Like a lot of people, I am uncomfortable when someone points a camera at me. Something remains on guard and the picture that results shows my features but the person that I am remains hidden.
This is going to be a very incomplete bio. This web site is mostly about fiddles and fiddle making, so this bio will be about my interest in music and making things in general.
My friend Jim risked his reputation as a photographer taking this portrait so the least I can do is shut up and just tell you who I am.
Peter Schug
I was born in Vienna on December 17th, 1937. My parents were able to get out of Austria, and we escaped the worst of WWII. I lost an aunt and two cousins in the concentration camps and I lost two cousins in the German army. We got off the boat in the USA on January 2, 1939. I don't actually remember it, but I was told that everyone had to wait on board a whole day because the boat arrived on January 1.
My earliest memories include locking myself in a bathroom in an aunt's home in Philadelphia at the age of eighteen months. I clearly remember my Uncle Ben warning me about playing with the lock, and I remember twisting the knob, but the rest of the story comes from my mother who told me about being rescued by some boys who climbed into the bathroom window to unlock the door.
Fast forward about four years, I was in a dentist's office and looking at pictures in a magazine. I couldn't read, but there were these drawings of how to build an airplane. I loved airplanes and I remembered the magazine. (more or less) After starting school I was walking past a news stand with my father and I saw "The Magazine," except the cover was different. (I only vaguely understood that magazines came out once a month, all new, with different content.) I asked my father to get it for me and he said "Why? You can't read." I said, "I can too!" so I got my first issue of "Popular Science." There was stuff about airplanes in it, and I read it cover to cover. I also read Popular Mechanics, Mechanics Illustrated and sometimes that country boy pulp relative called Science and Mechanics. There was an article about airplanes and in parentheses this reference: (PS, Jan 42) or something like that. I asked my father about it and he said that it meant that you should look in the issue of Popular Science for January of 1942 to read more about the subject. At that moment I decided that I would never part with any issue of that magazine just in case a future issue referenced one I had saved. Thus was born a librarian.
I grew up believing that you made things rather than buying them, and that nothing existed that a person couldn't make for themselves. People made cars and airplanes and ham radio rigs and put up shelves and built or rebuilt boats or houses and as long as you had the tools you could do anything, and in a pinch you could build the tools also.
I lived in an apartment in the Bronx with a mother who could take apart a sewing machine and put it back together, and a father who could add huge columns of numbers in his head and had a reputation as a great soccer player (but who played soccer?) My interests were very different than either parent, and I'm sure they didn't quite know what to make of me.
Great music was all over the radio dial (AM in those days) and it was taken for granted. I listened to Superman, Dick Tracy, Victor Borge and The Lone Ranger. I felt sorry for Victor Borge. He was so good, but nobody would ever appreciate his talent because he had such an accent. (So I thought at the time, coming from a family of refugees.)
When I was a little boy, not yet able to read I asked my aunt Adele what the newspaper was for. There was one lying on the kitchen table. She replied that it told her things, like what was on the radio. We were listening to some thing like a baroque trumpet concerto and my eye was on the crossword puzzle. The black and white squares laid out in symetrical patterns seemed related to the bright notes of the trumpet and the musical patterns I was hearing. I pointed to the crossword puzzle and asked my aunt if that was what was playing on the radio. She said no, but I was unconvinced. I saw a relationship between the crossword puzzle, the music and the dappled shadows of the trees on the living room floor. I still think I was right. To me the crossword puzzle was the formalized version of the dappled shadows and the music was the equivalent in sound of the crossword puzzle. Made sense to me, and still does in a way. Not that I could have verbalized it at that age, I remember the ideas and the frustration of not being able to get my aunt to understand what I was asking.
Kids had a lot of freedom in those days, and I remember going to the Museum of Natural History alone at the age of seven or eight with just a quarter in my pocket and some advice on what trains to take. The subway was five cents, and I could get lunch at the museum for the remaining fifteen cents! The Hayden Planetarium cost a bit more, but after one trip with my father I went there alone also. Sadly, in later years children weren't allowed in without adult supervision. (No, it wasn't my fault!)
Skipping a whole lot of years, in Junior High School I failed wood shop. I hated making tie racks and book ends, but I came away knowing how to use a tri-square and to adjust and use a plane. I probably learned more than the kids who finished their tie racks, and coated them with sticky, out of date shellac. I was not the least embarassed about failing wood shop. My only real interest was science, but I was not seeking a career. Around 1950 or so I discovered Scientific American and bought my first copy with trembling hands, wondering if I was worthy of such a treasure and if I wasn't being too presumptuous. Today I no longer read PS and MS, and MI and Science and Mechanics are long gone, but I buy and read Scientific American faithfully.
Thirty-five or so years ago there was an article in Scientific American about the acoustics of the violin, and I found it completely fascinating. I took the opportunity to borrow a violin, and soon I was hooked. A few years later I bought one, but it was soon relegated to the closet because I broke strings at the rate of one per session or so. Actually, I was using gut strings, and the humidity and temperature swings in my garden level bedroom (which also had it's own roof) were the probable cause of the constantly breaking strings.
When I was around nine or ten I wanted to learn the clarinet, and when I mentioned that to my mother she promptly ran out and bought a piano and arrainged for lessons. I hated the thing even before it arrived. The piano meant NO CLARINET to me. I drove two piano teachers out of the house in a couple of months, and my mother sold the piano. The first piano teacher was actually sympathetic to my plight, the second was as dumb as a box of rocks and was convinced that I was incapable of ever learning the instrument. I think it was the time I played the Star Spangled Banner with my left hand one measure behind my right that finally got him. I played a bit of clarinet in high school.
I took fine art and music as majors in high school. I did that by choice, not knowing that those subjects were the dumping ground for the dregs of the school. I was on the school rifle team, and, carrying my rifle (in it's case of course) around the school and from class to class I was the envy of all the lowlifes that I associated with. I was treated as an equal by the scum of my high school. I also enjoyed the art class since we had one of the best teachers in the state, and he only had to clear his throat to get the full attention of the toughest kids in his class. Everybody loved him. In the music class there was an uneasy truce. Our poor music teacher put up with a lot of fooling around, but nobody gave him a really hard time. Most of these guys actually wanted to learn their instruments, they just objected to playing melodies like "They call me little buttercup."
This is me with my Gibson, when I was about fifteen. Sorry about the tilted picture, but I guess the flash was so heavy that it weighed one side of the camera down. I rotated the image to compensate.
Some people are amazed that they had color film that you could shoot indoors back then, but it was the huge Wabash Press 40 bulbs that did the trick. You couldn't see anything in the center of your visual field for five minutes after your picture was taken.
I studied electronics and eventually got a job with Honeywell Information Systems fixing computers. That was in the late sixties when computers were huge, made of discrete components and had their own air conditioned rooms. In terms of power they were truly feeble compared to anything you might have around the house today, including your kid's (or your own) Playstation. Their strength was in being able to talk to many tape drives and disk drives, card readers and printers. They were a conduit for vast quantities of information, but what they usually did with it was add up a bill no more complex than what your waiter did at lunch. They just did it for a million customers at a time.
I remember walking to the subway with my boss one day and he was telling me with great enthusiasm all that he had learned about management since starting with the company, and I said, "Yes Tony, and you learned it from the guys who took us from number two in the industry to number fourteen." I liked Tony, but the only way to get ahead in Honeywell was to say "Yes Boss" without thinking about what your were being asked to do. I felt a great sense of relief when I was laid off, and some sadness for the guys who stuck it out to the bitter end and took pay cuts and wound up working for somebody else anyway.
When Tony called me into his office and gave me the bad news I took off my tie and loosened my collar then asked, "What was that you said, Tony?" I knew very well that I had gotten laid off because I was one of the last unmarried guys in the place. Tony spared the breadwinners as long as he could, and he even took some static about letting me go. I never blamed him or myself.
I survived for a few years doing freelance Paradox programming and temping Mac graphics at night. I loved temping because of the people I met. They all temped so they could act or write or be a spear carrier in Aida or sing or support their consulting firm between clients. It was a great life until computer literate kids began graduating from college in quantity. Computer skills began to be a requirement for entry level jobs and the need for temps began to erode. One of the great thrills in temping is meeting a nervous manager who needs work done now, and as he sizes you up, two or three people already hard at work say hello, calling you by name and your temporary boss relaxes.
Today I work for the US Postal Service. We seem to have an abundance of real musicians in the postal service, and I always bring my fiddle to school with me when I get trained on new hardware. We get our technical training in Norman, Oklahoma in the best equipped labs I have ever seen. Most of the instructors are pretty good, but the real attraction for me is that at home I have about three hours a day to myself since I live alone and have to shop, cook and clean in addition to commute and work eight hours a day.
This is the USPS school in Norman, OK. The pond was made at the request of the local fire department, and is home to hundreds of ducks, turtles, catfish and who knows what else. Housing is in the buildings just visible behind the school, and is run by Marriott. There is a swimming pool, tennis courts and all the amenities of a resort. With all that it still feels like a vacation in a rest home.
This picture is from five separate images put together with a program called QuickStitch.
In Oklahoma classes are six hours with two hours for self study. School is a one minute walk, and meals are cooked by someone else. In OK I have eight hours a day to myself. I can usually find a guitarist or two and on one occasion when several of us had a two in the afternoon class I had the pleasure of jamming with some really good country musicians from about nine in the evening 'til two in the morning for five weeks running. The only break we took was for a slice of pizza at midnight. There was still lots of time for sleep, study and reading.
The postal service gets a bad rap for violence, but it is a community of 800,000 people, and I doubt there is a city of 800,000 anywhere with less violence. I work with some of the nicest people I know, and if I get bored with work now and then I remind myself of that.
This picture is about fifteen years old. The helibaby was set up with a relatively fast rotorhead and had a very quick but predictable response. It's final crash came when my enthusiasm for flying it exceeded it's battery's capability. One of these days I'll build another helicopter, but for now my workbench is cluttered with fiddle making tools and materials.
I used to fly this in my back yard in the Bronx. The area I flew in was surrounded by trees and fences, and I really enjoyed showing off for the neighbors, none of whom ever complained about the noise.
The engine was well muffled and was large enough to be in the middle of it's power range when hovering, which also helped keep the noise down.