Remembering Harry LeBovit

by Fred Calland

Originally published in American Lutherie #10, 1987 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume One, 2000

Harry LeBovit’s company was always and unvaryingly a pleasure, and his companionship was never touched by shyness, aloofness, or anything boring like that.

I can’t remember the first time I met him, and I know why I can’t; the man put me at ease on the spot, probably saying something like, “You must be very happy doing something so interesting so well.” Now add to that a sort of uneven smile and a warm welcoming expression, and you have a master of diplomacy, a man capable of aggressive friendship, and an irresistible companion in spirit.

There were vast areas of Harry’s life that never came up in conversation with him. His wife Judy told me recently that he was born in 1915 in New Jersey; that he spent much of his time as a preadolescent stalking museums, drinking in paintings, particularly Baroque-Era angels or Saint Cecilias holding some sort of stringed instrument. For these instruments in general, and the violin in particular, were his first love, and to get a clumsy metaphor over before it even gets started, he remained true to this early love all his life.

He became engrossed by the violin as only a young, intensely intelligent boy can become engrossed in such a wondrous thing: in its sound, in the performance of it, and in the building of it. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Harry never really considered this interest, this passion, this ability to search out all the great secrets of art and civilized existence through a single manifestation of this greatness (a sound-producing box made of maple and pine and sheep intestines and I shudder to think what else) to be unusual.

I don’t imagine he was pleased, but he certainly wasn’t thrown by the fact that he was coming to manhood during the Depression, and that an occupation more likely to bring in money on a fairly regular basis was not only in order, but mandatory. So during his college years at Rutgers, studies of agricultural science and economics took up much of his immediate concern. The fiddle, however, was not to take a back seat. A side seat, maybe.

Harry’s sort of intelligence was far more penetrating than the average man’s: more piercing, and more encompassing. He could talk at length about world political problems from an almost bewildering variety of viewpoints. Harry could, with a soft, warmly-inflected voice, take your mind out through these byways and let it find its way to a higher, more sensitive view of the world. And he did this with no deviousness whatsoever, and certainly no effort. Great compassion for humanity, for his wife, for his dogs, for his friends, probably for his enemies if he ever acknowledged any, weighed on him as lightly as a Mendelssohn Scherzo.

When Judy told me that Harry was called by the State Department to serve as Agricultural Attaché to the American Embassy in Budapest from 1945 through 1949, at a time when diplomats and agricultural experts of the highest caliber were in demand, and that he served in a similar capacity in Denmark from 1949 to 1951, I wasn’t too much surprised. You know why? Harry mentioned to me that he knew about the fabulous Hungarian violinist and teacher, Jeno Hubay, at almost first hand, that he had studied in Budapest with Zathuretzky, the great Hungarian violinist and pedagogue, and that he could describe all the shortcomings and strengths of the Danish-Hungarian violinist Henry Temianka. When he perceived that I was genuinely impressed by these contacts, and would probably be less so with his diplomatic coups, we somehow became friends. And when Judy mentioned that Harry went out of his way to sponsor embassy concerts by starving Hungarian musicians immediately after the war, and said it as though she (and he) took such activities as a matter of course, I was impressed by this even more than I was to learn that John Kennedy summoned him to the White House to be Deputy Director of the Food For Peace program, and he was kept in that position by President Johnson.

I was not terribly impressed with his next title: Director of Marketing and Technical Services for the National Stockpile Program of the General Services Administration. I must assume he made a go of it, for the reason for his departure from the position in 1974 was a heart attack, the first serious manifestation of the disease that would cause his death twelve years later.

Judy, whom he met in Budapest in 1948 in the third year of his Hungarian assignment, joined with others in urging him to retire. Well, Harry knew many words in several different languages, but he apparently never caught the hang of “retirement.” Guess what stringed instrument was waiting to take over his attention!