A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 16

Scott Myers
Go Into The Story
Published in
4 min readApr 16, 2021

--

This is the 12th year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Because the best way to come up with a great story idea is to come up with a lot of ideas. And the best way to come up with a lot of ideas is to be proactive in sourcing story ideas.

Today’s story: The best Gibson guitars were made by the ‘Kalamazoo Gals’.

The “Banner” Gibson guitar is considered one of the finest acoustic guitars ever made.

Over 9,000 of these Banners were carefully built during World War II.

But Gibson company records show the company had shifted to producing goods for the war effort and not instruments, and most of the men who made those Gibsons at the headquarters in Kalamazoo were off fighting the war.

So who made these guitars that are still prized 70 years later?

That question and his love of guitars drove Connecticut law professor Dr. John Thomas to discover the remarkable answer, which he turned into a book called “Kalamazoo Gals: A Story of Extraordinary Women and Gibson’s Banner Guitars of World War Two.”

Thomas’s quest started with a photograph he found of a group of women standing in front of the Kalamazoo Gibson guitar factory in the 1940s.

“To say that picture haunted me probably is not much of an overstatement,” said Thomas. “I pinned it to the bulletin board in my office and just kept finding my attention going back to it, wondering what were all these women doing in front of that factory during World War II.”

Gibson records stated that no guitars were built during the war. Thomas eventually made it to the Gibson corporate headquarters in Nashville, where he went through thousands of pages of shipping ledgers to discover that 24,000 instruments were in fact shipped during the war.

Thomas found that none of the women he interviewed who worked on guitars had any training, but they did all have experience in sewing, crocheting, or needlepoint, which Thomas believes was helpful.

In order to test the quality, Thomas started a project x-raying different Gibson guitars from before, after, and during the war.

“The women’s guitars . . . were more refined. Every little plate, every little brace, every little piece of material in the guitar is sanded just a tiny bit thinner, just a tiny bit smoother, and that’s the difference. And I contend that people can hear this. That’s why they sound so great.”

As someone who played music professionally for seven years and who owns several guitars, this story caught my eye. As soon as I saw it, I went: “It’s A League of Their Own meets Hidden Figures.

Set the story in 1944. A group of women, each from different backgrounds, land a gig at the Gibson plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan. As it turns out, this is a top secret project by the company because they are not supposed to be making non-essential products due to World War II. But consumers continue to clamor for guitars. How can music in a time of calamity be consider “non-essential?” That’s at least what the chauvinistic head of the company uses as a justification to surreptitiously continue to manufacture guitars. I see him as quite a capitalist, too.

He hires these women because there are no men available, all of them called to war. His goal: Produce as many cheaply built guitars to satisfy the growing number of orders from vendors.

The women he hires develop a different vision for their work. Given the care they bring to their work as housewives — sewing, crocheting, needlepoint — there is no way they can just slap together a guitar. No, they take care with each instrument. There may be a kind of maternal feeling they develop for each guitar.

Oh, and some of them learn to play guitar, so let’s throw in a few music numbers to spice up the story.

How much fun could this be: Matriarchy vs. Patriarchy, Pride in Craftsmanship vs. Raw Capitalism.

There’s probably one lead female character who provides the counterpoint to the male head of the company. Two different world views and personalities. And as the women grow stronger due to their work — their guitars clearly sound better than others produced by men in years past — this is a story of empowerment, creativity, and the power of beauty as embodied in the graceful lines and sound of a Gibson guitar.

1944 Gibson “Banner” guitar

By the way, a 1944 Gibson “Banner” Guitar can sell today anywhere from $7,000–15,000 depending upon its shape.

There’s the setup for my 16th story idea of the month. And it’s yours. Free! What would YOU do with it?

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15

Each day in April, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are valuable skills for a writer to develop.

--

--