The lively grandmother of 29 has the usual things in her living room on a quiet Des Plaines street: comfortable antique furniture, pictures of her seven children.
But on the floor at the end of the sofa is a Dominick’s bag, which she proudly empties to display her handiwork. It’s dozens of white felt disks cut to resemble gear wheels about 3 inches across, with ends of white thread hanging from each.
Thus begins an introduction to a thriving-and intriguing-cottage industry whose workers average 75 years of age.
The woman is Catherine Robbins, 78, who for 22 years has been meticulously threading nylon draw strings linking the felt gears’ teeth so they can be pulled tightly over the head of percussion mallets without a wrinkle. These mallets, produced mainly for drum maker Ludwig Industries by Payson Percussion Products (PPP), go around the world to symphony orchestras and college and high school bands.
Robbins quickly explains what can go wrong if a stitch is the slightest bit off. Then she lists the different kinds of “caps” she makes for hard, medium, medium soft, and soft mallets.
“Each one makes a decidedly different sound on the timpani (kettle drums),” she says.
Then she produces a tablecloth-sized piece of a furry brown synthetic fabric and two precise pressed wood patterns for caps on larger, softer heads to be used on huge bass drums. The process with these is different but just as demanding.
“I do thousands of these in the course of a year,” she says. Then with a “follow me” she leads the way out the door and down a few houses. A tap on the door gains entry, and in the basement are Don, Wally, Larry and Norb, the rest of the crew.
Don, also 78, is Catherine’s husband, who retired seven years ago from Mercoid Corp. of Chicago, a maker of pressure, temperature and liquid-level controls. He worked there for 46 years in research and development and as quality control manager. Don supervises the operation loosely-but tightly, too, when it comes to quality control.
Wally, 74, is Wally Rachmaciej, a nine-year retiree who lives in Park Ridge. He spent 20 years assembling strapping machines for Signode Corp. in Glenview, a maker of packaging equipment.
Larry Pischke, at 68 the youngest of the group, has been retired for six years from his work for Illinois Tool Works Switches Division in Chicago, which makes electrical switches and other components. Also a Des Plaines resident, he spent 41 years with ITW in research and development, inspection, drafting and quality control.
Norb Kotulla, 75, of Park Ridge retired five years ago from Griffith Laboratories in Alsip, where he was engineering manager. The company produces food products for a worldwide market, including premixed batters for McDonald’s and Red Lobster, the chemical engineer explained.
Not there for the visit, but the moving force behind this unusual enterprise, is Albert Payson, head of PPP and a percussionist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 35 years.
Payson started developing mallets for his own use in the mid-’60s. The word spread and his colleagues started asking him to make theirs too. Then teachers and students joined the parade. The cottage industry was born to meet the demand, and now Payson Percussion Products is turning out several thousand mallets a year to please timpanists around the world and give music lovers the finest of kettle drum and bass drum sounds.
Ludwig executive Jim Catalano, a professional percussionist himself, will gladly beat the drum for Payson’s mallets.
“We position Al Payson’s mallets for timpani and bass drums as our top level professional models, ahead of even the mallets we make ourselves,” Catalano says. At retail, pairs of mallets cost about $37.
From Ludwig’s headquarters in Elkhart, Ind., Catalano also notes that Payson serves as a clinician and teacher for professional, amateur, collegiate and high school musicians at Ludwig-sponsored seminars.
Payson says mallets usually last through about six months of steady use. They can be returned for re-covering, but most users just buy new ones, he says.
In the beginning, it was all trial and error for Payson. “It took me more than a year to develop a system for producing superior mallets,” he recalls. “Just taking apart someone else’s mallet didn’t tell me too much about how it had been assembled.”
Another factor in those early days, he says, was that the Chicago Symphony had 18 weeks of downtime each year and no pay for that period.
“Most of my colleagues needed to have a sideline of some sort to survive,” he says.
His mallet-making efforts were filling not only a professional but an economic gap. High school youths working after school did the assembly in the beginning, but they needed constant supervision by Payson’s wife, Gerry.
“I had to inspect every mallet,” he said, “and about 10 percent of the output had to be rejected. Today, the men do their own quality control, and rejects are almost unheard of.”
Raw materials provided by various suppliers include cores (mallet heads), shafts and the felt disks stamped out in the proper sizes from sheets.
There are then five steps in PPP’s mallet-making process:
1. The felt is split by hand (much like separating the halves of an English muffin) and matched in pairs under the discerning eye and feel of Don Robbins.
2. These caps are then handsewn by Catherine Robbins, working in her home. She goes through a lot of thimbles, not including some fancy collector’s thimbles brought for her from France, Holland, Spain and Russia by the Paysons.
3. Putting the mallet heads and shafts together is the specialty of Kotulla, the retired chemical engineer. He grabs a handful of hard maple shafts and rolls each across a table to cull the crooked ones for the reject box. Then he smoothly mounts the predrilled head, reaming it or padding the shaft to assure a permanent fit. Next he nails the head to the shaft and puts an adhesive band around the head. As one would expect of an engineer, he has noted that “each mallet takes me between 1.2 and 1.5 minutes.”
4. The caps are then drawn on over the mallet head by Robbins, who tugs tight the draw strings Catherine had put in place and knots them tight, using a “surgeon’s knot,” sternly ordered by a Payson note on the wall.
5. Excess felt is then shaved off by Rachmaciej and Pischke, using electric shavers. They also knead the heads into perfect contours.
After putting together so many mallets, do these cottage workers go out of their way to watch timpanists in live orchestras?
“Well, I haven’t seen the Chicago Symphony, but I do pay particular attention to those musicians at our local band and orchestra concerts,” Kotulla says. “And I get frustrated when watching musicians on TV and the camera pans to the percussionists for only a moment now and then.”
He also expresses best a common thread for all the men: “After I retired and sat around for a year, I wanted something to do. This is a challenge. I enjoy the work. The hours are right.” He works two or three mornings a week, with the option to get ahead of the gang on his part of the work and then skip a week or so.
And how did they get together? Well, Gerry Payson once lived in the home where the basement workshop is located. Her mother still lives there. Al Payson met the Robbinses that way. Kotulla was the Paysons’ neighbor at one time in Park Ridge. Rachmaciej’s and Kotulla’s daughters were good friends before their fathers started making drumsticks. Pischke got involved through his and Payson’s mothers-in-law at their church.
“Today I feel a close bond with these people who make PPP work,” Payson says. “And I am gratified by the wide acceptance of our mallets.”
And from his vantage point at age 59, what might Payson do in his retirement? “I just might join them in the basement. I expect to keep this thing going, perhaps with more models and more outlets.”
This could go on for a long time-and no one could be more pleased about that than the world’s timpani fans.
