[78-L] Spy Records

[fnarf at comcast.net]

I'm reading Gary Marmostein's fascinating "The Label: The Story of Columbia Records", and among the many great stories is this:

"The war was addressed, too, if ever so secretly, in the Bridgeport factory. When the day's work was done, the lights turned out and everyone else home for supper, Ted Wallerstein and Jim Hunter went back inside to make records. There might have even been music on them; Andre Kostelanetz speculated that Wallerstein was an agent for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and used his recording of "Clair de Lune" to send coded messages to prisoners of war. Using the bastardized composition that included scrap shellac, Wallerstein and Hunter pressed maps of various parts of Europe, presumably provided by stateside army representatives, between the disks' laminated layers. The disks were meant to be broken, of course -- a patriotic reversal of the manufacturing process."

Has anyone on this list ever seen one of these? 

The stories of wartime recycling of shellac -- from old or unsold records (presumably including lots of rare and valuable ones today) -- and the inevitable bootlegging of shellac are fascinating. At one point, he says, shellac was so valuable that factory workers were smuggling discs home under their coats, and goons with baseball bats were stationed outside the plant to smack them lightly with a baseball bat, not enough to hurt them but enough to send the shards tumbling out onto the ground.

--
Steve.