thinking of Winston Morris as perhaps chief among them, in addition to Roger Bobo and Tommy Johnson. Maybe one of those scored a big purchase from a university program or local school district or something.
So, that led me down a fun rabbit hole, but it didn't go quite deep enough.
Rick "so much for today's lunch break" Denney
One goofy thing I remember was the last overnight stop on that trip where the family I and another bandmate stayed with lived up in the mountains, but their house was on the bottom of a cul de sac of a small sub division. The steep street ended at their driveway in the cul de sac. The bedroom we slept in was above the garage. Garbage trucks had apparently on 2 different times lost their brakes coming down the steep street and crashed into the garage/house which had been rebuilt twice.
But the wackiest thing of that house stay is my buddy and I woke in the morning to nobody home - and no note. The deal was that people who hosted kids were responsible to make sure we got back to the local HS in the morning on time to get on the buses to go to the airport. We had like an hour and half to get there after waking up and discovering we were alone in the house and we had no idea of where we were exactly and this of course was before the age of cell phones to contact anybody from our band. We were sweating hard at the prospect of missing the busses & flight home so we started knocking on neighbor’s doors and a lovely elderly woman agreed to drive us to the HS. She drove us the 5 miles or so in a huge ancient 1953 Chrysler 300 sedan that had been her late husband’s car. Slowest ride in a very large car downhill ever!
