Drum roll, please

It’s 50 years of making beautiful music

It was 1967, the year Canada celebrated its 100th birthday.

Bob Mingo was a husband and father of three. He worked full-time at Brookfield Foods (now Scotsburn) and was playing gigs as a drummer, a night or two a week. It was a demanding enough schedule, yet somehow he figured it was a good idea to open a music store in the basement of his Truro home on Duke Street.

“I think mostly the idea was to help his musician buddies, but he also had three mouths in the nest crying to be fed,” says his son Dave, who now runs the business out of a two-storey Prince Street location. “I don’t think Dad was thinking it would ever grow to this extent.”

Grow it did, out of the basement and into the Mingos’ living space. In 1971, Bob’s wife, Dave’s mother, Ada finally put her foot down and Bob bought a building on Dominion Street, setting up in the basement.

The music business continued growing, requiring more space for inventory, to do repairs, for printed music and for lessons. Eventually operations crept upstairs, just as it had on Duke Street.

When his last tenant moved out of the Dominion Street building in 1982, Ada opened The Book Nook there, selling new and used books.

As a teenager, working for his

parents wasn’t the coolest thing in the world, according to Dave, but being around drums and amplifiers more than made up for it.

His plan after high school was to study jazz. But on his father’s advice, he studied business at Acadia.

Dave came out of college thinking bar graphs and charts and formulas for running the business.

“Dad just said no, no, forget that, here’s how we do it.”

Dave helped bolster sales of printed music and music books, one thing Bob couldn’t find time for.

“As the years went on, and Dad saw I knew what’s what, he let the rope off me a bit.”

Gradually, it grew into a partnership. When Bob passed away in 2003, Dave took over. In 2006, needing still more space,

he moved the business to Prince Street.

Dave says they’ve managed to stay in business this long because they have always treated their customers right, providing good, honest customer service.

“A bit of it’s stubbornness, tenacity, and experience – I imagine we were battered and bruised in the early days, but I benefited from Dad’s experience – and then the other thing is the people we have had working for us, good people, people who are with us.”

JOnaThan Riley/TC Media Dave Mingo took over the Mingo’s Music Sales from his father Bob, who started it in 1967.

SUBMiTTed PhOTO Bob Mingo was a drummer in +4, with Gregg “Phisch” Fancy, Sandy MacDougall and Jack Miller, when he opened a music store in his basement in 1967.

SUBMiTTed PhOTO Bob Mingo opened Bob Mingo’s Music Sales in 1967, quickly realized he would need help at the store, and his son Dave, who now runs the store, was born in 1968.