On a Sunday night in early February of 2011, my house was burglarized while I was away, and among other things, three guitars and a banjo were stolen. The instruments have nearly no monetary value, but the banjo and one of the guitars were instruments I inherited from my grandfather Pat, who died many years before I was born. The thief will never understand or appreciate what he was walking away with on that Sunday night. Those instruments contain a rich and complicated history, which has become a sort of family lore. Now that they are gone, I feel more than ever the need to share this story – the legend of the Stanley, the man who made it, and its place in my life.

My grandfather, Pat Moore, was a veteran of WWII who came back to St. Louis from the war missing his right leg. He lied about his age to enlist at 17 years old, and was deployed to the Philippines. There, while rescuing an injured medic, he was shot in the leg. It was amputated at the knee in the field, but the wound became gangrenous. Pat didn’t know until he woke up from anesthesia in a bed at Walter Reed, but the remainder of his leg was gone, up to the hip. This didn’t stop him from marrying my grandmother when he came home, raising two daughters, and starting his own business. When Pat was 60 years old, he died quite suddenly of cancer. Growing up, I would discover many artifacts of this man throughout my grandmother’s house, like the canes and crutches he used to get around on one leg, his war medals, the dusty paraphernalia behind the basement bar he built himself, and, most importantly, his guitars. Through stories and photographs, I understood how much Pat loved to sit in his chair at the table after a meal, singing along to the old country songs he played on these instruments, and ruining an otherwise pleasant dinner with the family.



The stolen guitar that belonged to Pat was the Stanley – or, as I knew it during the early part of my life, “the heavy brown guitar.” Staying at Grandma’s house, my sister and I would explore the shadowy corners of the basement and the little-used upper floor for hidden treasures. I can still remember picking up the Stanley – which was probably a quarter of my weight at the time – and feeling the rusty strings under my fingers. It’s the first guitar I ever touched, without even knowing what I was holding.



As I got older, music became a significant part of my life. I taught myself how to play guitar, and Pat’s guitars were given to me. I cherished this tangible connection to a man I never met.

The more I came to appreciate this bond, the more I became fascinated with the story of the Stanley. It was made, I learned early on, by a man named Clyde Stanley, an outwardly pleasant man who worked for Pat for a few years in the early ’60s.



To pay off a debt he owed, Clyde gave Pat a guitar and a banjo that he made himself while he was in prison in the ’50s, along with a record called “The Lifer.”



But there was more to know about Clyde. At this point, the story takes a dark turn.

Clyde Stanley played guitar professionally in jazz bands around St. Louis and Detroit and hosted a live big band radio show in St. Louis. But at the same time, Clyde was the black sheep of his relatively well-off family. He fashioned himself to be a gangster, and a string of petty crimes saw him in and out of jail. His run-ins with the law became increasingly frequent and more serious in nature, leading to a straining of the ties between himself, his parents, and his siblings. Eventually his parents effectively disowned him and severed any connection he had to their successful chain of appliance stores in St. Louis. Meanwhile, he had built a family of his own that he was slowly destroying with his penchant for small-time crime and a bad habit of beating his wife. She would move the family around to get away from him, but Clyde would always find them. On one occasion, the physical abuse became so severe that their young daughter Muriel intervened, brandishing a kitchen knife. Clyde took the knife from her, patted her on the head and told her he admired her moxie.



In 1953, while being questioned by two Detroit police officers in their squad car, he grabbed one of their sidearms and proceeded to hold them hostage in the car for two days. Clyde was convicted of armed kidnapping. He was sent to Marquette State Penitentiary, Michigan’s maximum-security facility on the Upper Peninsula to serve his sentence.

While behind bars, Clyde joined a band of inmates in 1962. It included Al Gliva, inmate #62055, who was serving a life sentence for murder. Al had sent a letter to Longhorn Records in Dallas about a couple of tunes he had written from within the prison walls. Representatives at Longhorn took some interest in a track fittingly called “The Lifer.” With the cooperation of Marquette’s warden, Longhorn’s recording technician flew to the prison and made this record, “The Lifer,” b/w “How Many.” As the back cover of this rare 45 says, “the proceeds of the sale of this record will go to Al Gliva and his prison band. It is our sincere hope that because of our efforts, this record of ‘The Lifer’ might keep some boy from turning to crime.”



The sound of a cell door slamming shut begins “The Lifer,” a song written from the perspective of a reformed inmate eager to prove – to the parole board, to society, to God, hell, to himself – that he is a changed man. Indeed, Gliva was eventually paroled in the late ‘60s. Clyde Stanley played guitar on the record, quite possibly the Stanley itself, and seemed to take the message to heart – he was paroled later that year.



Clyde returned to St. Louis in 1962, where he found employment at Pat Moore’s University City business, State Window Air Conditioners. During that time, Clyde incurred some debt to Pat, and paid him back in the form of two instruments he’d made during his time in Marquette: a tenor banjo, and a heavy, solid electric guitar bearing his last name.



Being hand built, the Stanley was a unique instrument. The solid body was clearly influenced by Les Paul’s eponymous Gibson guitar. (In fact, Clyde may have known Les Paul personally. Clyde’s daughter Muriel relayed childhood memories of her father having a friend named Les and his wife Mary over to their house to play music.) Most obviously, the Stanley’s body shape recalls the Gibson’s, except that the Stanley features a small cutaway on the bass side of the body at the neck. It also differs from the Gibson in that the Stanley has a flat top, as opposed to the Gibson’s carved, arched top. (Gibson later offered a flat top Les Paul in the Junior model beginning in 1954.) Other similarities include the set neck joint, the trapeze tailpiece and Tune-O-Matic style bridge (similar to the original Gold Top Les Paul), and solid mahogany construction, although the Stanley eschews the Gibson’s maple cap for a one-piece slab of mahogany for the entire body. On that body is mounted a single DeArmond pickup, with volume and tone controls hidden underneath a thick plastic pickguard.

Naturally, and most distinctively, the guitar bears the name of its builder in white script on the headstock, in Clyde’s own hand.



Aside from the features of the guitar, it’s also a unique joy to play. The heavy, dense mahogany sings; the DeArmond is sensitive, musical and hot the way only a big vintage single coil can be; the neck – built to fit Clyde’s meaty paws – fills the left hand like a Louisville Slugger.



While splitting his time in the early ‘60s between St. Louis and Detroit, Clyde had taken up with a married woman, Thelma Trombley. Sometime around 1963, he was pressuring her to leave her husband, Ray Trombley, for him, but she was having none of it. She and her husband had two young children, both of whom were developmentally disabled, and she refused to turn her back on them. Clyde confronted the couple in the parking lot of their children’s school. Words exchanged led to a scuffle, and the fight ended when Clyde shot and killed them both.

He would later tell his daughter, “killing them two was like stepping on an ant”.

He made orphans of two children and finally succeeded in destroying the relationship with the rest of his family – they would never have contact with him again. He wrote his daughter letters that she returned unopened; she couldn’t bear to read them. She wanted to forget about the man who never really was the father he should have been.

Clyde was never charged with Thelma’s death, but he was tried and convicted of Ray’s murder. In 1966, he was ordered to serve life without the possibility of parole in Marquette Penitentiary – back inside the prison walls he knew all too well. It was there just years before he’d played a song about contrition and reform, but his failure to heed that message meant he would spend the rest of his life in a living hell.

Clyde died in prison in 1981, the year I was born. His family didn’t know of his death until two years later.

For better or worse, Clyde’s story – the story of a Bad Man – is intertwined with Pat’s – a decidedly Good Man who literally gave of himself in service to his country and returned home to marry his love, start a family, and start a business with a penchant for hiring men overlooked by most of society.



The instruments connect these men to each other; these instruments connect us, tangibly, to this past. Pat told his daughters this strange story from behind his strange guitar. My mom told it to me so I could know more about this special instrument, and her father, the special man I never got to meet.

I’ve had the distinct honor of recording with the Stanley on two albums with my band, Trigger 5. When I inherited and refurbished the guitar, it hadn’t been played in earnest in more than 35 years. But I could tell when I picked it up that it had songs in it, just waiting to come out.



Now that it has been stolen, I am denied the sense of connection I felt when playing it.

What you can’t steal is a story.

But for all I know, it’s still out there somewhere. So, if you ever happen to see an old guitar bearing the name Stanley on the headstock, know that you’re glimpsing an important piece of a bizarre, dark history.

And if you can, let me know where you saw it – I’d like to have our guitar back in the family, where it belongs.

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