Harvey Hansen, Light Fixtures & His Hanburt Guitars
As you stroll around our Anderson School property – or any of our joints, really – you will notice a preponderance of two things: interesting lighting fixtures and interesting music. Without these two elements (among others), it simply wouldn’t be a McMenamins.
And that is why we named a room for Harvey Hansen, a one-time shop owner in Bothell, WA. His story is quite unusual, and we like that…. Railroad fireman. Lumberyard truck driver. Door-to-door salesman. WPA worker. Lamp and lampshade maker. Electric Hawaiian steel guitar maker. Oil painter. Lawn bowler.
Born in 1898 in South Dakota, Harvey Hansen was handy. He could pretty much make whatever he set his mind to. And he did. Times were lean for him in the 1920s, so Harvey and his young family moved west to the Seattle area, and he did what he needed to do to support them. “He made everything by hand. He was a tinkerer. Anything he ever needed, he just made… he was uneducated, but very, very clever,” his sons recalled.
Improbably, it was his lamp and lampshade business that took off. By the mid-to-late 1930s, Harvey and his wife Emily had established a home in the Green Lake neighborhood, along with a retail shop featuring their handcrafted lighting products.
It was during this time that they first heard Paul Tutmarc, guitarist and owner of the Audiovox Manufacturing Company, playing sacred hymns on his electric Hawaiian guitar on Seattle’s wide-reaching radio station, KJR. Harvey and his wife Emily were entranced by the sound, unlike anything they’d ever heard. Emily in particular dreamed about owning such an instrument. So, being the ingenious guy that he was, Harvey decided to figure out how to make an electric Hawaiian steel guitar for his wife. He asked for help from Barney E. Egerer, an electrician and mechanic who was familiar with servicing “automatic phonographs,” nickelodeons, pinball machines and other items. According to one of Hansen’s sons, Egerer was “a genius who could do anything and [Harvey] told him ‘I’d like to make a guitar. And I’d like to make it electric.’ So they got together and figured all this stuff out.”
Hansen and Egerer acquired one of Paul Tutmarc’s Audiovox guitars, dismantling it to learn its inner workings and even crafting the body of the Hanburt model – a combination of Hansen and Emily’s maiden name Holburt – almost exactly the same as the Audiovox. The Hanburt’s stylistic elements were unmistakably lifted from the original model. (Because Hansen and Tutmarc were members of the same church, it never became a legal issue. But Tutmarc wasn’t pleased that Hansen had copied his ideas.)
Emily loved her guitar. She took to it with ease, which was somewhat astonishing given she had little prior musical experience. She began holding jam sessions at the Hansen house, eventually giving lessons on the newfangled electric guitars.
By the mid-1940s, the Hansens had moved to a new location west of Green Lake and opened the Hansen Lamp and Music Shop. Signs outside read: “Repair: Lamps Radios Electric Guitars” and “Teachers: Guitars Piano Accordion.” Hansen was handcrafting at least three models of Hanburt electric Hawaiian steel guitars. He also made organs, harps and “at least one electric mandolin.” His sons’ recollection of how many guitars he actually made varies – it’s either somewhere around 20 or perhaps more than 100. That’s a good indication as to how unstructured the Hanburt Electric Guitar business model was.
In 1951, the Hansens decided to open a second shop right here in Bothell. The store was to be run by Harvey’s brother – but, as sometimes happens within families, the brothers had a falling-out and the shop soon closed.
Harvey Hansen gave up his guitar-making business in the early ‘50s to focus on his lighting business, although Emily continued playing and teaching guitar well into her seventies. Harvey turned to oil painting and lawn bowling in his spare time.
The Hansen Light & Shade company still exists today, with two Seattle-area shops run by Harvey’s grandson Jeff. He seems to have inherited the family ingenuity – the company offers custom-made shades and can turn almost any object into a lamp, including Army boots, stacks of books, teapots, vintage cigar boxes and someone’s old cast. But no guitars. The Hanburt Electric Guitar business has seemingly faded into a footnote of Pacific Northwest music history.