Alvin J. Dettinger - New York

    Ebay user ortizwilli listed a unique guitar dated to the 1920s that piqued my interest because of it's unusual body shape, size, and a clear label attributing it's construction. All of these images came from the Ebay listing and while I did not bid on the instrument, I thought it was interesting enough to discuss.

    The instrument has a very narrow, squash-shaped body and fragments of a unique headstock shape with traditional friction pegs.

Peering at the sound hole, we see a fingerboard extension that is styled like the old European guitars of the 1800s and what appears to be bar frets. The soundhole, itself,  is an unusual 'bean' shape with a rosette of a single species of wood inlaid. We can see a paper label with very fine penmanship and two names.

The bridge is also unique but appears to be incomplete as the shading on the top would suggest that this bridge originally had some curly ends. This would make sense from a traditional, 1800s European guitar which had bridges that looked like fancy mustaches. A single ebony bridge pin with pearl dot is all that remains.

A close-up of the label reveals a date of 1923 with a note "To my Friend, Haydon Jones, from A.J. Dettinger".

From here, I began searching Ancestry for matches on the east coast (where the seller is located) and found an Alvin J. Dettinger in New York.

Alvin J. Dettinger

Alvin Dettinger was born on January 26th, 1871 to John G and Barbara Dettinger in St. Johnsville, New York. In 1892, he married Lillian Kretser and they had two children. The earliest reference I can find to his instrument-making was the 1900 census where he was employed as a 'piano action maker' which refers to the mechanism that swings a hammer at the string corresponding to the key that was depressed. This would've been woodworking and mechanical engineering on a small scale as the weight of the keys need to be calibrated consistently and smoothly for the player. By the 1910 census, he was a foreman at a piano manufacturer. Jumping to the 1920 census, he was working as a carpenter for Remington Typewriter Company which may have included pattern making as their typewriters appear to be mostly made of cast iron. And in the 1930 census, he was listed as a pattern maker for a cash register manufacturer. Pattern making is a highly skilled trade as the craftsman is building models to form molds for casting objects out of metal. It requires an understanding of how metal shrinks to adjust the dimensions of the model and also to prevent cracking in the final casting. 

Haydon Jones

Haydon Jones is harder to track down, I did find Mr Robert Earl Haydon Jones who was born in 1871 in Ohio, lived in Manhattan during the 1900 census, lived in Massachusetts during the 1920 census, and lived in Queens during the 1930 census. He was an artist and more specifically a cartoonist for a newspaper. There were seven million people in New York City in 1930 so I cannot definitively say that these men knew each other but it's the only lead I have.

Most noticeably, this guitar has a cylindrical, arched back.

The neck heel is rather beefy but the intersection between the heel and the neck body itself is carved to look like an intersection of two pieces of wood meeting at a right angle. That is how the old guitars of the 1800s were constructed. But we can see from a witness line just below it that this neck has a grafted heel and the mitre carve is only aesthetic.

This is a very unique instrument with a story behind it that has been lost to time.