Seeing the handwriting

Boak said the ukulele eventually was put on display in the Martin museum, which originally was a small room, but which grew into a big display.

Boak said he previously started to try to identify the names, “but I didn’t get very far.” He also had an apprentice who, working online, “found five or six of the really obvious ones.”

“We knew Calvin Coolidge and we knew Admiral Byrd and we knew Floyd Bennett, and we knew couple of the others,” Boak said.

But when Bartram returned to pick up his repaired guitar, he brought with him professor Gould’s book “Cold,” about the polar expeditions.

“We grabbed the ukulele and went up to the computer,” Boak said. “We looked in the index of Larry Gould’s book, and in the index were the names of everybody associated with the expeditions, all the crew members and everything.

“And in the course of about an hour, we had identified about 40 names, and we were just floored. But then there’s 160-some signatures on the ukulele. So we just became obsessed with it,” he said.

Many of the autographs faded over 90 years. And because an instrument isn’t an ideal medium for autographs, many were distorted to begin with.

Boak said that to get the signatures to stick to the ukulele, Konter had to scrape away the lacquer “to create a sort of an abraded surface.”

During a visit to the White House, for example, “he scraped away an entire section above the sound hole because he knew he might be able to get Calvin Coolidge’s signature. And he got Coolidge, and then he got the vice president, and then the secretary of state and then Gen. “Blackjack” Pershing and Charles Lindbergh. And they all signed one after another in that area,” Boak said.

It also became evident to Boak and Bartram that Konter relegated related autographs to specific areas. For example, all of the expeditions’ participants signed in the same area, making them easier to identify.

“When we realized that, we looked up the names of all the crew members and we had all of their signatures from the ship’s manifest, and we simply went down the list,” Boak said. “And we got them all.”

One autograph that initially stumped Boak and Bartram was that of Marie, the last queen of Romania, which is on the ukulele’s headstock. Boak said Martin’s former historian, Mike Longworth, believed the name was of the cook on Byrd’s ship. But research revealed the cook was a man.

At first, Boak believed it to be Marie Peary, who, as the daughter of arctic explorer Admiral Peary, was known as “the snow baby.” But she already had signed the front of the ukulele.

“It wasn’t until our research in the Byrd polar archives that we scanned two invitations to Adm. Byrd to attend a reception for the queen of Romania. And we saw clearly Marie’s signature, and it matched the signature on the headstock exactly,” he said.