PATRICK OGLE: So, you started Gruhn Guitar, you started this company in 1970?

GEORGE GRUHN: Right. I started wheeling and dealing guitars when I was a college student at the University of Chicago in 1963, and over the years, I developed the hobby more and more until it eventually effectively got out of hand to the point that it was crowding me out of my apartment, and also it was taking up more time than my academic studies and graduate school, so I had a choice. I could go for a full-time academic career in animal behavior studies or I could go into music, and I eventually chose music. Let get this.

PATRICK OGLE: So, you opted for guitars as sort of an animal study?

GEORGE GRUHN: Effectively, I had decided that I would really rather have the music store at that point, and a lot of that may well be because I'm temperamentally unsuited to being a good employee and it's hard to start in an academic career as a department chairman. You can spend your whole life and not become the chairman, and in business you can start out where indeed you are the chairman. It may be the chairman of a very, very, very small department of one, but you can be your own boss, and that probably appeals to my personality.

PATRICK OGLE: Now what -- I mean how did you -- I mean how did you learn so much about guitars? Was it something you always did or was it something that -- I mean did it appeal to you from like the time that you were a kid?

GEORGE GRUHN: I started late with the guitars. I was really into zoology at a very early age. I was collecting insects at age four. One other time, I was either five or six I was collecting turtles and frogs, and I started with snakes when I was eight. In many ways, I approached the musical instruments very much the same as I did zoology. You can collect guitars as a musician and just play them and listen to them, fondle them that way, or you can study them almost as zoological specimens, which I did, and effectively I study these the same way that I did reptiles. And in my mind, I organized them in a Linnaean taxonomic system just as a zoologist would reptiles and amphibians or other such zoological specimens. And the books I have written are organized, for all practical purposes, as a zoological field guide except that it happens to be North American fretted instruments rather than reptiles and amphibians, but the approach is the same. And I find that if you organize knowledge in patterns, as it is done scientifically, you can store a lot of information in your mind. If you have random unrelated facts, you can't do it nearly as effectively, and the zoological studies that I have done in the past and my interests in that area are really very directly related to the approach that I have for collecting and dealing in instruments. Effectively, I'm not really a businessman as much as a person who's hobby got out of hand.