Walter Haenschen

American bandleader, composer, pianist, and radio musician Born November 3, 1889 in St. Louis, Missouri — died March 26, 1980 in Norwalk, Connecticut "Gus" Haenschen started accompanying silent movies on the piano as a teenager in St. Louis. At Washington University in St. Louis, from whose engineering program he graduated in 1912, he formed his own college band. In 1916, while working as the manager of the Victrola department of the Scruggs, Vandervoort & Barney store in downtown St. Louis, he cut several sides as leader of W. G. Haenschen's Banjo Orchestra on Columbia's personal record label. After serving two years in the Navy, Haenschen was hired to lead Brunswick's newly established Popular Record Department in mid-1919. For the next eight years, until summer 1927, he directed Brunswick's house band. Its recordings were usually released under the pseudonym Carl Fenton's Orchestra, but many of the same studio musicians also played on recordings released, e.g., as by The Wiedoeft Ensemble or Bennie Krueger And His Orchestra. From 1925, he also broadcast on radio with the "Brunswick Hour of Music". For the next two decades, Haenschen primarily worked in radio. From 1927 to 1931, for example, he served as musical director of NBC's "The Palmolive Hour". He also worked as conductor on the "Voice of Firestone" radio hour. From 1929 to the late 1940s, Haenschen, as Vice President and Musical Director of Sound Studios of New York, Inc., produced World Broadcasting Company transcription records for syndicated radio shows. Haenschen also composed numerous songs, many of them under pseudonyms such as Walter Holliday and Paul Dupont, including "The Maurice Glide" (1912), "Underneath The Japanese Moon" (1914), "Read 'Em And Weep" (1921), and "La Rosita" (1923, as Paul Dupont).