Stokowski Came on Stage . . .

by Charlie Fogel

The first university faculty meeting I went to when I was a member of the Physics department, all of the faculty met in one room, Hayes 239. Nowadays you probably would have trouble getting all of the faculty in one building.

Of the physics professors, L.Grant Hector was frequently asked to be a consultant. His expertise was a combination of physics, acoustics, and electronics. He was chosen to be the consultant for the construction of Kleinhans Music Hall in terms of its acoustic properties.

I think it was Leopold Stokowski who came as the guest conductor shortly after Kleinhans opened. The story is that Stokowski came on stage, snapped his fingers, listened and said: ""Good, but it's just a little bit dead.""

Grant Hector confided in me that he had understood that they were going to have floor runners in the auditorium. He didn't realize, or was not told, that there was going to be carpeting over the whole floor. Consequently, he did not have quite the right objective in treating the walls, so it's just a little more dead than it should be because a little more energy is being absorbed than he expected. I do not know if people remember this or not. People feel that the sound in Kleinhans is very good and it is - it is excellent. But Hector felt that it could have been better - maybe it's 97 percent and he thought it could or should have been 99 percent.

L.Grant Hector left the University and became vice president of a Philco subsidiary in Newark, NJ, which was manufacturing vacuum tubes, if you remember what those were.