Conn Pan American

This is from David Mack Endres, dmendres@slb.com:

My curiosity piqued again by the recent post by Mark Charette, which contained information contradicting what I had been told about the line of Pan American clarinets, I decided to do some digging. I called UMI (Conn) in Elkhart, and the person in customer service told me they had NO SERIAL NUMBER lists for Pan Americans. The Conn serial numbers on woodwind.org are not relevant to Pan American clarinets, so it is not vintage 1926. I was referred to the Shrine to Music Museum (anyone heard of this museum? Their phone number is 605-677-5306).

I contacted the museum, and was told the following: The instruments in question are actually "Violin Finish" clarinets manufactured for the Conn Pan American student line. Production started soon after WWII as Conn got it's instrument lines running. They were manufactured from 1947 until 1949 or 1950. Records were destroyed so no serial number information is available. They are indeed a wood laminate. They would have probably been successful but a bad batch of wood was used and they got a reputation for cracking. As a consequence of this bad reputation the line eventually died. I find this striking because I had been informed by a instrument salesman familiar with the line that they had been guaranteed never to crack!

In summary, these "rosewood" look Pan American clarinets were a brief post war experiment in producing wood laminate clarinets with the durability of plastic (resonite) and an attractive finish. The experiment failed failed, possibly without good reason. I have heard various claims about their desirability as collector items, but the Museum could shed no light on this point.

Personally, I like mine, but not as well as my pre-R13 Buffet. The keywork and intonation are decidedly inferior. The tone is almost as good as the Buffet, though - without entering into mysticism, and without a spectrum analyzer I can say no more about the sound quality. I use it as a spare and when camping. And, I suppose one could claim I'm "collecting" it.

Some of the following information is from an old Allied Supply Corporation Catalog. (Allied Supply sells items of interest to instrument repair technicians. They do not sell retail.)

I don't have Conn serial numbers from 1967-1974. In 1974 Conn started using a code system. First character indicates decade, "G" for 1970's, "H" for 1980's, etc. Second character indicates month, "A" for January, "B" for February, etc. Third character (number) indicates year of decade. Fourth character indicates type of instrument. The remaining numbers are a monthly serial number.

For example, my C clarinet was made by Conn and has serial number C95887L. "C" indicates it's a C clarinet (I think), "95887" means it was manufactured sometime around 1922, and "L" means it was built to a'=440.

On the other hand, my Buffet R-13, purchased new in 1972, has a serial number 118122, which indicates that it was manufactured sometime around 1971.