In November 2010 Jay Jones, the sixth-generation president of drum maker Noble & Cooley, traveled with his wife, Carol, to Gettysburg, Pa., to attend a Remembrance Day event, commemorating the anniversary of President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Their mission was to drum up interest for a limited–edition line of commemorative snares they planned to roll out between 2011 and 2014 to mark the 150th anniversary of the four-year-long Civil War. Noble & Cooley’s replica drums are historically significant because they are made with some of the same equipment that was used to create the company’s original Civil War-era drums. Jones also uses the same specs as co-founder James P. Cooley, his great-great-great-grandfather, did.
“Re-enactors are very passionate group of people,” says Jones, 58. “They try to keep all their gear as authentic as possible. Some go to events with 150-year-old muskets and coats. Few drums have survived, so [the replicas] are a chance to purchase a piece of history.” Recalling the 2010 trip, he says, “It was a very moving experience, to have 5,000 people show up in the period costume—not just men, but women and kids. It was like stepping into 1860. Except when those costumed customers handed me their credit cards to place orders.”
Noble & Cooley—still based in Granville, Mass., where the company was founded in 1854—plans to issue only 50 copies in each of the four Civil War anniversary years. But to date the company has sold just 27 of the first year’s (2011) replicas, at $850 apiece. Jones is hopeful that as word spreads, sales will rise, especially during the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 2013.
The company has experienced many highs and lows in its long history. From 1920 to 1980, it was the world’s largest manufacturer of toy drums. In response to market changes in the 1980s, it expanded beyond producing toys and began making drums for professional musicians, including stars Paul McCartney and Phil Collins. But the recession that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, hit the company hard. Today Noble & Cooley, which in the 1990s had 120 employees, now has only three: Jay Jones, wife Carol, 60; and their son Nick, 28. Sales have yet to return to seven figures. These days, 80% of Noble & Cooley’s $350,000 annual revenue comes from custom-built, high-end drums. Despite the setbacks, the Jones family remains committed to keeping their historic business alive. “What else am I going to do?” asks Jay rhetorically.
Back in time
Like watching a Civil War reenactment, walking through the company’s factory feels like traveling back in time. The facility is located on the outskirts of a rustic town at the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains.
The company’s original machines, dating as far back as the 1850s, are stationed along the periphery of the factory. Although they require constant maintenance, Jay Jones still uses these machines today. One steam-heats sheets of wood, another bends them into the outer shell and yet another stamps designs on the metal shells of the toy drums.
James P. Cooley began making toy drums in 1854 with his boyhood pal, Silas Noble, a farmer and master mechanic, at Noble’s farmhouse kitchen. Like many other local farmers, they had experienced sagging agriculture sales and a shortage of labor and dabbled in manufacturing to supplement their incomes. Their toy drums immediately flew out the kitchen door. Within a month they had moved to a nearby red house and hired their first employee. That year they produced 631 toy drums.
Jones still has James P. Cooley’s diaries, which first mention his and Noble’s interest in drums in an entry dated Dec. 20, 1853: “Tuesday, started for Pittsfield with Sile. Took cars at Westfield 1:30 arrived Pittsfield 4:00. Went to Pierces, selected melodian, Sile went to drum shop.” Many diary entries mention materials, buying methods and deliveries. “They would buy live animals, delivered on the hoof,” Jones says. “They tanned the skins for drum heads and sold the wool and meat.”
The company and its 15 employees outgrew their building in 1857 and raised a 40-by-30-foot, two-story shop that May. When war broke out in 1861, Noble & Cooley began producing military drums, which Union soldiers used to communicate on the battlefield.
The idea to reproduce those Civil War drums came after an estate salesman called Jones to offer him one of the original drums from the Gettysburg battle. “He looked inside the vent hole, saw our insignia and discovered we were still in business,” says Nick Jones. The Joneses bought the antique drum for $5,000. With the Civil War sesquicentennial just around the corner, the father and son thought, why not rebuild that drum?
Obtaining the original specs was a challenge. Luckily, the Heritage Military Music Foundation in Watertown, Wis., let Jones borrow a Noble & Cooley Civil War-era drum from its collection. Because that vintage drum had already been taken apart once and restored, the museum allowed Jones to dismantle it (and put it back together) so he could record all the details he needed to build a prototype.
Changes and challenges
In the 1860s and 1870s, Noble & Cooley expanded its product line to include croquet sets, cigar lighters, toothpicks, rolling hoops, doll carriages and bowling ten pins. At first, it used an adjacent brook for power and eventually converted from water power to steam. By 1873, the company was banging out 100,000 drums a year in addition to the other products.
After the deaths of Noble in 1888 and Cooley the following year, their sons, Orville Noble and Ralph Cooley, took over. They barely got their feet wet when the factory burned down in an 1889 fire. The sons bought out a competitor and built three buildings on the site where the company is still based today. After one of those buildings was destroyed by another fire in 1902, they rebuilt it. Today, one of the buildings houses the company offices and factory as well as the Noble & Cooley Center for Historic Preservation (see sidebar). Another building is used as a warehouse; the third is not in current use.
Early in the 20th century, Orville and Ralph adapted their equipment for manufacturing tin toy drums. In 1903, after much deliberation, they sold the company to National Novelty Corporation, which had captured more than 90% of the domestic toy and novelty market. Later, when National Novelty was acquired by yet another company, toy drum sales plummeted. Orville and Ralph spent years in court trying to buy back their business. In 1912, they prevailed.
After Orville died in 1921, Ralph bought out the Noble interest. Jones describes Ralph Cooley as a progressive man: “He brought electricity to the factory and his home three years before the town had electricity.” Ralph also bought Western Massachusetts’ first car, for $720, in 1899: a “locomobile” run by a steam engine, fired by a gasoline flame.
In 1935 Ralph Cooley died childless, leaving the company to his nephew, Ralph Hiers, Jay Jones’s great-grandfather. Hiers and his sons, Ralph Jr. (Jones’s grandfather) and Herbert, took over in the middle of the Depression, but the company was doing well because the toy drum had become a staple plaything. During World War II, however, the business suffered. Manufacturers were no longer allowed to use metal, so the company began making drums from cardboard. To aid the war effort, they made wooden spools and reels for an explosives company.
In 1952, Jay Jones’s father, John, joined the business. “My grandfather—his father-in-law—did not like the way John ran the business,” recalls Jones. “Over time, Ralph spent less and less time at the office, and more and more time in Florida. But every Thursday he would call. And every Friday my father would have a migraine.” Even so, John helped the company grow in the 1960s through licensing deals with Disney and the Muppets.
John’s wife, Joyce—Jay Jones’s mother—started working in the company at age 16, assembling jazz sets and stringing drum heads. At age 18, when she started making heads and working on the machines, Jones says, “She remembers getting told, ‘If you get cut, don’t bleed on the [drum] head!’ Well, once she cut herself, and in fact lost the tip of her finger. And no, she did not get blood on the head!” Joyce retired in 1996 at age 68, but still stops in to work part-time, making toy drum items for several museum shops. She is also the company and family historian and gives talks about the venerable business to civic organizations and churches.
Jay Jones, a lanky six feet, two inches tall with dark hair and a boyish grin, joined the company full-time in 1973. He presided over a growth spurt that produced sales of about $3 million by 1979, all from toys. But by 1980, globalization and dramatic changes in toy tastes forced Jones to reinvent Noble & Cooley by entering the professional drum arena.
Going high-end
In 1983, “A drum collector found out that we still did steam bending here, brought me a cracked drum from the 1930s and asked if I could make him a new shell,” Jones recalls. “My dad allowed me the freedom to explore this option as a viable business.”
Jones worked closely with designer Bob Gatzen, a renowned drummer and inventor, to develop the new high-end drums. Jones dug up, dusted off and reconditioned a steam-bending machine that had survived the company fire in 1889. The resulting Solid Shell Maple Classic snare drum, introduced in 1984, was a huge success. “It revolutionized the drum industry,” boasts Jones. Customers shelled out $1,200 for custom-built snares and $3,000 for complete drum kits.
This niche helped Noble & Cooley thrive during the next decade, with revenues rebounding to almost $2 million by 2001. That is, until September 11 of that year, when orders suddenly collapsed.
“We had 24 containers of purchased material and three warehouses full of manufactured product,” says Jones. “We had already assumed $1.5 million in debt to buy our materials. It almost killed the company. To survive, we had to sell off our products at ten cents on the dollar, plus I sold 750 acres of wooded property to pay off the bank.” Sales wound up plunging to less than $200,000 the following year—the company’s low point.
“We hated to lay off our entire staff [then 60 people], but we were in survival mode,” says Jay. “You have to do what you have to do.” The family’s personal finances suffered as well, he notes: “We’re tied to the business—it went down, we went down.”
In the Nick of time
Between 2004 and 2005, leadership of the company transferred gradually to Jay Jones as his father, John, came in to the office less frequently. “The handoff was very easy,” Jay Jones says. John stopped in regularly to discuss “matters of the day,” his son recalls, “but he made it clear that I was the one handling the day-to-day and could do what I wanted.”
John Jones, now in his 80s, still drops by the office a couple times a week and is “very supportive,” Jay says. “He realizes that if he hadn’t allowed me to pursue the professional drums, the company probably wouldn’t have survived 2001 to 2002.”
Jay’s son Nick joined the company full-time in 2006. “I’m not really the inventive type,” says Nick, who handles artist relations and customer service, updates the website and helps produce drums. He has tried to get the hang of using the bending machine, thus far unsuccessfully. “It takes finesse and practice,” Nick says. “I’m eventually going to have to do that, but I don’t want to break the product in the process.”
Jay’s other son, Jonathan, 29, an artist who works at an ad company, plays drums in a band with Nick, a bass guitarist. Despite Jonathan’s experience as a drummer, he can’t join the company, his father says. “He’d love to work here if there were enough business to support another family member,” says Jay.
For now, he says, “Nick is learning the necessary skills to build the products and is designing some good items.” In fact, he points out, Nick came up with the idea for the company’s newest product: the CoolMount, a lightweight, two-piece bracket that locks a drum mount into any suspension system in the same position during each set-up, without the need for wing nuts, bolts or tools. The idea came to Nick after one of the band’s many gigs. “The small bars where we play give you ten minutes to get on stage and three to get off,” Nick says. That wasn’t nearly enough time for Jonathan’s 11-piece drum kit, even with Nick helping.
Nick took his design for the CoolMount to his father, who crafted a prototype. It’s now available for sale online. Jones is trying to get the big chain music stores to carry the mounts. He’s also sending them out for endorsements.
One distributor asked Noble & Cooley about developing a mid-priced kit. Jay and Nick toyed with the idea but decided it would cheapen the brand name they have worked hard to establish for the past few decades. If they had enough start-up capital they could set up a separate division with a different company name for that line of drums, but for now they’re staying the course, grateful to still be in business.
These days, half of Noble & Cooley’s high-end drum customers come from overseas, mostly from Germany and Thailand. Carol Jones handles overseas distribution. “If we didn’t have international accounts, we probably wouldn’t be here,” her husband says.
Maybe, maybe not. Their company may be small, but Jay and Nick Jones have plenty of energy and Yankee ingenuity. Jay says he’s confident that Nick will be “ready to take over as soon as I want to or can afford to leave.” He says the family has no “Plan B” if financial difficulties force the business to close.
Does he see growth potential? “I can’t say for sure,” Jay Jones says. “I hope it would grow again. People who use our products now love them. It’s a matter of being able to afford them.”
Jayne A. Pearl, a member of Family Business Magazine’s founding staff, is now a freelance writer, editor and speaker. She is co-author, with Richard A. Morris, of Kids, Wealth, and Consequences (Bloomberg, a Wiley imprint, 2010; www.kwandc.com), and a new e-book, Kids and Money Guide to Shrinking Your Family’s Carbon Footprint (ALLL Right Books, 2012; www.kidsandmoney.com).
Preserving regional history
In 2007, Jay Jones and his family created the non-profit Noble & Cooley Center for Historic Preservation, housed in two of the company’s three buildings. The center’s mission is to preserve the regional history of manufacturing, agricultural pursuits and rural crafts by acquiring and maintaining significant historic buildings, machinery, collections and local artifacts.
The 5,000-square-foot museum exhibits equipment used to manufacture toys from the 1850s through the 1950s, such as copper print rolls for the company’s five-color design and a one-of-a-kind eight-color press (pictured), designed and built in 1926 by Ralph B. Cooley, son of the company’s co-founder. In the future, Jay Jones hopes an interactive, hands-on exhibit will show visitors how a toy drum was made in the Civil War era.
Jay’s brother Matt, an electrical engineer, serves as president of the museum. Their sister, Liz Smith, is also active in the museum project.
— J.A.P.
Copyright 2012 by Family Business Magazine. This article may not be posted online or reproduced in any form, including photocopy, without permssion from the publisher. For reprint information, contact bwenger@familybusinessmagazine.com.