Old Glory

An American ocarina brand, registered in 1940 on a claimed first use of August 25, 1939, to a company other than the one printed on its own instruction booklet.

Every claim below names the document it came from. The trademark record is reproduced from page scans of two volumes of the Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office and the annual Index of Trademarks, in four library copies, and every fact drawn from it appears in at least two of them. Where a question is open, the page says so rather than choosing. Research and drafting were done with help from Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant.

Old Glory was an American ocarina brand, registered in 1940 on a claimed first use of August 25, 1939, offered in five sizes and advertised on its own booklet as “AMERICAN MADE” and “They’re Tunable!” Its instruction sheet gives the maker as “Old Glory” Company, Dundee, Illinois. Its trademark was registered to a company in Chicago.

What can be dated comes from three documents: the company’s own instruction booklet, the Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office for 1940, and the annual Index of Trademarks. They give a first use, a registration, and a classification.

The booklet

The booklet is a four-page instruction sheet, How to Play “Old Glory” American Made Ocarinas, with a fingering chart inside and a price list on the back. Its cover reads:

HOW TO PLAY “Old Glory” AMERICAN MADE OCARINAS · They’re Tunable!

SOLD BY LEADING MUSIC STORES EVERYWHERE
MADE BY “Old Glory” COMPANY · DUNDEE, ILLINOIS

DURABLE CONSTRUCTION · CLEAR TONE QUALITY · ATTRACTIVE FINISH

The back carries the line, numbered:

No.		Each
024	E♭ Alto	$0.65
026	C Alto	.75
027	B♭ Tenor	.85
029	G Baritone	1.00
033	C Bass	1.50

Three things in it are worth setting down separately.

The fingering chart inside is copyrighted 1939.

The cover separates making from selling, in consecutive lines: made by the company at Dundee, sold by music stores everywhere.

And the catalog numbers on the back are not consecutive. 025, 028, and 030 through 032 are missing, and the five sizes do not account for them.

The museum holds two copies, and they are not the same printing. The copy scanned here reads SOLD BY LEADING MUSIC STORES EVERYWHERE; a second, held as a photograph taken from bearpawflutes.com in 2001, reads DISTRIBUTED BY in that line. Everything else on both agrees — the title, the five prices, the three colors, the Dundee address. Which printing came first is not established: both carry the same 1939 copyright line and neither carries a printing date.

What the register says

The instrument photographed on the cover carries a sticker reading TRADE MARK REG. The register bears the claim out.

In the 1940 Official Gazette, published for opposition:

Ser. No. 435,118. CHICAGO MUSICAL INSTRUMENT COMPANY, Chicago, Ill. Filed Aug. 19, 1940.

[the mark, drawn in cursive: Old Glory]

FOR WIND INSTRUMENTS — NAMELY, OCARINAS.

Claims use since Aug. 25, 1939.

And in the annual index, twice — once by registrant, once by goods:

Chicago Musical Instrument Company, Chicago, Ill. Wind instruments. 383,661; Dec. 17; Serial No. 435,118; published Oct. 8, 1940. Class 36.

Mark	Old Glory, the cursive wordmark
Owner	Chicago Musical Instrument Company, Chicago, Illinois
Goods	“Wind instruments — namely, ocarinas”
Class	36
Claimed first use	August 25, 1939
Filed	August 19, 1940
Published for opposition	October 8, 1940
Registered	December 17, 1940 — Reg. No. 383,661

The claimed first use, August 25, 1939, falls in the year the booklet’s fingering chart is copyrighted. Trade Mark Reg on the sticker is accurate from December 17, 1940 onward.

The name on the application is not the name on the booklet

The booklet says made by “Old Glory” Company, Dundee, Illinois. The register says the mark belonged to Chicago Musical Instrument Company (CMI), of Chicago. Both are primary sources, and neither explains the other. Dundee is a place, not an address; the booklet gives no street.

Three readings fit, and the museum has evidence for none of them. Old Glory Company may be a trade style of Chicago Musical Instrument Company, with Dundee the location of the pottery. CMI may have bought or licensed an existing Dundee brand. Or a Dundee firm may have made the instruments under contract while CMI owned the mark and the distribution, which is the reading the cover’s own two lines fit most neatly: made by at Dundee and sold by music stores everywhere, with CMI in between. It would also explain why the register names CMI and not “Old Glory Company”: that company may have never filed anything.

What is established is the serial number, the date, the goods, and the name on the application. Who held the clay is still open.

Chicago Musical Instrument Company and Ziegner Swanson

Ziegner Swanson, of De Kalb, Illinois, filed two applications on September 26, 1938: a design patent, US D112,623, “Design for a musical instrument similar to an ocarina,” issued December 20, 1938; and US 2,180,130, “Musical instrument,” granted November 14, 1939, which tunes the instrument “by means of the movable mouthpiece.” The US patents name no assignee. Their German counterpart, DE 761436, granted in 1944 and printed in 1952, names the applicant — “Chicago Musical Instrument Co., Chicago, Ill.” — with Swanson as the inventor.

Swanson’s instrument is not Old Glory. His patents describe a closed tube, preferably molded in plastic, blown through a sliding mouthpiece. Old Glory is described as “genuine pottery” on its own back page, and it is not tunable in practice, whatever its cover says.

Four Class 36 marks of CMI were published for opposition in 1940. The goods of one, Reg. No. 381,843 (Serial No. 433,050), are recorded as “NOVELTY WIND INSTRUMENT SIMILAR TO AN OCARINA”, ending in the same words as the title of Swanson’s design patent. The name of that mark has not been established.

Three things often said about Old Glory

That the company was in business in the 1920s. The source is the Ocarina Wiki, whose history section is an empty placeholder and carries no footnote for it. The registrant’s claimed first use is August 25, 1939, and the booklet’s fingering chart is copyrighted the same year.

That the instruments have a cork tuning slide. They do have a cork. What it does is a question for the object, and a collector who has handled them puts it plainly: “‘The tuning cork’ on Old Glory is not a tuning cork. It’s only a cork.” The booklet’s own phrase for the mechanism is a “removable tuning device.”

That they are made of a higher-grade ceramic. The same wiki footnotes this to the booklet cover, which does not say it. The back page says “genuine pottery,” which names the material, not its grade.

Still open

• Who made them. Dundee and a 1939 copyright are enough to search county and state records with.
• When the line started, and when it stopped. The registration claims use since August 25, 1939; nothing marks the end.
• The catalog numbers. The gaps at 025, 028, and 030 through 032 are unexplained.

Chronology

Every row is from a printed federal record or from the booklet itself.

August 25, 1939	The claimed first use of “Old Glory” on ocarinas, as stated in the trademark application	Official Gazette, 1940, Ser. No. 435,118
1939	The fingering chart in the Old Glory instruction booklet is copyrighted	the booklet
August 19, 1940	Chicago Musical Instrument Company, Chicago, applies to register the cursive mark Old Glory for wind instruments, Class 36, Serial No. 435,118	Official Gazette, 1940
October 8, 1940	The mark is published for opposition	Official Gazette, October 8, 1940
December 17, 1940	The mark is registered: Reg. No. 383,661	Index of Trademarks Issued from the U.S. Patent Office, 1940

Two details considered and not used

The town. An account of 2011 gives the address as Dundee or possibly West Dundee, hedged by the person writing it. The booklet settles it: Dundee, Illinois.

The price list. A 1930s date has been attached to the five prices. The prices match the booklet’s back page exactly, so the price list is the booklet’s, which carries a 1939 copyright line and no printing date.