Please tell me more about the Multitone Phonograph Co. It was in the Parks and Rec building on Oxford. 1920s?
    Thanks for asking! Multitone made great phonographs: beautiful walnut case, chromed steel running gear. Lovely. Phonographs are how old people listened to music on long-playing records (LPs) in the days before compact discs (CDs). CDs are how old people listened to music in the days before iPods. But the company’s best known for its spectacular collapse.

You’re right: it had the brick building at 1300 1st Ave., recently home to Parks & Rec Administration and Programs, and before that CVTC (yep, the whole darned technical college). Community Table serves free meals in the basement: you should volunteer to serve a meal there. It’s fun.

So, in 1918, local piano maker Edward J. Sailstad formed Multitone to build a phonograph he’d designed. He sold as well as he designed apparently: for instance, he sold 1,000 units in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The next year, Multitone acquired the old Eau Claire Trunk Co. factory (footlocker-type trunks, maybe other kinds, too: had a retail store on South Barstow). Multitone was making 100 machines a day in 1919.

On August 28, 1920, tragedy struck. Sailstad died in a cottage fire at Lake Nebagamon (now home to the world’s heaviest ball of twine). Investigators found a few bones near the fireplace. Survived by a wife (Leone?) and two children.

But then details started trickling out. Sailstad’s dad had pulled a disappearing act four years earlier. He had married a woman named Kingston. Sailstad’s stenographer, Dorothy Anderson (“Norwegian and pretty”), who had worked for Multitone for a couple of months, left “for Chicago” three weeks before, on August 9. She said she’d married a Chicago salesman named, um, Kingston. A Duluth taxi driver came forward and said he’d taken Sailstad and Anderson the 30 miles from Lake Nebagamon to Duluth the night of the fire. Sailstad had taken out $56,000 in insurance (over $800,000 today).

By 1922 authorities had decided to exhume the bones, including teeth, and send them to Madison. A Madison dentist, comparing the teeth and an X-ray of Sailstad’s mouth, testified they couldn’t be the same. Nevertheless, a jury declared him legally dead and the insurance company settled with poor Mrs. Sailstad.

In December 1923, a fellow recognized Ed Sailstad in Eureka, California. Authorities caught him — with Dorothy — in Napa, where he’d been repairing typewriters. Both were convicted of arson and sentenced to four years prison. (Came out at trial that he’d robbed a grave at Lake Nebagamon Cemetery to get the bones.) Ed was paroled after three years, and met Dorothy at the gates of Taycheedah women’s prison on her release. They married in Oshkosh, and Sailstad went to work for a refrigerator company in Minneapolis. Lived on happily, as far as I know.

His company wasn’t so lucky. Steven R. Davis (better known as the head of Dells Paper and Pulp) agreed to take over as president, promptly found a $50,000 deficit, and guided Multitone through bankruptcy. Creditors were paid 7 cents on the dollar.