I met Bill and Gene Bonyun when I was 12, 1952; Bill the unstoppable teacher was directing a group of us kids in the art of radio (audio) theater. It was summer program that Betty Puleston would run on her ranch down Meadow Lane in Brookhaven New York. Bill had a used Magnecorder reel-to-reel recorder and a single microphone. Bill had written the script, and we were all assigned speaking parts and we rehearsed our lines diligently. After a month we went into the radio studios of Columbia University in New York City. They had lots of RCA ribbon microphones, sound effect stuff and a library of recorded sound effects and a big studio. After a few trips to NYC I found my way into the control room and a Colombia student showed me how to run the old tube mixer. That stared my career as a sound engineer. Back in Brookhaven in Bill and Gene's house I helped Bill setup recording sessions, fixed and upgraded his high fidelity system and learned from Bill. Bill would call me to over after school and weekends to help him record his friends, one was Burl Ives and many more wonderful people who would come to Bill's for conversation and to sing. Some of those visitor sessions ended up on Bill's recordings later.

While I was in high school I became Bill's studio engineer mixing his folk singing recordings. This was in the mid-late fifties. Bill moved into an empty general store and old Post Office on South Country Road in Brookhaven NY. My folk singer friend and mentor Bill Bunyan started out with two RCA something's microphones, a worn Webcor reel-to-reel recorder. Later the year I graduated 1958, Bill bought two Beyer ribbons mics and one Capps ¾" condenser, for vocals, guitar, fiddle, and drums. He got a donation of a old monaural tube mixer that I converted to two channel for stereo recordings. The Capps mic was too clean for vocals but was the best for drum snares and tom-toms, but those Beyer ribbons were just great and they still worked after being dropped. Bill and I did a collection of field recordings with a rented Nagra reel-to-reel monaural recorder and the ribbon mics.

Bill and I recorded the cannon blast for the Revolution record on the Nagra at West Point, while the drum and fife was recorded on that same Nagra with the Beyer ribbon as the band marched past Bill's studio on Memorial Day in Brookhaven NY, the echo on the most recorded singing and narrations was from our rented Ampex 351 playback head at 15 ips into a speaker in the long back store room behind the studio with the sound picked up with a junk Shure dynamic mic. This was the latest in 1950s technology but served Bill well. Most of those sailing ship sounds on the whaling record were made on Bill's friend Bob Stark's 36' wood sail boat early one Saturday morning on Bellport Bay also using the Nagra and the Beyer ribbon.

In the early sixties Bill started the Civil War recordings and he would do a lot of these cuts by himself at night; I would align the Ampex, check the tube mixer and leave everything on. In the afternoon the next day I would come in read Bill's notes and splice edit anything he or I thought was good enough to save. I don't remember how Bill got involved with the Civil War production company for PBS but much of the film editing and sound recording took place at Bill's studios in Brookhaven. That PBS program was a huge success and made better by Bill's genius and his vocals. Even today PBS will run that series even though it was shot on 16mm and had monaural sound.

Bill and Gene continued to be our friend and teacher even when he moved north to become the a curator and teacher at Old Sturbridge. Anyone who knew Bill Bonyun was blessed as I was.
Richard Majestic