It’s 1986. I’m 18 years old and have just gotten off work on a Saturday. I take my car to the carwash, put on a quick coat of wax, vacuum the interior and Armor All the seats and dash.
I then go to pick up my girlfriend, now wife, Tracy, and we proceed to do what kids did back then that kids do not do today. We cruised Main Street. In my Iowa hometown, we would start at the mall parking lot near the Mississippi River bridge and drive a mile to the McDonald’s parking lot, turn around and repeat this loop for hours. Armor All was a critical piece of the strategy because it made the seats slick, and if I turned the car around really fast, Tracy would slide across the bench seat and land right next to me.
We would listen to our favorite music while we cruised. Great pride was taken in having a car with a good stereo system, and music was at the center of it all. The louder and the better your music sounded, the cooler you were.
Fifty years ago, my Sunday morning church service consisted of someone playing a piano and everyone singing from page 450 in their hymnal. Flash forward to today, and my Sunday morning worship service includes a praise band with a modern sound system that produces wonderful and rich music that truly adds to the service.
Let’s face it, music makes our lives better, gives us joy, stirs the spirit and soothes the soul. The book of Samuel tells us that David played music on his harp for King Saul, and the troubled spirit left him.
What does this have to do with Arkansas? Well, I am glad you asked because one of the greatest sound engineers in history, Paul Wilbur Klipsch, invented a revolutionary speaker in Hope. His high-fidelity speakers brought music as we hear it today to the world, so, quite literally, he brought the sounds of Hope to the world.
Originally from Indiana, Klipsch enlisted in the Army in 1941 during World War II and was stationed at the Southwestern Proving Ground in Hope. He served as chief engineer, was second-in-command and led thousands of troops in testing more than 3 million rounds of ammunition (artillery shells, bombs and rockets) in support of the war effort. It was during this time, while working in the ballistics labs, that he noticed how efficiently sound traveled through the megaphone-like geometry of horns. He ingeniously figured out how to use the walls of a room to become a physical extension of a speaker horn, and this is where the Klipsch corner horn speaker was born.
So why Hope? After the war, Klipsch loved the area so much that he stayed and rented a tin shed behind a dry cleaner. It’s where he made the components for his speaker and received a patent for his design in 1945. He registered the name of his company, Klipsch and Associates, in 1946 and personally built loudspeakers by hand for the first two years. He then hired his first employee and purchased Building 116, the former telephone exchange building at the Southwestern Proving Ground, from the U.S. government in 1948, and converted it into an acoustics lab and manufacturing facility.
The first Klipschorn loudspeaker had serial number 121. He added 100 to the serial number to make it look like his company was bigger than it was. Klipsch’s genius was not done, though. He saw the future and that three-channel stereo (L, R and Center channels) was on the horizon. He designed the Heresy loudspeaker in 1957 to serve as a compact center channel to accompany two Klipschorn speakers in a three-channel stereo array. The first stereo LP wasn’t commercially available until 1958; Klipsch was truly a pioneer. In 1989, he sold his business to his cousin, Fred, who moved corporate headquarters to Indianapolis, but Klipsch stayed on as an adviser working in Hope. He was inducted into the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame in 1997 with alumni like Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver and the Wright brothers. Klipsch died at the age of 98 and was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Hope.
Some cool Klipsch facts: The name Klipschorn was not created by him but by a customer in New York. When Klipsch came to make a sales call, the customer told him that his company had heard of his corner horn speaker and that they called it the Klipschorn, a name that remains. The Heresy speaker got its name because it was a noncorner compact speaker, which went against years of Klipsch acoustic doctrine. When one of his employees saw it, he called it “heresy” and the name stuck.
The Klipschorn is the only speaker in the world that has been in continuous production for 80 years, and it is still handcrafted by skilled artisans in Hope. Even cooler, all Heritage Series models (Klipschorn, Klipsch Jubilee, La Scala, Cornwall, Forte and Heresy) are still made in Hope, along with a line of professional and cinema speakers and THX home theater speakers.
I have always been a big fan of Klipsch speakers and had no idea until recently that their history is so deeply rooted in Arkansas. Every morning, my routine is to turn on the light in my office, then my computer, then turn up the nearly 20-year-old Klipsch iGroove SXT on my desk (pictured in this article) and listen to music while I work.
I am listening to it right now as I type.
I also own a Klipsch Quintet home theater speaker system, and my wife just bought me a Klipsch Bluetooth Nashville speaker for my birthday.
I plan to visit the Klipsch Museum of Audio History in Hope soon. And I may even have to get some Heritage Series speakers so that I can spread the sounds of Hope to my family, and if I turn them up loud enough, my neighbors.