Norwell Mass. Archives - New England Historical Society

When it came time for Aram Zildjian to pass on his family’s 300-year-old secret for making superior cymbals, he looked to Massachusetts’ Armenian community.

Display of cymbal makers in the Zildjian corporate lobby

Since the Zildjians started their business in 1623, family tradition required Aram to tell his oldest male heir just how to make the cymbals with the unique purity of tone. That relative, Avedis Zildjian, had immigrated to Greater Boston, a haven for Armenians persecuted by the Ottoman Empire.

Today, the Zildjian factory makes cymbals in Norwell, Mass., for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the E Street Band, the Foo Fighters and many others.

Zildjian

Cymbals were long used in Greek and Armenian religious ceremonies and by Ottoman military bands. On March 23, 1618, Sultan Mustafa I authorized an immigrant named Avedis to make cymbals.

Mustafa I

Avedis, a metalworker, had fled the wars in Eastern Anatolia for the Ottoman Empire, which tolerated Armenians. He dabbled in alchemy at night, and one night he melted copper, tin and a mystery alloy. When it hardened, it made a sound that would make Avedis rich.

The Sultan gave Avedis 80 gold pieces, a contract with the Ottoman Army and a name: Zildjian, meaning “son of cymbal maker.”

Avedis Zildjian then left the sultan’s palace in 1623 to set up a cymbal factory in Constantinople. The family for generations kept the formula for making the cymbals a secret.

Starting in the late 17^th century, European composers began using cymbals in opera, inspired by the sound of the Ottoman martial bands. Composer Richard Wagner once said, “That is the real music.”

Avedis Zildjian’s descendant, also Avedis Zildjian, realized the potential for his company and brought his cymbals to European trade shows. European composers were said to specify that only Zildjian cymbals were to be used in opera productions.

An Ottoman military orchestra

Revolt

By the late 19^th century, the Ottomans were growing less tolerant of the Armenians in their midst. The Armenians began to flee and to revolt. In 1880, the first Armenians came to Massachusetts.

Ottoman persecution then culminated in the Armenian massacre of 1915. Aram Zildjean joined a plot to kill the Sultan with a homemade bomb. The plot failed when the bomb exploded too early and evidence pointed to Aram and his co-conspirators. So he fled Turkey and moved to Bucharest. But then he returned to Constantinople in 1926.

From there, Aram wrote to his nephew Avedis in Boston, where he had opened a candy store.

Many survivors of Ottoman oppression landed in Boston and Watertown, Mass. Today the commonwealth is home to as many as 70,000 people who claim Armenian descent. It commemorates the Armenian massacre to this day on April 24. Only California claims more Armenians (which include the Kardashians).

Avedis in front of his cymbal factory

Around 1928, Aram Zildjian and his nephews, Avedis and Puzant, opened a cymbal factory in Quincy.

Zildjean Designs New Cymbals

Avedis then passed the company on to his eldest son Armand. The Jazz Age was well underway, and together they worked with jazz drummers like Chick Webb and Gene Krupa to adapt cymbals for drum sets. They did it by making them thinner.

Then Armand’s younger brother Robert decided to move to Canada and start his own cymbal company, which he called Sabian after his children Sally (Sa), Billy (bi) and Andy (an).

Life Magazine in 1944 reported that cymbals satisfying symphonic and operatic requirements are difficult to find. “Nobody today manufactures the cymbals but a single family of Armenians whose purity of tone is unlike any cymbal ever made,” the magazine concluded.

Life also reported the New York Philharmonic had to hire a new cymbal player because he owned cymbals and the orchestra’s had gone missing.

More recently the company collaborated with Frank Epstein of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to design orchestral cymbals, lighter and thinner than those used by rock and roll bands.

To see a demonstration of Zildjian orchestral cymbals, click here.

In 2010, Avedis Zildjian Company merged with Vic Firth, Inc., a company founded by a BSO percussionist who started making his own drumsticks.

Image: Avedis Zildjian in Quincy, By Avedis Zildjian Company http://www.zildjian.com, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16960807. Mustafa I By Unknown painter – https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/mustafa-i, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97553913. This story last updated in 2023.

Janette Kelley

She was born in Deer Lodge, Mont., and graduated from the Montana State College home economics department in 1917.

Janette Kelley in 1921 joined Washburn-Crosby, which made Gold Medal flour in a Minneapolis suburb. That was the year Gold Medal flour ran a promotion that gave a pincushion resembling a flour sack to customers who put together a jigsaw puzzle of a milling scene. Thousands responded with the puzzle and questions about baking. Washburn-Crosby created the name Betty Crocker to personalize answers. The company chose “Crocker” in honor of a director who recently retired, William Crocker. It chose “Betty” because it sounded friendly.

Kelley answered mailed-in questions about how to make the perfect pie crust or why bread didn’t rise. She offered solutions for such problems as the heartbreak of a cake that turned out a wee bit flat. The high quality of “kitchen tested” Gold Medal Flour solved that difficulty, she responded.

She also put on wildly popular Gold Medal Flour Cooking Demonstrations and Betty Crocker Cooking Schools, first in the Twin Cities, then throughout the Midwest.

The Betty Crocker House kitchen today

Betty Crocker House

Food manufacturers at the time were setting up test kitchens to find better cooking methods. Washburn-Crosby had been operating a test kitchen since running water and gas stoves were considered a modern convenience. Janette Kelley helped set up the first test kitchen for Washburn-Crosby’s successor company, General Mills.

She then left Minneapolis for New York City, where she went to work for Lever Brothers, setting up their first test kitchen. She also ran a test kitchen for The Delineator magazine, a woman’s publication that featured Butterick sewing patterns along with work by Theodore Dreiser and L. Frank Baum.

The Betty Crocker House

Around that time in the late 1930s Janette Kelley bought an antique three-bedroom, two-bath Cape house in Norwell, Mass. According to the Billings Library, she worked for a Massachusetts branch of General Mills in the 1930s. The house, on 604 River Street, was built in 1681 and went on the market in 2016 for $675,000. {Click here for more pictures.) Zillow listed it as sold in 2020 for $635,000.

Big Red

A Betty Crocker test kitchen

In 1944, she returned to Minneapolis to set up five test kitchens for General Mills. She sold the Norwell house. Two years later she became director of the Home Services Department, supervising 50 women.

She ran the test kitchens when the company developed recipes for Betty Crocker’s Kitchen Cook Book — known as Big Red or the Kitchen Bible. The cookbook was an instant best seller after its release in 1950, and became a popular wedding gift. One ad for it proclaimed, “At last! A Betty Crocker Cook Book! Over $100,000 spent in testing and developing recipes before a single page was printed! Just off the press! Exciting, revolutionary, handsome! The result of 29 years’ experience by the Betty Crocker Staff of General Mills, in food, cooking and homemaking.”

Janette Kelley retired in 1958 because of ill health. She died shortly thereafter.

This story was updated in 2023.

Norwell Mass.

Zildjian, the Sultan’s Cymbal Maker Who Moved to Massachusetts