Clarence Leonidas “Leo” Fender was born in 1909 and grew up in California. His parents Clarence Monte Fender and Harriet Elvira Wood, were owners of a successful orange grove located between Anaheim and Fullerton, California. Leo showed an interest in tinkering with electronics at a very early age. His uncle, who ran an automotive-electric shop was a big influence on him. Leo was fascinated with radios and soon began repairing them in a small shop in his parents’ home.
After graduating from Fullerton High School, Leo attended Fullerton Junior College where he studied to be an accountant. He continued to teach himself electronics, and tinker with radios and other electrical items. Leo never took any kind of formal electronics training. He later became a bookkeeper and learned a bit about running a business. While working as an accountant, a local band leader asked Leo if he could build a public address system for use by the band at dances in Hollywood. You could not drive over to Guitar Center or Sam Ash in those days. These were not “off-the-shelf” items. Fender was eventually contracted to build six of these PA systems.
Leo married his fist wife, Esther Klosky in 1934 and took a responsible job with California Highway Department in San Luis Obispo. However, his government job was eliminated due to cut backs. After losing another job as an accountant at a Tire company due to downsizing after only six months, Leo had enough with balancing numbers.
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In 1938, with a borrowed $600, Leo and Esther returned to Fullerton, and Leo started his own radio repair shop, “Fender Radio Service.” This is where the Fender story begins. He opened up his small shop to repair radios, phonograph players, home audio amplifiers, public address systems and musical instrument amplifiers. In the late 1930’s they were all based on vacuum tubes with the original designs based on research developed and released to the public domain by Western Electric which made telephone company equipment.
Leo’s store front business also carried records for sale and the rented self-designed PA systems. Leo began building amplifiers based on his own designs or modifications to designs, that he felt improved their quality and usefulness. The Fender Radio Service was one of the few places around Fullerton to buy records or get a radio repaired. Leo was a smart businessman and provided whatever items or devices out of his little business that could possibly make a profit. Local musicians and band leaders began coming to Leo for PA systems, which he built, rented, and sold. They also visited his store for amplification for acoustic guitars that were beginning to be seen used in big band and jazz music, and for the electric “Hawaiian” or “lap steel” guitars that were becoming quite popular.
During WWII, in the early 1940’s Leo Fender met Clayton Orr “Doc” Kauffman who was a musician and formally the chief designer of electric guitars for Rickenbacker, which had been building and selling lap steel guitars for a decade. Doc Kauffman invented and patented one of the first mechanical vibrato units, Vibrola (sometimes called “Kauffman Vibrola” or “Kaufman vibrato”) in 1935. He soon became Leo Fender’s business partner and they founded the K & F Manufacturing Corp to design, manufacture, and market electric instruments and amplifiers.
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K & F began production in 1945 with Hawaiian lap steel guitars (incorporating a patented pickup) and vacuum tube (or valve) amplifiers sold as sets. By the end of the year Fender became convinced that manufacturing was more profitable than repair and he decided to concentrate on that business instead.
It is important to realize that this was at the end of the great war and Kauffman had already seen failed attempts at profits at Rickenbacker. Kauffman was unconvinced at the prospects with Leo and was afraid of losing the money he still had. Kauffman and Fender amicably parted ways by early 1946. At that point Leo renamed the company the Fender Electric Instrument Company. The original service shop remained open until 1951, although Leo Fender did not personally supervise it after 1947.
So this was the point when ‘Fender’ as a company was actually born. A custom lap steel guitar made in 1946 for his friend Noel Boggs was thought to be the very first product sporting the now familiar Big “F” logo.
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In 1948, engineer George Fullerton was hired by Leo, beginning a partnership and friendship that would last for over 40+ years. George worked with Leo on many guitar and amp designs. He was also a big part of Fender introducing colors to the guitar models. The first one was known as “Fullerton Red” named for George Fullerton.
Two other people that played a large part in Fender’s early success were musician/product engineer Freddie Tavares and marketing genius Don Randall. Rickenbacker was the exclusive distributor for Fender’s Hawaiian lap steel guitars and amplifiers in the early days. Don Randall assembled what Fender’s original partner Doc Kauffman called “a sales distributorship like nobody had ever seen in the world.” It was Don Randall that suggested that Leo, design a Spanish style guitar to complement the Hawaiian style lap steels Fender was selling around 1948. Leo started working on the design.
No one knows just how much influence Doc Kauffman, Les Paul, Don Randall or Paul Bigsby’s Merle Travis guitar had on Leo’s early design of Fender’s first solid body electric guitar. It is likely that Leo was well aware of Bigsby’s solid body as they knew each other socially and were both based in California. Leo Fender was not a guitar player. This may have been a disadvantage, but also likely allowed him to “think outside the box” in what he thought his design of the guitar should be.
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Leo spent a great deal of time talking to local Country & Western musicians that he knew. He rented PAs to many of them. Fender had ben making lap steel guitars for a few years. Leo developed a good idea for what they wanted in an instrument. He determined that many of the players back in those days, owned maybe one guitar. If the guitar was damaged or the frets wore out, the repairs would be costly and time consuming. If their guitar was being repaired they could not earn a living. Working musicians would appreciate a guitar that was inexpensive, plus easy and quick to repair.
Many small combos were now playing boogie-woogie, rhythm and blues, western swing, and honky-tonk in roadhouses and dance halls which Leo realized created a growing need for louder, cheaper, and more durable guitars. Since Leo rented PA equipment, he was well aware of the feedback issues that a hollow body electrified guitars had. Leo was out to design what he thought was a better guitar for working musicians.
Leo Fender could look at something and immediately discern the simplest method of doing whatever had to be done, ” said Les Paul. “He was a good, honest guy who made a straightforward guitar.
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After a few prototypes and having some players test and comment, then eventual improvements, Leo was ready to launch Fender’s first solid body guitar. The first guitar was the 1950 Fender Esquire, so named as it sounded regal. The Esquire had a single pickup, 25.5 inch full scale and no truss rod. The early one shown in the 1950 Fender catalog was actually painted black with a white pickguard. I guess this fit the “regal” theme. Even though Esquire magazine was popular at the time no one complained about the name. Leo had felt the rock maple he was using for necks would be strong enough and a truss rod would not be needed. This proved to be a false start as some of the necks had issues with warping. Only about fifty were likely made. What followed was a more refined model.
In 1951, Fender offered the first mass-produced solid-body Spanish-style electric guitar, which had two pickups and a truss rod. One issues was the early pre-orders were actually for the one pickup Esquire which was a bit cheaper to manufacture. So the solution was to give the new two pickup model a new name and discontinue the Esquire one pickup model. Radio was a king in those days and Leo was a radio repair guy, so the name reflected this, as it was called the Fender Broadcaster.
The Broadcaster was introduced to the public by Fender in 1951, with a price tag of $169.95 plus $39.95 for the case. Featuring the addition of an adjustable truss rod and was the first Fender guitar officially released with 2 pickups (although some transitional 2-pickup Esquires exist). BUT it was short lived… the name was soon changed. There are estimates that anywhere from 50 to 500 Broadcasters were built, though most experts agree there were probably no more than 200 instruments produced in the six months or so during which the Broadcaster name was used
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Almost immediately, Fender was contacted by the Gretsch Company from Brooklyn, New York by telegram. Gretsch informed Fender that they had a trademark on
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