[78-L] Spy Records

[davdieh at aol.com]

 -----Original Message-----



>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? 

Uh, broken records? Yeah, thousands. 
Maybe that's why Columbia pressed V-Discs in laminated shellac rather than vinylite. I don't think that "Clair de Lune"
is a bastardized composition but most Kostelanetz records WERE made to be broken.
Over and out
David Diehl