Note from Matt: Shortly after I posted the JJ Babbitt stuff, I got an email from Paul Coats (formerly of SaxRax, also Runyon, SOTW columnist, and generally a saxophone guy going way back) where he laid out an enormous volume of interesting information from his days at Runyon mouthpieces. Steve Goodson had linked him to my video, and Paul then graciously shared what is obviously only a small portion of his saxophone knowledge with me, and even more graciously has allowed me to reprint it here.
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“Hi, Matt! I’ve watched a number of your videos and enjoyed them, admire your work.
I’m Paul Coats, a friend of Steve’s. I used to be a “clinician/consultant” with Runyon Products for many years,
traveling to trade shows and assisting Mr. Runyon. What a great person to hang with! A very inventive mind!
Anyway, Runyon had two facing machines they called the “new machine” and the “old machine”.
The “new machine, which they had since, I think, sometime in the ’70’s, and of course you can’t go to a hardware
store and buy a mouthpiece facing machine. It worked on the same principle as the Babbit machine. The piece
Babbit calls the “cam”, Runyon called the “template”. And it was a very fast machine, Zzzzzzzzzt! Done! One
pass. Though the facing was cut under a stream of water by making the cut fast the body of the mouthpiece
didn’t have time to heat up and warp upon cooling. The facing was cut before it knew what hit it… hah! You
could identify mouthpieces made on this machine from the parallel machine marks running from butt to tip,
just like the Babbit machine.
The “old machine” was the original machine Santy designed and had built back in the late 1930’s. He had
quit the Chicago Theatre by then and had already opened the famous Runyon Studio, strategically located
halfway between the Chicago Theatre and the famous Oriental Theatre. It was a convenient stop for the
musicians traveling back and forth between the theatres. There Santy and staff trained some of the greats in
the professional music world, Lee Konitz, Art Pepper, Sonny Stitt, Charlie Parker, players in the Ellington, Basie,
Cab Calloway, and other big bands. Later he supplied the 5 saxes for the Lawrence Welk Orchestra, and those
same five guys worked for Welk the entire run of the TV show, over 30 years.
And of course, musicians need repairs, so he hired a flute guy, Kurt Gemeinhart, who had just left Selmer over
a difference in how flutes should be designed.
He began making mouthpieces, but that is another story.
His first machine he drew up, made cardboard templates of how he wanted it to work, and got one of his students
who was a machinist at a button factory to make the machine in exchange for a piano the guy needed for his
daughter. Santy was quite the horse trader.
Now this original machine was unique, real genius. People in the industry that toured Runyon all said it was the
best facing machine in the world. Let me describe it.
It was based on a milling machine. There was a fixture that held the mouthpiece that was molded to fit the top
and beak of the mouthpiece to hold it steady. There was a rod that would insert into the bore, and a lever
mechanism to clamp the mouthpiece into the cavity of the fixture. Of course, those cavities could be changed
for various mouthpieces. This held the mouthpiece absolutely steady while cutting. That mechanism traveled
slowly, about 90 seconds, under the rotary cutting head, which turned on a vertical axis, cutting the table of the
mouthpiece. As it cut, from butt to tip, there was a point where it would hit a stop and the mechanism would
pivot causing the facing curve to be cut, and it would cut the arc of a circle. The distance from the cutter to
the pivot was adjustable, as was the point at which it would begin to pivot. Thus you could adjust the facing
length as well as the tip opening. This left too much material at the tip rail, but that was filed off by hand, then
the baffle just behind the too wide tip rail would be finished by hand. For each mouthpiece and facing run a
few blanks would be run through (and discarded later) to fine tune the adjustment. Again, the table and facing
curve was cut under a stream of fluid. It was felt this was the more accurate and consistent of the two machines
so the metal mouthpieces and the pro plastic models were done on this “old machine”.
This “old machine” would also be used to make the templates for the “new machine”. Mouthpieces faced on
the “old machine” could be identified by machine marks running side to side in a slight arc.
Material… metals were bell metal bronze that were chrome plated. Actually “triple plated” like a car bumper.
First a flash of copper, then a flash of nickel, and finally chrome. The first two acted like a primer to get the
chrome to stick.
Plastic… Runyon chose an “alloy” of materials that was suggested to him by the plastics manufacturer that had
the same “flex modulus” as premium hard rubber, therefore it vibrated like hard rubber. I know that most of
it was acrylic (like Plexiglas) with a synthetic rubber added (also clear like the acrylic beads) to make it crack
resistant. And that material was tough! On more than one occasion I saw Santy throw a mouthpiece on the
concrete floor, it would bounce around and be undamaged.
With only the acrylic and synth rubber, and I don’t know what rubber… the labels were peeled off the big
cardboard barrels that stuff came in, the blend was top secret. Leblanc wanted to use that blend to make
their student clarinets (which are ABS, like many mouthpieces sold as “hard rubber” which they aren’t) but
they could not promise to keep the blend secret. Anyway, that alone would be clear like glass, and regardless
of how clean you keep everything there would be tiny specs you could see in the plastic. They are sure it came
in with the materials. And that was unsightly. So they added tints. Black, and ivory (not white) later red, blue,
and amber. Tint material was not powder but more plastic beads with the tint in the beads. No, tinting did
not affect strength nor sound in any way. If you scooped up a big double handful of the mix from the hopper
on the molding machine there were probably fewer than 10 colored tint beads.
You’ll find this funny, I’m sure. I think it’s hilarious. To mix the blend of plastics and tint the manufacturer of the injection molding equipment wanted to sell Santy a $20,000 blender. That was $20,000 back in the 1950’s. Who knows what that would be now. Santy went down to Western Auto and bought a little cement mixer, like the ones you would use to do a patio, for $150. I asked Santy how many of those little mixers he went through over the years. He said none, it’s the original mixer. Every so often they put in bearings, a belt (same as an auto fan belt), and get the motors rewound. He had three motors, one in the mixer, one on the shelf (with the spare belts and bearings), and one off being rewound at a motor shop. He just rotated through the motors as needed. But it was still the original mixer.
Originally, back in the late ’30’s, and into the ’40’s, Runyons were made in black and ivory. The mouthpiece
Charlie Parker played, and often seen with in his publicity photos, was an ivory Runyon 22, NOT a Brilhart.
Parker may have played a Brilhart on occasion, but mostly the 22, which he carried in his coat pocket.
Anyway, Santy was one of the three designers of the Conn Constellation saxophone, an instrument with very
advanced ergonomic keywork. He was also contracted to design and manufacture the mouthpieces… the
famous Conn Comet. He was making those in black and ivory, too, but Conn came to him with the idea to
mold them in transparent amber to match the gold lacquer on the instruments. The amber would catch the
stage lighting and look like gold at a distance. So Runyon made the Comet in black, ivory, and amber, and
also began making Runyon mouthpieces in the amber. The transparent tint also kept the specks from
showing.
The salesman for the plastics company, I think Santy said Dupont, brought samples of other colors by, and
everyone at the factory liked the transparent red. Thus the birth of the famous “Red Runyon” mouthpiece,
and that was the model his student Art Pepper played. He recorded Somewhere Over the Rainbow with
the Red Runyon. People began to call the mouthpiece the “Red Pepper”, but it was sold as “The Art Pepper
Model”. While Art was alive he was free to use the Art Pepper name for the mouthpiece, but after his death
Art’s widow wanted an unaffordable royalty for the name, so they dropped the name.
Back to the red… In the mid to late ’80’s they dropped the red color. They had long stopped making ivory
because they could not get that color in the needed tint and Santy wanted ivory, not white. And they dropped
the red. I was instrumental, in the early ’90’s, for getting him to began making the red again. I explained to
Santy that the red color was as much part of the Runyon identity as the logo itself, that people loved the red.
So, fast forward a few years… I had brought my younger son Brian, a budding saxophone player, to Santy’s
home studio for his first sax lesson with Santy. There were racks of mouthpieces on shelves all around the
studio. Brian asked, “May I see that blue mouthpiece?” Blue was Brian’s favorite color. So Santy reached
up and got the wrong one. “No, the blue one,” Brian said. “This one? This one?” Finally handed Brian
the blue one. I joked, “Santy, I know you are having eye problems in your old age, but don’t tell me you’re
colorblind, too.” Santy said, “As a matter of fact, I am.”
SHOZBOT!!! I thought I had insulted my old friend. When I got home I called Lilly at the factory, told her
about that. How can I ever apologize enough? She laughed, “You didn’t know? He use to try to pick
orders when we were eating lunch. He’d get all the wrong colors and we would have to put it all back and do it
all over again. We don’t let him pick orders anymore.” So he wasn’t really angry at me. I talked with
him about it next time I visited. To him, the red, the blue, both looked black. He was not the typical male
red-green colorblind. He was fully colorblind. He saw the world in black and white, I suppose. The only
color he could identify were the amber, and only if he held it up to the window and and could see some
light through it. But the transparent red and blue both looked the same as black to him. That’s why he
could not understand why people liked the red mouthpieces so much.
Anyway, Santy died in 2003, and the factory closed 10 years later. I literally bought a bunch of the remaining
stock, or rather cherry picked the best and most useful facings, and swept out the place. The family locked
the doors and sold it all.
Paul Coats”