[Trombone-l] Finally!

[Michael Shoshani]

On Wed, 2008-10-08 at 01:08 -0500, Fred Hudson wrote:

> I beg to differ Michael - My 1949 2-B of which I am the original owner is 
> marked the same way as Earl's except that it just says Liberty, the word 
> "Model" and it is definitely a dual bore. It is my understanding that the 
> 2-B designation, which Earl's horn has, was meant to designate dual bore. 
> This was obviously not extrapolated to the 3-B, 4-B etc.*grin*

Well....here's the story on that. (There's always a story, isn't there?)

King differentiated between the straight Liberty and dual Liberty 2-B
both in bell markings (of which I completely missed the 2B in Earl's
reconstruction of his engraving) and in slide construction. However, the
original Liberty, which was introduced three years before the 2-B model
but was sold simultaneously for a few years, was discontinued when H. N.
White stopped producing musical instruments for civilian consumption
during the war.

H. N. White died in 1940; his widow Edna, who by all accounts ran a
tighter ship than he, streamlined the King lines after the war. Your
1949 horn has a different engraving stencil; Earl's will have the word
"LIBERTY" in serif type in an arc beneath a King trademark that has the
top of the letters straight and the bottom slanted upward, while your
"Liberty" is probably cursive. But that stencil should have a 2-B
designation in a ribbon above the King trademark which is now swollen in
the middle compared to the ends. 

And you're right; by the time the 3-B was introduced in...1956?, they
just began a new numerical branding sequence. Oddly, King also used
model names for these horns as well, so along with the 2B Liberty you
had the 3B Concert, and later the 4B Sonorous. 

Michael Shoshani
Chicago