martin guitar factory tour, originally uploaded by pinkgerl.

Took a weekend off and hung out with my dad in Allentown - on Friday we visited the Martin guitar factory, which was a model of 19th century craftspersonship in a 21st century setting. Total Mr. Rodgers style - one guitar travelling through maybe 100 hands, each person adding one small bend to the body, frets to the neck, a set of tuning knobs, mother of pearl inlay, strings, polish.
Yes, they did have a section of the factory devoted to dudes who just tried out the instruments - lick-o-rama central.
Most beautiful to see stacks and stacks of the guitar sides without bodies, like cookie cutters stacked, only this hollow is the form. Also, to see hundreds of strings sitting in pots like flowers, a man pulling one from each to sit and string each guitar, one by one.
The fetishization of the object, it turns out, starts long before it sits in the hands of some Clapton - branding and quality contrl demands that even a completely finished guitar be sawed in half and its serial number restarted in the plant, for even the slightest cosmetic imperfection. Workers carry the expensive ones - up to 100,000 each - by hand from station to station. Then, at the end, their buffing robot shines each guitar until you can see your reflection - a weird blend of uptight, old world care and bizarre, in-house compu-tech. The guy who gave us the tour was the shop manager - my age, stiff jelled hair, kept referring to 'my guys on the floor' - a jealous pang to be worried about repetitive stress on the body, not the ears.

Pictures of John Lennon were many but no music played - it's a factory. Martin pays for employees to take guitar lessons. They will send a free guitar to any employee's family member serving in Iraq. Tiny American flags were wedged around, and I guess we were the parade, a daily 1pm tour for a factory in the middle of Nazareth, PA, hours 6am to 2pm. The second most popular image, after Lennon, was of Nascar - although the speedway in town just closed leaving fans far from the next nearest Nascar hub in Delaware.
Martin's employees were grandmas, old men with risque forearm tattoos, young women wearing safety goggles, moms with little league baseball card pix of their kids up on the board behind their station - a weird vision of what would I think be called the ideal small town working-class American job in a sort of wonderful small American Town.