Ever since he moved from California to Oregon eleven years ago, Kerry Char has been an integral part of the Pacific Northwest lutherie scene. A regular participant at Guild of American Luthiers conventions and at the annual Portland Handmade Musical Instruments Shows, Kerry builds fine classical and steelstring guitars. He has also established a reputation as a resident expert in the repair and restoration of historical harp guitars, and a builder of authentic replicas. As one who shares his interest in these odd boxes, I have wanted for years to talk to him about his work. I took the opportunity to do just that when I ran into him at the 2001 Portland show.
Interspersed throughout this conversation you will see some of Kerry's photographs of the very cool vintage instruments which have passed through his doors seeking musical health, along with a little bit of information on each.

Tell me a little of your family history.
I was born in Hawaii, at Trippler Army hospital in 1955. That's on the Island of Oahu. My dad was in the Air Force. My family originally migrated from China to Maui at the turn of the last century. That would have been my great-grandfather. They were farmers.

Were they working their own land, or were they working on plantations?
They worked on the pineapple plantations. Between the 1850s and the 1890s, there was a huge influx of immigrants to the islands to work on the ranches and plantations. Most of the people who owned land where the rich plantation owners.

The colonials.
That's right. Somewhere in the early teens Protestant, missionaries converted my grandfather to Christianity. These missionaries enabled my grandfather to go to Cornell University to pursue a degree in architecture. From what I understand they put him on a boat and shipped him off to the states for two years. At that time you only had to go to college for two years to get a degree, so he came back a certified architect which I think quite a feat for minority at that time. He was the first Chinese architect in Hawaii. There are several buildings that he designed and built still around. In fact, a couple years ago a church that he built on the big island of Hawaii just celebrated their 100-year anniversary.

How about your own folks?
My dad was the youngest of five kids. He was in the Air Force when he married my mom. They had me, and very soon after that my dad got out of the service and we moved to California to look for work. I think I was only two or three when we came over. We lived in L.A. then in this complex where you had several units facing each other with a courtyard in the middle between them. All the people that lived around this little courtyard were from Hawaii. Half of them were relatives € aunts, and uncles. Lots of kids, too. It was a lot of fun. I have a younger brother, Steve, and a sister, Chris, who were born when we lived there. A few years later, we moved to Gardena where I lived until I moved to Portland in 1991.

How did your own interests in craft get started?
My family always had an appreciation of art and craft and design. My grandfather, as well as being an architect, professionally built furniture is a hobby. I have all sorts of relatives who are involved in arts and crafts of some sort. One cousin is a jewelry maker in Seattle. He makes these incredible, beautiful necklaces. He actually has one in the Smithsonian. My Mom and Dad weren't into arts and crafts per se, but they were always kind of crafty and always had an appreciation for things that were beautiful and well made. My Dad was more into building things, like remodeling a room or building in addition to a house. He built a cabin in the mountains that we still have. He worked as an electrician all his life, but I think he would have been happier as a carpenter. He was always inventing things, little gadgets, and little tools. I can remember as a kid him trying to get a patent on something he invented, but he got sour and frustrated with that whole patenting process. He died in a car crash about four years ago, and I inherited a bunch of his tools. There are still some tools that he made that I can't figure out what they do, probably because I'm not an electrician. My mom is into sewing. She can make anything. Every year,when I was growing up growing up we all got pajamas, swimming shorts, and shirts. She still sews all sorts of things for kids.
I got interested in pottery when I was in high school and did that for quite a longtime. I went to college to study clay, but after a while I quit and started doing fairs. It didn't take me long to figure out you couldn't make a living being a potter.

At that time there were a lot of hippie potters. The market was pretty saturated.
Oh yeah, it was just wild. To make it you had to go on the fair circuit, which means lots of traveling. All your weekends from spring to fall, hauling all your stuff in and out, setting up and tearing down. It got old fast. I eventually got a job working for Dr. Pepper bottling Co. driving a truck. Then, about 1978, I got a job working for Continental Airlines at LAX. It was a great job. It paid well, had great benefits, and was very flexible. They had his policy where you could trade off your days or give them to other employees. They didn't care who was working so long as all of the bases were covered, so if you wanted to travel or just get a few days off you could arrange it. I worked there for 16 years. That's where I really got my education in guitar building.

How did that work?
Well, you do so much sitting around waiting for planes to get on the ground. I would just bring a backpack full of reading material. I read everything about guitar building that to get my hands on. Do you remember the old frets magazine? They always had these articles on guitar repair by Charles Hoffman. I would buy all these back issues, and make copies of the articles on repair and guitar building, and bring them out onto the ramp with me. When I was waiting for the plane to get up to the gate I could sit on my tug and read these articles. They would give you hard time if you're reading a magazine or book while you're sitting there, but if you're reading a piece of paper that was OK. I guess they thought you were reading something important. (Laughs)

So you are one of those guys driving tugs on runways, loading and unloading planes?
That's right, I am one of the guys throwing everybody's bags around. (Laughs) Actually, there are about a dozen different jobs you could do. We had to bid on them based on seniority, or you could transfer to the ticket counter, or down to freight. The job had its moments when it wasn't so fun, but overall I really can't complain. I've always been an avid reader, so that's what I did. There was really nobody I could watch work or learn from. I tried to hang out at this music store called McCabe's in Santa Monica. They were friendly and had some talented people, but they really didn't have the time to have people hanging around asking questions about guitar building. They were pretty busy, and so was I. I had a job, so I just tried to read everything that I could find about guitar building. The first book that really turned me on to guitar building wasn't even a guitar-building book, it was Don Teeters first book on the acoustic-guitar repair. Then, of course, I read Sloan's book.
About 1983 I built my first in acoustic instrument. It was a flatiron-style mandolin. I built about three or four of these and then got up enough nerve to build a guitar.

This was while you were still working your airline job?
Oh yeah, at that time lutherie was still just a hobby. I kept my airline job as long as I possibly could. I only switched over to building and repairing full-time about five years ago. I should also mentioned though that I worked part-time most of my career at the airlines. You got the same benefits and raises whether you are part-time or full-time, so I was able to build my guitar business while I was working. But I'm glad that made the move to doing guitars full-time.

How did you get into doing repair work.
Sometime in about 1986 I went into a pawn shop called Lawndale Jewelry and Loan to try to buy a couple of little parlor guitars they had. One was an old Washburn, and the other was a Bruno. They needed a little bit of work, so I was trying to talk this guy into selling them cheaper. His name was Gary. In the course of the conversation I told him about my guitar-building hobby. He goes in the back room to talk to his dad, this was a family business, and when he comes out he says he has a proposition for me: he'll sell these guitars to me at the price I offered on the condition that I do repairs for the store. Now this is kinda blowing my mind. I don't even really know this guy and he's offering me a job repairing his guitars. I told him I don't really know a lot about guitar repair and that I've only built a few instruments. But he tells me that that's OK they are willing to take a chance on me because it sounds like I know what I'm doing. This is puzzling because we've only had about a ten-minute conversation, but I tell him OK, and he tells me to come back next Monday. I come back, and he gives me about seven guitars to repair, and one of them is a Martin. Now, I don't think that I had even touched a Martin up to that point, and here this guy is giving me one to actually work on. It was a bit intimidating.

I remember the first Martin I had on my bench. I was intimidated, but was also excited to be able to really take my time and look at a real guitar, inside and out.
Yeah! Gary had a special love for musical instruments. At the time, they were probably the best pawnshop for musical instruments in the South Bay. They maintained a great inventory, and working for them was great training. They ran all their stringed instruments through me before they put them up for sale. I got anywhere from six to a dozen instruments a week. Soon I started doing work for other shops in town. As my repair business increased I was able to work fewer days at the airport because of their policy of being able to trade off your days. At some point I got to where I was only working two days a week for Continental. It was great! I still had a job with all the benefits, but I didn't have to be there very much.

That's a pretty good deal!
Oh yeah, it was great! I worked at Continental from 1978 to 1995. During this whole time I was going to a small church, called Normandy Avenue Christian, which I had gotten involved in when I was a senior high school. About the time that I started working for Continental there was a split in the church, and the group that I was with started a small Christian community/House church called The Church of the Servant King. After a time we started to establish other churches along the West Coast. We started a small group in Eugene in the late '80s, and about the same time some of our people were involved in a group in the San Francisco Bay area. In 1990 we started a group here in Portland, and a year later Cheryl and I and the kids came up to join them. I transferred up with the airlines, and then tried to figure out what to do with my lutherie interests. When I first came up I tried to make it is a builder, but by '94 I realized that I needed to make a living first. I hadn't realized the commitment that it was going to take to be a successful builder. Building the guitars is only half the equation. There's also marketing and promoting, and I'm not very good at that, especially the self-promotion. The whole thing is a 24-hour commitment, and I was not willing to make the trade-offs. My church, my family, and my kids are much more important to me. So I flipped back to what I did best, which is repair and restoration. I've built instruments all along, though. Unlike a lot of builders, I actually enjoy repair work. Even if I were a successful builder I probably would still want to do some repair work, at least the restoration part. That's the fun stuff.

You have established a reputation as a repairman with unique expertise in harp-guitars and other such oddities. How did that happen?
When I was in L.A. I had a small clientele of collectors who collected all these weird things like harp guitars, mandolins, banjos, etc. Do you know who Gregg Minor is?

Sure, he's a collector of Knutsen instruments. I was in contact with him when I was doing research for an article on harp guitars in 1991.
That's only part of his collection. Gregg has got a good size collection of some wonderful stuff. If you get a chance you should check out his web site (www.minermusic.com). Through him I met other collectors and got into this circle of guys who had very eclectic tastes in musical instruments. That's how I met Dan Most. You knew Dan. (GAL member Dan Most tragically took his own life last spring. -ed.) Dan and Tom Noe wrote that great book about Knutsen and his instruments, From Harp Guitars to the New Hawaiian Family: Chris J. Knutsen, History and Development of the Hawaiian Steel Guitar. Anyway, I was fortunate enough to develop connections with all these people who are involved in these cool old instruments. People send me stuff from all over the place. I love getting boxes in the mail. It's always something interesting.

What sort of instruments are you building?
Most of my experience has been in building steel strings, but I've gotten to build some pretty interesting things. Gregg Miner came up with this idea for a resonator mandocello that I built for him. It had all this airbrush artwork on it with a Fantasia theme. The whole concept was totally his, artwork and everything. It made it onto the back of Guitarmaker magazine. Last year I built a left-handed harp guitar for a guy in New York. It was a copy of the Dyer style 7. There seems to be a real interest in harp instruments these days. I get quite a few inquiries about building and repairing harp guitars. Part of it is due to being on Gregg Miners web site, and on John Doan's. John is a fabulous musician, and harp guitar is his main instrument. So I am in this circle of harp guitar enthusiasts, some of whom see me as a kind of harp-guitar guru because I've worked on so many of them, and I enjoy building them. They are kind of fun, and they pay pretty well. They make a nice break in my building. Right now, I'm mostly building classicals. I know it's a bit schizophrenic. Classical guitars are tight and very disciplined, whereas harp guitars are loose and kind of whimsical.

Sometimes you have to go where the money is.
You do, and you have to go with what you know. I've been around harp guitars a lot, so I know them pretty well. I don't really play them, but I have an affinity for them, and I love to work on them. I can honestly say that I've had harp-guitar family instruments constantly in my shop for the last ten years. Right now, I've got both a Dyer style 7 and a style 6 in for repair. I also have a rare Knutsen harp mandolin with four sub-bass strings, and an old Oscar Schmidt Stella harp guitar waiting to be restored. I guess I'm the harp guitar guy now. I don't know if it's any different than being a good repairman, but I guess that people feel comfortable in trusting these instruments to me because I've restored so many, and if someone wants a replica of one of these instruments I can build them something authentic. I love to build, and probably average about four to six pieces a year. That's about perfect for me. I almost don't want to do any more than that because I really do enjoy working on all these old instruments. Some of them are just so bizarre and cool. I just love goofing around with them. People bring in all sorts are crazy things. Some of the other shops in town, like the Twelfth Fret, and Schubacks Violin Shop, refer people to me if they have something weird.

If it's weird, send it to Kerry!
(Laughs) I've gained a reputation that way, but I like it. It makes things interesting. I've seen enough Strats!

I know the allure. Another factory electric comes in and who cares? But one of these harp guitars comes through the door and you drop everything.
That's right! Stuff seems to come in waves. Lately I've got people bringing in zithers, if you can believe that. I got one the other day that this woman paid me $300 bucks to restore, which was more than the thing was worth. But it belonged to grandpa, and I suppose there is some legitimacy to sentimentality. I had another one come in that guy's wife gave him for Christmas.

Was it one of those cool German-style zithers, or was it one of the quirky American ones?
One of the quirky American ones, and not even an interesting one at that. The other thing I get a lot is homemade instruments, like violins that grandpa carved with a pocketknife and a bottle cap. Someone will come in with a bag of parts, hand it to me and say, "Can you make this thing play?" I tell people that almost anything can be fixed. Most people are unaware of how much is possible in instrument restoration. The question is whether it's worth it to the owner to pay to have the work done.