Dick Burns As I Knew Him
More Tales of Dick Burns

The Studio

When I met Dick in 1968 he was already the recording engineer at Syracuse University’s music school. The Crouse building itself impressed me with its commanding view out over the city and beyond as you approached it (now blocked out by taller buildings), its brownstone facade and its stained glass windows up to and including the auditorium on the second floor . Behind the stage was an impressively large pipe organ. There were many convocations and student recitals needing to get recorded and sometimes I would help Dick move the microphones around. The second floor ceiling was maybe fifteen feet high so it was a bit of a climb up a grand oak staircase from the auditorium level to Dick’s third floor studio. Despite his thinning white hair, Dick would bound up that broad-stepped oak staircase, two steps at a time. That always startled me, and I’d be huffing and puffing behind to keep up.

In the middle of his studio sat a long bench on which sat the pre-amplifiers and reel-to-reel tape decks that Dick had brought with him from New Haven, CT. (They were originally used for the record company he had founded, Overtone Records.) The studio was heated by an old steam radiator that was quite clunky and whose output was quite inadequate in the dead of winter and off-hours. So the heat from all those electronic tubes was a welcome supplement, not so much in the summertime.

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The House

Dick’s record collection was impeccably organized. He knew what he had by heart and knew where everything was. If he couldn’t find something, it drove him nuts. Other than the record collection the rest of the house was utter chaos. There was the dining room table that had the same undisturbed woven table cloth from New Haven on it all the years I knew him. It was strewn with music publications as was the living room and a short stool in the bathroom. Floors were seldom vacuumed. When I first got married my wife was appalled and would try to straighten it out. So when Dick would go to New Haven for a week she would go to work with her boxful of cleaning solutions. On one memorable occasion I helped her take down the living room drapes and carry them upstairs to the bathtub for a good soaking in a heavy duty cleanser. The water turned jet black! It could have been bottled as ink. The old New Haven furniture would get washed and polished. However just like Dick’s sister-in-law before her, Joyce eventually surrendered.

Dick would keep an ever-expanding punch-list list of things that needed repair. If it didn’t have something to do with music it sunk to the bottom of the list and stayed there. The repair of the downstairs lavatory beneath the staircase was a simple hand-written warning scotch-taped to the closed door “under construction.” Others at the bottom were too time-consuming. One of his big (and wholly impractical) dreams was to strip the layers of paint and restore all the oak woodwork throughout the house. Time to do that expired in 1967, the first full year he lived in Syracuse. So for all the years I knew him the staircase to the second floor and in the kitchen were only half completed. On the other hand an item that always was treated as a top priority was to build more shelving for records. Lumber had to be hauled downstairs to the basement for cutting on a large table saw. Records needed to be pulled off the old shelves and rearranged due to the fact that the French collection or the English collection could now be consolidated. The weight of the collection had to be safely redistributed. What a project to re-organize! Despite what got accomplished and what didn’t, his house always kept this grand, historic feel about it.

Friends

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Dick’s circle of friends in Syracuse included next door neighbors who would make sure the bachelor stayed nourished, music school professors,music school alumni, archivists, and serious audiophiles. Dick’s focus was on music with just several exceptions that could be counted on one hand: There was the autumnal wine tour. Two or three carloads of friends would wend their way around one of the Finger Lakes and afterwards dine at a restaurant that Dick knew about. All the other exceptions tended to be annualized celebrations – one school associate and his family hosted the yearly Christmas party and another the New Years Eve party. Dick assumed the Fourth of July picnic to which he would bring his softball and bat and contribute the hot dogs,(incidentally hot dogs were one of the few foods he knew how to cook.) After I got married, Dick assigned us the Super Bowl party.

One friend who visited Dick every Tuesday evening to listen to records was mesmorized by the back-lit VU meters and all of the lights on the audio equipment that would come alive. Between those listening experiences and all those lifelong friendships he summarized it best: “Welcome to Dick’s world.”

My Friendship

My record collection was at about 3,000 when we got married so Joyce knew what she was getting into. She voluntarily married and moved into my two bedroom apartment, one being the record room. An unforgettable experience was when we moved from my apartment located north of the city to the house we had purchased south-west of the city. The friends were involved and they organized as a procession of cars, 400 pounds of records per car. We drove bumper to bumper. Headlights were lit as if it were a wake. I assumed the honor of the lead car. My Delius collection occupied the back seat. Dick followed with Elgar and Brahms. Don Seibert had Tschaikovsky. And so on. We proceeded slowly across town, avoiding every bump. Using the rear view mirror and watching the record collection wag back and forth like the tail of a dog behind me was something.

There are stories too numerous to include. Dick’s relationship with our daughter was a hoot.

Dick’s health starting failing around year 2001. A group of his friends and associates in the local community (organized and scheduled by Don Seibert!) took care of him so he could remain in his house. For his last few days, Dick was hospitalized, and even on the very last one he and I were still exchanging Packburn information! He passed away in 2002.

Rich Warren who I credit with getting the Packburn business started ever so many years earlier dispersed Dick’s record collection as he had willed. I inherited Dick’s Delius collection. Just think, this whole adventure started with that innocent question asked in 1968 on the Greyhound bus to Syracuse, “Is this seat taken?” The rest is history. What a ride it has been and still is!

So let’s do a toast to the love of music. Hear hear!

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