Strips of kerfed lining were glued to the inner edges of the rims. The 14-fret dreadnoughts were among the newest additions to the standard Martin line, having been added to the catalog the year before. The rosewood sides had been shaped on a hot bending iron, using one of the cleanest templates in the shop as a reference. Later that day, the neck block was glued and clamped to a pair of bent rosewood sides, which had been selected from the many such pieces drying in the attic of Martin’s North Street factory. had been making fretted instruments for just more than a century–and their total production now numbered in the tens of thousands.) Within the hour, the neck block for the last guitar of the batch was completed: Working freehand, the stamp man devoted one line to the model designations and then moved down to the next line for the serial numbers. Mahogany neck blocks had already been cut on the table saw and dovetailed on the shaper table, and now they were brought to a workstation where a set of metal hand stamps was kept: individual tools for the numerals 0 through 9, plus a dash and a few uppercase letters. The first step was at once the simplest and the most momentous. New sales orders had arrived, and while the heating system creaked back to life and the sounds of power tools began to fill the otherwise quiet workspace, Martin’s shop foreman, John Deichman, directed his attention toward a new assignment: initiating work on a batch of 12 rosewood-bodied dreadnought guitars. It was business as usual for the mostly rural folk of Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Martin Guitar Company, where a workforce of just more than 30 men arrived for their normal shift. By January 23, some businesses in eastern Pennsylvania remained closed–but not the C.F. A winter storm had come down from Canada, dumping a foot of snow on the Northeast before moving out to sea a few days later.

Nineteen thirty-five was only three weeks old but it already looked to be one of the snowiest years on record.

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