By Charlotte Pack
The century-old Meteor Phonograph, an early wind-up record music player, returned to Ohio on June 21.
On a muggy June day, Katherine Schrenk Olson and her partner, John Duffin, drove from Lannon, Wisconsin, to the Music Makers Museum in Hillsboro to donate a treasured heirloom.
Four generations of the Schrenk family have owned Meteor Gramophones, and the machine was originally purchased new by Olson’s great-grandparents, George John and Katherine Lang Schrenk.
In the early 1900s, patents for the Columbia and Edison Phonograph Companies began to expire, paving the way for furniture manufacturers and other businesses to enter the booming market for phonograph manufacturing.
The Meteor Music Machine Company of Piqua was a side business of the Meteor Motor Car Company. Accounts of the company’s phonograph manufacturing began appearing in Talking Machine World in 1917. According to Talking Machine Forum, the company is estimated to have lasted about 10 years.
This was the heyday of hand-cranked gramophone production before the advent of radio, and the Depression relegated gramophones to corners, attics, and basements. Fortunately, the Schrenck family stored the Meteor Gramophone in its original packaging box when it wasn’t being used, so the mahogany gramophone remains in good condition. The box was also donated to the Music Makers Museum.
“My four great-aunts, Helen, Olive, Elizabeth and Hildegard, who lived in Iowa City, used to play this gramophone when they were young and kept it after their parents passed away. I always loved visiting my father, Joseph J. Schrenk, and my great-aunts, so I purchased it at my Aunt Hildegard Schrenk’s Estate Auction in 1987. Every time I think about it, I feel nostalgic and it reminds me of the wonderful people my father and his family were,” Olson said.
Due to retirement and downsizing, Olson discussed the family treasure with his family. They all agreed the gramophone should be on display in a museum. Olson began searching the Internet for a place that could restore and preserve the gramophone. “I’m so happy I found the home I was looking for in the Music Makers Museum,” Olson said.
Olson said he hopes future generations will “think about how people have always wanted to listen to music and that they created instruments like the phonograph to make that possible. I also hope they will think about how technology has changed the way we listen to music, from the past to the present.”
“Olson said it well. It is the goal of the Music Makers Museum to provide education, restoration and preservation of early music recording and performance techniques, and to allow voices from the past to inspire the future. And we think it will be very exciting to see the Ohio phonograph return to the Buckeye State where it was originally made,” said Charlotte Pack, curator of the Music Makers Museum.
“We had a group of seniors come in recently, aged between 60 and 80, and only a handful remembered having a gramophone in their family,” Pack says. “We’ve moved on from this early music-playing technology so much that people will only see it through the internet and movies, or it will be forgotten. At the Music Makers Museum, gramophone man Rodney Pack has been passionately restoring gramophones so people can see and hear them for themselves.”
For more information about the Music Makers Museum’s mission or to schedule a tour of the museum, please visit https://www.musicmakersmuseum.com/
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