Jan. 22, 1972: The Kazoo Co.

 

In which we pay a visit to a Western New York treasure in its natural state, back before it became a tourist attraction: 

Jan. 22, 1972 

Millions Play Tunes

On Eden Kazoos –

Without Lessons 

The sign inside the front door says no retail sales and no tours. Kazoo Co. Inc. doesn’t mind visitors, but they tend to tie up valuable production time.

“We used to have people come in and spend two hours picking out a couple dollars worth of kazoos,” says Samuel Whetzle, the owner. He wears a gray workman’s suit and a matching cap. He prefers to talk standing up.

* * *

“NOW,” HE SAYS, “we have a coffee shop down at the four corners that acts as our retail outlet. If somebody wants a kazoo, we send them down there.”

Anyone driving by on Route 62 south of Buffalo might not notice the small turn-of-the-century factory, anonymous as it is in tarpaper shingles in the middle of the Eden Valley farmlands.

Anonymous also on the nearly 2½ million kazoos it turned out last year (up 250,000 from the previous year). All they say is “Made in U.S.A.”

“We never really saw the need to put our name on them,” Whetzle says. “We’re the only out-and-out kazoo company in the world. If you say kazoo, they all know where to get them.”

There’s a kazoo cornet with moveable keys (just ornamental), a kazoo slide trombone, a clarinet kazoo, a bugle kazoo with a colored tassel, a French horn kazoo, the hi-fi kazoo with its periscope amplifying horn and, of course, the original red and blue submarine kazoo.

“Many people consider it a toy,” says Whetzle’s wife, Lenore, who helps out in the company’s cluttered office, “but actually it’s a basic musical instrument.”

That’s the joy of kazoos. Anybody who can hum a tune can play one. Just hum into the large end or mouthpiece and you make a glad, irreverent-sounding raunch halfway between a trumpet and a Bronx cheer.

And generally it makes you feel so good you want to do it some more. A little practice and you can trill a kazoo with your voice (as Mr. Whetzle can) or mute it with your hand like a horn.

A good kazoo will resonate through the whole vocal range. That’s where the metal ones are better than the plastic ones, Whetzle will tell you.

Grade schoolers play them in kazoo bands. So do Golden-Agers. Pitchmen sell them at fairs and department stores. Restaurants and oil companies give them away to attract customers.

* * *

THE KAZOO gained status during the folk music boom. “They’re the only ones who consider it a serious instrument, the guitar players,” Whetzle remarks.

And kazoos from Eden have popped up on network TV, on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera and in Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” which dedicated the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Kazoo-making is a metal-stamping operation. Kazoo halves are punched from blue, red and gold color-lithographed sheets of tin-plated steel, the same stuff they use for cans. They’re shaped with the mammoth Industrial Revolution clanking of big black metal presses.

* * *

ANOTHER MACHINE stamps out the tiny, round replaceable membrane which vibrates across the opening in the top of the kazoo. The material, extracted from sheep’s stomachs, also is used to cap perfume bottles since it keeps the scent intact and resists water and solvents.

Unfortunately, the membrane, which costs more than $400 for an 8-by-11-inch box, doesn’t resist sharp objects. That’s why the kazoo has only a small hole on top, to protect it. But that also cuts down on the sound.

“There’s the continual problem of keeping costs down,” Whetzle says. “One way is by increasing production, but you don’t do it with a whip. You do it by improving methods.

* * *

“PRODUCTION doesn’t particularly make me happy. Making something or fixing something – I get satisfaction out of that. I like to do mechanical work. Solving problems is my business.”

That’s what keeps kazoo prices around 29 or 39 cents. Since World War II, Whetzle has simplified every stage of kazoo-making, devising new stamping dies as he went along.

The machines, the dies and the steel may be different, but the shape of the kazoo is the same as the one worked out in 1917 by Eden machine shop owner Harry Richardson and a traveling salesman from Buffalo named Emil Sorg.

Sorg had come across this musical toy – a tapered wooden tube with three holes on top covered with paper. It was called a kazoo and he wanted someone to make metal ones to sell.

They went to Michael McIntyre, a Buffalo tool and die maker, and they experimented with shapes until they found the right resonance. McIntyre made the dies, moved to Eden and stayed on.

He became a partner and then owner. Whetzle first worked in the plant temporarily in 1921, married McIntyre’s daughter in 1929 and took over the company in 1939. At one time, the company held a patent on the kazoo.

* * *

FOR YEARS company policy was delivery within 10 days. Booming business in the late ‘60s, however, has left Whetzle’s 30 employees, almost all of them women (“There’s so many small operations, women work out better than men”), working on orders made four to six weeks ago.

Orders come from musical and novelty wholesalers and distribution, oddly, is weakest in Western New York. An Orchard Park store owner was surprised to learn his kazoos were made in Eden. He’d bought them from a supplier in San Francisco.

The plant might catch up by having double shifts, like it did when it employed about 60. But Whetzle, now 67, says double shifts leave him too tired.

“A guy in New York City told me: ‘You’re not a businessman, you’re a mechanic. You could’ve been a millionaire.’

“And I said to him: ‘I know, but this is the way I like to do business.’ I’ve had a happy life and I think this is part of it.”

* * *

THESE DAYS Whetzle is ready to retire. Since neither his son nor two daughters want to take it over, he’s looking for a buyer. Someone who won’t want him to stay around and run it. Somebody who knows the basics about machines.

“If someone wants to take over, I’ll teach them in two, three months,” he says, lighting another cigarette while the women put tops on kazoos outside his office, testing one occasionally to check the membrane.

As for the Whetzles, they’ll head West.

“I’ve been promising my wife for 43 years that we’d take a leisurely trip to the West Coast,” Whetzle says. “I want to get out into those wide open spaces before I join my ancestors.” 

For the first time, no box/sidebar. 

THE PHOTOS: Top, Leonard Bernstein playing kazoo last September at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Bottom left, Samuel Whetzle at this desk. Bottom right, Robin Gregory twists tops on kazoos. 

FOOTNOTE: Before 1972 was over, Sam Whetzle had sold the operation, pulled up stakes and gone off into the sunset. His obituary in 1992 said that since he retired, he had lived in Mission, Texas, which is on the Mexican border about three hours south of Laredo.

The kazoo company was acquired by a group of Buffalo investors, according to the Kazoo Boutique website. They in turn sold it in 1985 to a local family business run by Robert Berghash and his son David.

In 2003, the website continues, the Berghashes turned over the Kazoo Gift Shop and Museum to the Claddagh Foundation and donated the factory to Suburban Adult Services. Claddagh donated the museum two years later and sold the gift shop to two longtime Eden residents.

Now known as the Original Kazoo Company, it’s still stamping out its signature product. It’s part of Suburban Adult Services’ employment program for people with disabilities.

The company’s website declares: “Today kazoos continue to be manufactured in the original factory where the company began. Original die presses and a leather belt driven power transmission system make The Original Kazoo Company factory a working museum. Through partnership with the Kazoo Boutique Gift Shop, visitors are given tours and the opportunity to witness early American manufacturing in action.”