When young---about seven or eight years old ----- I found one of the really old original ones. (1948) It was made of a carved turtle shell. It was cut in such a way that the shell had a slit between it and what was once the belly of the beast. The meat and other innards had been pretty much removed.---- Something was still inside it though----- just enough of the dry innards to keep the airflow through the thing rather impeded to allow exceptional intonation that was MUCH better than any wooden or metal or plastic nose flute (two words) I have ever seen. I bought in for a whole quarter in a junk shop in DeKalb, Illinois where a childs coffin was in the window along with a cat that had been mummified and wrapped as in olden days in Egypt. You could tell it was a cat mostly by the shape of the head and the ears that stuck up from the little skull. Still, it made me quite ill to play it. The aroma or whatever was still pungeant as hell. That meant that after three or four songs (medium length) I had to go out behind my aunt and uncle's garage and toss my lunch. Then I felt much better and could play the rest of the afternoon with fewer interruptions of that kind. I found my fist HARDY BOYS book in that wonderful little store-----and condems too. We didn't know what they were so we filled them with water and replaced my little brothers pillow with the unwieldy thing. That night he jumped into bed, hit that pillow with his sleepy little head------and almost drowned.

Ah, nostalgia !!!!

Art Thieme