Author: David Spiegelthal ★2017
Date: 2012-07-27 19:26
It's been written, and repeated in many places, how the demise of the venerable Kohlert firm (dating back to the 1800s in Graslitz/Kraslice) in the late 1960s or very early 1970s was caused by an ill-advised business deal in which they contracted to produce musical instruments for "a U.S. distributor" for a fixed price, for something like a decade. With global economic changes such as inflation and the resurgence of the German economy, the fixed selling price of the instruments to the distributor resulted in the bankruptcy of Kohlert. So far, nobody has been able to identify the evil U.S. distributor; and also nobody has been able to explain why a German company sold some of their instruments under a very non-German model line name such as "Bixley".
I think I've found the answer. The tipoff was a sale tag in a Kohlert Bixley alto sax I bought on the unmentionable Internet auction site; the tag had a New York address with the word "Bixley" in it. Unfortunately I didn't keep the tag, but a bit of digging on the Internet came up with this (from the scan of a catalog, apparently from the late 1960s, of multimedia resources for public school music teachers printed by the State of New York Board of Education):
"Wm. R. Cratz Co., Inc., 14 Bixley Heath, Lynbrook, N.Y.11563.
Importers of Kohlert woodwinds; Bohm Meinl brass band instru-ments; Hofner guitars and stringed instruments; Buchner stringed instruments; and Dr. Thomastic strings, tailpieces, and rosin."
So now we know (a) who bankrupted Kohlert, and (b) why some of the models from the 1960s are labeled "Bixley".
Post Edited (2012-07-27 20:26)
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