Musician, electronics
technician and Air Force veteran William Kenneth Eskew (1918 – 2001) was born in
Belton SC, a cotton ginning town in the Piedmont region of the state. Called Kenneth all his life — not Ken, Kenny or Bill — he grew up in nearby Greenville.
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William
Kenneth Eskew
(1918 –
2001)
|
As a teenager Kenneth
worked in an uncle’s store, Payne’s For Music on Main Street, and learned to
play the guitar and clarinet. During the 1930s he met many big-name
musicians who visited the store in search of strings, reeds or other gear when the were performing at nearby Textile Hall on nearby Washington Street.
When WW II broke Kenneth joined the U.S. Air Corps. At the time he was 5-foot, 11¾ inches tall,
but didn’t weigh enough to attend flight school and become an airplane pilot. Instead, he was trained to be an electronics technician.
During the war years he was stationed with the
8th Air Force in Norwich, England, and lived in a four-story Georgian mansion
located near several aircraft and submarine factories. There he met Marion
Cooper, the English woman who became his wife of 56 years.
Escaped German bombing
raids
During the war Marion, her
four siblings and mother moved to Norwich, 100 miles northeast of London. They
wanted to escape German bombing raids, which had leveled a next-door neighbor’s
home.
Marion’s mother met Kenneth first,
at a nearby air base, but for reasons Marion never revealed, she
didn't meet Kenneth for another nine months. They dated during the war and
married in 1945. When the war was over Kenneth brought Marion, one of 70,000
English war brides, to the States.
Kenneth’s profession was now
electronics and post-war jobs were plentiful. During the Korean Conflict,
however, he was recalled to service and sent to Texas. Once there, Kenneth
met aircraft manufacturing reps who convinced him to join North American
Aviation in Inglewood CA (near present-day Los Angeles International Airport)
after his military stint.
For the next 30 years
Kenneth worked on avionics, jets and spacecraft, from Jupiter missiles to the
Apollo command and service module. He also switched from electronics to making
the calculations needed for manned spaceflight — all the while using only slide
rules!
Marion's gift of a small guitar
Sometime in the late 1950s
or early 1960s Marion gave Kenneth this 1955 Martin 0-18 (SN 145937) guitar as
a gift. She paid $40, she recalled, to “a Colonel Blankenship who lived in San
Fernando Valley and said he needed the money at the time.”
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1955
Martin 0-18 with spruce
top,
rosewood fingerboard and bridge
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Kenneth played the guitar
for relaxation, especially after work. “Some days he’d come home and rush into
the bedroom where he’d play the guitar for a while before he could come out and
talk to anybody,” Marion said. “Mostly, he played it for pleasure and little
concerts.”
Kenneth was a fan of
Andrés Segovia, Chet Atkins and Tony Mattolla, and got Marion to sing old
English folk songs and Shakespearean tunes as he played along. “He even did
that while I was cooking dinner,” she said. “It was fun.”
The Eskews relocated to
Greenville SC in the 1980s and later moved into Rolling Green Village, a
retirement community east of town. Stricken with larynx and throat cancer,
Kenneth passed away in July 2001.
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1955 Martin 0-18 with mahogany back,
mahogany neck and butterbean tuners |
Three months later Marion
discovered two gifts Kenneth had left behind. “I found previously unknown
poetry he'd written for me and left in a drawer,” she said.
“I also found the
instrument had been under the bed for years. I ran my fingers over it and it
was all in good shape.”
Marion's 2nd gift
After attending one of my Vintage Music Concerts at Rolling Green Village in Nov 2004, Marion decided to
give me Kenneth’s guitar. She thought I'd appreciate it, she told me.
Housed in a ratty old cardboard case and still strung with Kenneth’s nylon strings, the guitar was in fair shape for its age. It had a mahogany
body, spruce top, 13.5-inch lower bout width, 24.9-inch scale and 14
frets to the body.
Attractive but unplayable,
the Eskew 0-18 needed several repairs and a good cleaning to update its performance. I took it
to luthiers Greg Hanson and David Crawford (now in Durham NC).
Hanson and Crawford repair the Eskew 0-18
The repairs were completed in October 2005 and cost $895. This work included:
• reset
the neck
• refret
the fingerboard
• repair
bridge plate holes
• reglue
an internal split brace
• remove
and reglue the bridge
• fill,
reslot and intonate the saddle
• repair
top cracks near the pickguard
With a reset neck, playing action of the Eskew 0-18 improved and projection opened up as
well. Still, it needed to be played and played for the neck and body to
"settle in" and for the tone to warm up or "sweeten."
It was one of 30
instruments I owned at that time and, despite its use in a few concerts, I knew
this guitar would not get the attention it needed. In addition, the skinny
neck of this mid-50s Martin hampered my left hand's fingering agility, while
the string spacing hampered my heavy-handed flatpicker's playing
style.
So, in March 2007, I sold
the rehabilitated Eskew 0-18 at Lark Street Music in Teaneck NJ for
$2500. I felt someone else would play and relish this robust yet diminutive guitar.
Kenneth Eskew's 1955 Martin 0-18 — SN 145937
An unadorned concert-sized guitar such as the Eskew 0-18 was a staple of the C.F. Martin Co. since the 19th century. In 1955 the firm produced 526 units of the 0-18 guitar, which were offered at retail for $95.
_____________________ Specifications _____________________
Scale length: 24-7/8-in.
Nut width: 1-11/16-in.
Body
length: 18-3/8-in.
Lower bout
width: 13-5/8-in.
Upper bout
width: 10-in.
Waist
width: 8-in.
Depth @
endpin: 4-3/16-in.
Fretboard
radius: 14-in.
String
spacing @ bridge: 2-3/16-in.
Top: spruce — Sitka
Back & sides: mahogany — Honduran
Neck: mahogany — reset Oct 2005
Bridge: rosewood
— reglued
Oct 2005
Bridge
plate: maple
— repaired Oct 2005
End pin: ebony
Fretboard: rosewood
Heelcap: rosewood
Bracing
pattern: x-braced
Neck
shape: medium soft V
Saddle: intonated
bone —
new in Oct 2005
Frets: medium wire — refretted
Oct 2005
Nut: original bone — reclaimed Oct 2005
Tuning
machines: single-unit, vintage-plate, open-gear,
nickel-plated metal butterbean tuners
Bridge
pins: black plastic
Back & side binding: dark
tortoise celluloid
Finish: hand-polished lacquer
Pickguard: tortoise
celluloid teardrop
Soundhole
rosette: nine concentric b-w-b rings in two black rings
Markers: six white dots of decreasing size on fretboard
white side markers at 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 12 fret
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© 2019 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights
Reserved
