Early Years
Zemaitis (born as Antanas Kazimeras Žemaitis) was born 1935 in London, England of Lithuanian family and left school at the age of sixteen to help out with family finances. He took up a five-year apprenticeship as a cabinet maker, but it was only when he found an old damaged guitar in his family attic that he found his real passion in life. After completing his national service, Zemaitis expanded this hobby in 1957 by producing a few basic guitars to learn about construction, soundhole shapes, tonewood, and string length. He experimented with differing multi-stringed instruments with some of these models making their way onto the folk scene. In 1960 he began selling his guitars at a price to cover the materials he used and soon realized that musicians needed instruments that were simple and light. By 1961, after being mentioned in the music press, Zemaitis started to be approached by leading players who wanted to use his guitars.
Read more about this topic: Tony Zemaitis
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I leave the governor’s office next week, and with it public life ... [which] has been on the whole a pleasant one. But for ten years and over my salaries have not equalled my expenses, and there has been a feeling of responsibility, a lack of independence, and a necessary neglect of my family and personal interests and comfort, which make the prospect of a change comfortable to think of.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)