by jfine » Wed Aug 29, 2012 2:48 am
I've actually played one of those. I grew up in San Francisco, and when I was a teenager in the mid-'60's, a dealer called Satterlee and Chapin started carrying those. I remember that they got one of those Maltese Cross guitars in, and I tried it out--as I recall, it played pretty well, although I wasn't much of a player at 15, and anything that played better than my Japanese St. George was killer! I never liked the look of that model, and I remember wondering if Thomas made anything a bit less, uh, Teutonic. As it turns out, they did, but I've never seen one. There was a good article in Fretboard Journal a while back on Harvey Thomas--apparently he was quite eccentric. (like you couldn't tell from that guitar...)