This is a reply that I posted on another forum where we were talking about how well the cases were made back in those days, and it also tells how I came about getting this guitar:
When my father passed away one of my older sisters ended up with ALL of his things,includeing his Mandolin and his Violin,she was married at the time to a guy who played guitar, shortly after he passed away she divorced this guy and he took everything that blonged to my dad,includeing all of his Craftsmen tools with him, but for some stoke of luck he left the Guitar
Some years later my mother was up in Indiana staying with her,one day my mom had to go down into the basement for something and there was Dad's guitar,,,,in the case,,,floating in water,now this was back when the case was in better shape,she put the guitar up in a dry place, later she moved to Alabama bringing the guitar with her, she just told my sister that she feels the guitar should go to me,my mom wrote to me and told me that she had the guitar and that the next time I came to Al. she would give it to me,I live in Fl.
It was a while before I could get up there to get it, the whole time I just knew that it was ruined from being in the water for god only knows how long, my younger brother was comeing to Fl. so I asked him to bring the guitar to me, which he did,
When he handed it to me I slowly opened the case, therewas no signs of water damage at all on the inside of the case and the guitar was still in the same shape that it always was,No moisture damage at all
The case however looks bad from all this, the bottom of the case is comeing apart and the fiber bouard is warped some,but it still looks good insde,
And that's how I got the guitar, I just wish I could find her X-husband, as far as I am concerned he has a lot of things that belong to me and my brother, who knows maybe he will read this and come clean
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So that's that part of my story,here is how I finally found out some info on it, I hope this might help some of you in your searches,it got me going again just about the time I was going to give up on it,
I started looking for anything about the guitar in 2002 and I found out very fast that this wasn't going to be easy, first I searched all over the internet for any information on a Crest guitar, all I found was info on a Gibson Crest(very nice guitar)but this had nothing to do with mine,so I finally joined into this Guitar forum and asked for any help on this, this too was in 2002, all i found out by this was that there were other people with the same problem
I kinda put it on hold for a long time in hopes that in time someone would post something about it as time went on,still nothing,I made a new post on this forum and in it I mentioned that I was going to do some research on another guitar I have ,a Bently , SB replied to the post saying that there was a lot of info on the Benlty on his web site so this is how I got to this forum,
I was told that my Bently was made by Epiphone and at this time I had just about given up on the Crest so I went to a Epiphone forum looking for info on the Benlty, I found out very little about there, one day while I was on the Epi forum just for the hell of it I typed in Crest on the search tab and hit the search button, I was very surprised to see that there was something about a Crest on this forum, the topic for this thread was :How many guitars do you own?, and on the very first reply a man going by the name of Svet showed his guitars, I scrolled all the way to the bottom of his pictures and low and behold the Headstock of a Crest guitar came into veiw, now this was just a couple of months ago,I was very happy to say the least to finally see a guitar like mine in a picture and also to have the guy who owned it to talk to about his,
I replied to the post and asked if he could tell me anything about the Crest that he had in his collection, all he was able to tell me was that it was passed down to him from his grandfather and that with all the other guitars that he had he just hadn't had the time to do any research on it,
BUT another fella replied saying, "You aren't going to beleive this" and he posted some old Sears and Roebuck cataloge pages with our guitars in them 
From this I went on to find out what I know now about it,
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First I found a antique dealer that had pages from the caloge for sale, I sent off for the 1936 and 2- 1938 pages from it,(they made it so you couldn't read the fine print on the pages that were on the internet) he didn't have the 1937 page or I just couldn't find it, I bought the pages in hopes that the fine print would tell me more about the guitar
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Come to find out the guitar was made by Harmony so off to a Harmony web site I go,this opened up a whole new can of worms for me, on this site with the help of some great guys we were able to find out that it was made in 1937, when you look down the "F" holes you can see 3758, this is the model number and you can also see a S*37 , this means it was made in the spring of 1937
Before I was able to get and post pictures of it I had descrided the tuners that were on it to a man that goes by Fran,this guy really knows his stuff, he told me that by my desciption of the tuners that they were not original,this all came about because one of them was missing a button onthe tuners and I wanted to get it fixed,anyway him saying that weren't the ones that came on it got me wanting to see what was supposed to be on it , so another guy ,David, posted a picture of what he thought should be on it, so I took the guitar and took off the old tuners and sure enough there were extra holes in the headpeice where the old tuners were and you could still see the imprint of the shape of the originals, sure enough they matched the ones in the picture that David had sent, I told you, these know their way around the Harmony guitars
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Well at this time this is all I have on it, in the future I plan on finding out how long they were made and if the Crest guitar company was a company within it's self and why did the guitars have the name Crest on them,if they were made by Harmony,,,why not just put Harmony on them?And why doesn't my serial number have a "H" in it like the other Harmony built guitars I have seen, the plot thickens
