The auctioneer had dropped the price three times and the room still hadn’t moved until Dean Martin raised card number 22 and every head in that Beverly Hills salon turned at once. Wait, because what Dean had seen on that guitar before the bidding even started is the part nobody in that room understood and what came back in a letter three weeks later would prove he was the only one in the room who had been paying attention.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in October of 1958. The Hensley Auction House on Camden Drive was doing what it always did, looking expensive without trying. Light came in flat and golden through the tall windows landing on lacquered chairs, polished shoes and the long display tables where instruments sat under small white catalog cards waiting to be decided upon.
Dean Martin was not supposed to be there. He was not a collector, had never bid in a room like this and had no particular reason to be in Beverly Hills on a Tuesday looking at other people’s old guitars. He was there because Cal Resnick had called. Cal was a session musician who collected stringed instruments the way other men collected debts.
He’d said there was an auction and Dean should come along if he had nothing better to do. Dean had nothing better to do. That was the truth of it and it was a truth that sat heavier than it sounds. Two years earlier in the summer of 1956, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had walked off a stage together for the last time. 10 years of partnership, rooms that held a thousand people, every one of them made to feel the show was just for them and then it was over.
A Sunday night in Atlantic City, a final curtain, two men walking in two separate directions. The press had been clear. Jerry was the genius, the timing, the instinct, the gift. Dean was the good-looking one who held the glass and smiled. Without Jerry, the columnists were already writing his career in the past tense.
Nobody said it to his face. They didn’t need to. So, Dean said yes. Not because he wanted to look at guitars, because it was Tuesday. And there are only so many times a man can read the same racing form. They arrived at the Hensley at half past one. The room was half full. Men in their 50s and 60s, the posture of collectors, slightly forward at the shoulders, eyes moving.
A few recognized Dean. He could see it in the small pause before they looked away. He signed the card and followed Cal in. Notice something. The expensive pieces were at the front. A 1942 Martin D-28, a pre-war Gibson L-5 that two men in dark suits were already circling. A Stromberg Deluxe that Cal stopped in front of, hands in his pockets, head tilted.
Dean walked with him, listening to Cal explain things he didn’t need to know. Cal talked about guitars the way some men talked about horses. Dean felt it for music, not for instruments. They were different things, and he had always known it. He drifted toward the back of the room.
And toward something he didn’t yet have a name for. Two years of people telling him what he was worth had made him very good at knowing when they were wrong. That was not a decision. It was what happens when everyone else knows exactly what they’re looking for. You drift. The back tables held the pieces that hadn’t made the cover of the catalog, and one of them was about to matter more than anything at the front.
There were seven instruments in that section, arranged without particular care. A banjo with a cracked head, two nylon string guitars that had seen considerable use, a battered mandolin, a lap steel of uncertain origin, and at the far end of the last table, slightly behind the lap steel as if it had been set down there by accident and forgotten, a small acoustic guitar.
Dean almost walked past it. Almost. He had taken two steps past the table when something made him stop. He couldn’t have said what. Something in the proportion of the thing. The body too small, too compact, narrower than everything at the front of the room. Then he turned around, and what he saw stopped him where he stood.
The guitar was in bad shape. That was the first and most obvious fact about it. The finish had gone dull in patches, matte where it should have been glossy, with two shallow dents along the lower bout, and a crack in the binding near the strap button that someone had repaired with what appeared to be household glue.
The strings were ancient, the color of old copper wire, and a fine layer of dust had settled into the curves around the sound hole, as if the instrument had been sitting somewhere undisturbed for a very long time. The catalog card read, “Acoustic flat top guitar. Maker’s label present. Condition poor.
Origin unknown.” Mississippi, 1938. Estate, no reserve. Dean picked up the card and read it twice. Then he set it back down and leaned forward to look at the guitar more carefully. The body was small, not parlor guitar small, but the specific smallness of certain instruments from the late ’20s, built before anyone decided bigger necessarily meant better.
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He had seen a guitar like this once before, in a context so different from this Beverly Hills room, that for a moment the two places existed simultaneously in his mind. He had been nine, maybe 10. Steubenville, a Saturday with the barbershop closed. A traveling man had been sitting on the steps across the street playing guitar for himself the way people do when they think nobody is watching. Dean had watched.
He had watched long enough that the man noticed him and nodded. At some point the man stopped, lit a cigarette, and balanced it on the headstock nestled between the tuning pegs while he flexed his fingers, a small oval of amber. A small lazy curl of smoke rising in the Saturday air. And that image had never left him, though he hadn’t understood why until this moment.
Years later Dean had described that sound to a musician friend, that compressed woody intimacy. The friend had said, “You’re describing a Gibson L-1, small body, big voice. They stopped making them in ’37.” Dean looked at the headstock of the guitar on the table. And something in his chest went very quiet. He had been told often enough that he lacked instinct for things that mattered.
He was looking at something that suggested otherwise. There it was, a small oval discoloration, pale amber, just above the nut. Not a scratch, not a water stain. The signature of a cigarette rested in the same spot many times over many years. He stood very still. Two years of rooms that had already made up their minds about him.
Wait, because what happened next is something Dean did not tell many people, and the few he told he only told once. And the reason for that matters as much as the thing itself. He crouched down in front of it, right there in his good jacket, in front of nobody, and looked at it with the patience of a man who had already made a decision and was simply checking his work.
The guitar was a Gibson. He could see the label through the sound hole, faded but legible. The body shape was the one his musician friend had described, narrow, compact, built for a different era’s idea of what a guitar should be. The strings were original or close to it, which meant nobody had played this instrument in a very long time. Mississippi, 1938.
In 1938, Dean had been playing piano in roadhouses for 3 years, working whatever rooms would have him. He knew the kind of musicians who traveled with a cardboard suitcase and played Saturday nights in places with out-of-tune pianos. He knew what it meant when a traveling musician’s guitar ended up in an estate sale in Mississippi in 1938.
He had been that kind of musician himself once. It meant the musician had not taken it with him. There are not many reasons a traveling musician leaves his guitar behind. Dean could think of two. One was that the musician had found something better. The other was that the musician had run out of road.
He stood back up. Cal appeared at his elbow. “Found something?” “Maybe.” Dean said. Cal looked at the guitar with the quick, professional sweep of someone who had spent decades sorting things into categories. “Condition poor,” he said, reading the card. “No provenance. Mississippi estate.” He tilted his head.
“Could be interesting if somebody cleaned it up. What do you think it’s worth?” Cal shrugged. “In that condition, with no papers? $50 if someone feels generous, probably less.” He paused. “Why? You thinking about it?” “I’m thinking,” Dean said. “Stop here.” Dean Martin in the back of a Beverly Hills auction house, career in question, looking at a damaged, unloved guitar from Mississippi that nobody else had stopped for. He was not certain.
Only a burn mark, a catalog card, and a memory. Instinct and uncertainty, the honest human condition. But he was standing there, and everyone else in the room was not. The auction began at 2:00. Ensley himself ran it. A compact, silver-haired man who had been auctioning instruments in Los Angeles for 30 years, and who had the particular gift of making every item sound like exactly what it was worth, no more and no less.
He moved through the catalog at a pace that kept the room’s attention without exhausting it. The first 12 items went more or less as the room expected. The Martin D-28 went high. The Gibson L-5 went higher. After a protracted exchange between the two men in dark suits that the room watched with the focused enjoyment of people watching something that costs them nothing, Cal got his Stromberg at a price he would later describe as fair.
Dean sat in the fourth row and watched, and did not bid on anything. Item 20 was the guitar from the back table. Ensley read the description without inflection. Acoustic flat-top, Gibson label, condition poor, no established provenance, Mississippi estate, 1938, no reserve.
Who’ll start me at $40? Nobody moved. Ensley waited. The room was doing what rooms do when nobody wants something. Very slightly looking at other things, the way it had been doing with Dean Martin’s name in the trades for the past 2 years. A man in the third row checked his watch. A woman near the back wrote something in her program. $30.
Somebody start me at 30. Still nothing. 25 then. $25 for a piece of American music history, even if we don’t know exactly which piece. The room laughed again, loosely, the kind that forms when a room believes the matter is already settled, the way rooms had laughed at his career two years ago. There was a small laugh from somewhere in the middle of the room.
The comfortable laugh of people who are not going to bid, but appreciate a professional trying. Dean raised card number 22. The laugh stopped. Hensley caught the card immediately, and his voice went back to its professional level. 25 with the gentleman in row four. Looking for 30. $30 anyone? Nobody moved. The room had turned.
Not dramatically, not all at once, but with that specific quality of collective attention that a room develops when something unexpected happens, and nobody is quite sure how to process it. The man who checked his watch was no longer checking his watch. The woman with the program had stopped writing.
A man near the aisle leaned toward the person beside him and said something very quietly, and that person turned to look, too. Cal, two seats to Dean’s left, was looking at him with an expression that was mostly curiosity and partly something that hadn’t named itself yet. The whole room had shifted in the way rooms do when something unexpected claims the air, quietly, without fanfare, but without question.
Going once at 25. Going twice. Dean sat very still. Sold. Item 20 to bidder 22. He walked to the front table after the session ended and paid $25 in cash. The young woman wrapped the guitar in a cloth and handed it across the counter, and Dean carried it out through the tall windows in the golden October light to Cal’s car, where he laid it carefully across the back seat.
Cal started the engine and did not immediately say anything. That was one of the things Dean had always valued about Cal. He knew when a question was a question, and when it was something else. They were on Wilshire before Cal said, “You want to tell me what that was about?” “I’m not sure yet.
” Dean said, “You paid $25 for a guitar in poor condition with no provenance.” “I did. Gerald’s going to think you’ve lost your mind.” “Gerald already thinks I’ve lost my mind.” Dean said, “He’s been reading the same columns as everyone else.” Cal was quiet for a moment. Then, “So, what are you going to do with it?” Dean looked out at Wilshire Boulevard, at the late afternoon traffic, at the way the light was shifting toward the particular orange that meant the day was running out of itself.
“I’m going to find out what it is.” he said. This is where the story could have ended and in a lesser version of it, it does. Man buys guitar at auction. Guitar turns out to be worthless. Man learns a small lesson about the gap between intuition and evidence. But, that is not what happened. What happened was that Dean mailed the guitar to the Gibson Guitar Corporation with a letter asking what they could tell him about it.
Serial number on a separate slip. No explanation. Just the question in the mail. He waited 3 weeks. Look, during those 3 weeks Dean went back to work. Not with the precision of the Martin and Lewis years, the way he had in Ohio in 1937, just him, a room, and the question of whether he was any good, a radio session, three songs for Capital, an afternoon with Ken Lane on arrangements, unhurried the way performing had not been for a while.
The letter from Gibson arrived on a Thursday. A letter, serial number located. Gibson Kalamazoo KG-14. Manufactured fall of 1936. A budget model. Manufactured in 1936. Dean read that line twice, Then set the letter on his kitchen table and sat with it for a long moment. In 1936, a man from Mississippi had walked into a recording studio in San Antonio, Texas and laid down a series of songs in 2 days that would be talked about for as long as people talked about American music. He had been 25 years old.
He recorded 29 songs across two sessions, San Antonio, then Dallas. And then he had gone back to Mississippi and in the summer of 1938, at the age of 27, he had died. His guitars had scattered. Nobody had been keeping track of them. The columnists who had written his career off in two sentences hadn’t kept track of much either.
Gibson made hundreds of KG-14s in 1936. Dean knew that. The letter said it plainly. The serial number placed this particular guitar in that production year and that was all it placed it in. There was no record of who had purchased it or where it had gone after leaving the factory. But not every guitar from that run had ended up in a Mississippi estate sale in 1938 and not every guitar from that run had a burn mark on the headstock from a cigarette rested in the same spot.
Many times by someone who kept his cigarette on his guitar while his hands were doing something else. Dean folded the letter and put it in the drawer of his bedside table next to his father’s old pocket watch and a photograph of his children that he kept there because he liked to see it first thing in the morning.
He never had the guitar formally authenticated. People asked why. Why no expert, no provenance study, no certificate? His answer was always some version of the same thing. Though he phrased it differently depending on who was asking. What he usually said was, “I know what I know. The The wasn’t in the certificate.” He had found something everyone else walked past.
The guitar sat in the corner of his den for years. He would take it out sometimes, not to play it, just to hold it. The weight of something built for a world that no longer existed. Cal saw it once. On an evening when he came by for dinner and wandered into the den. “Still have the mystery guitar?” Cal said. “Still have it.
” Cal looked at it for a moment. “You ever find out anything more?” “I found out what I needed to find out.” Dean said. Cal nodded. He was a musician. He understood. “Good purchase.” Cal said. “$25.” Dean said. “Still.” Cal said. They went to dinner. The guitar outlasted most of what surrounded it. It outlasted the conversations about whether Dean’s career would recover, which it did, more completely than anyone predicted.
Dean Martin was not a man who needed other people to tell him what something was worth. He had learned it in rooms with out-of-tune pianos and inattentive crowds. He had learned it in the years after 1956, when the people with opinions finished having them, and he had simply continued. The guitar was $25. It was from Mississippi.
It was from 1936. It had a burn mark on the headstock from someone who had rested a cigarette there many times in the same spot, the way people do when they are very comfortable with something they love. Whether the man who made that burn mark was the man from those San Antonio sessions in 1936 is a question that has no documented answer, but Dean Martin stood up in a room full of people who knew exactly what things were worth, and he raised his card for something nobody else had stopped for, and he was right in the only way that finally matters. He knew something the room did not. He had read what they skipped. If you enjoyed spending this time here, I’d be grateful if you’d consider subscribing. A simple like also helps more than you’d think. If this brought back a memory or a thought you’d like to share, leave it in the comments. I read every single one and I reply to each one personally.
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