Hello everyone! Has anybody recently heard from whistle maker Mack Hoover? His whistles are among my favorites in the collection. I just found out that he retired last year, and has passed the torch to a whistle maker named Elizabeth. Now his design is manufactured under the MackBeth whistle brand in this website: https://hooverwhistles.com/
I haven’t heard from him recently and have had trouble getting in touch. Does anyone know how our good friend Mack is doing?
High G in brass, High G in Phenolic Resin, and D in PVC
Mack and I share a birthday date, rubenroks12. He is about 10+ years older than me, and I am a … uh … well advanced Senior Citizen. Mack is just fine, y’all. He lives in his unique and beautiful home in Colorado, with some of the coolest interior decorated walls on the planet. When I entered the whistle world, so very, very many years ago, he was one of the first denizens of the place, that I was honored to get to know. I had a fascination with whistles, and both undergraduate and graduate degrees in the musical arts, and soon realized I knew absolutely nothing about whistles, and the iTrad music scene. Mack helped me to learn…
Having fallen prey to a mild case of Whoad, Mack helped me understand what was good, and not so good, without ever pushing his own instruments. I learned to like and respect Mack, very much - and that remains true, today. Mack still makes and repairs whistles - and other instruments, but as he says, ‘not for money.’ He still plays his instruments, but not in public. He made a very thin-walled redwood, with black acetal mouthpiece high D, which he sent to me a lot of years ago, and my daughter took it over, right away. She played that instrument for many years, at the time she was very young - and still lived at home - in one of my early Celtic/American bands. Ah, memories.
I digress, and I apologize. Bottom line: Yes, rubenroks12, as with you, I truly do like the Hoover whistles that I still own - from that little redwood D, through the Whitecaps, through a set of aluminum high whistles in their own ‘Mack-created’ case, through a sleeper Whitecap with a Feadog body, through much more sophisticated metal and wooden instruments he sent to me, over the years… etc. Mack is still very much Mack. And that is a very good thing.
I’m glad to hear you are still amongst the living, Mack. I’ve said many times that a Mack Hoover small bore brass whistle will teach a person how to breathe and is a must-have! —Reggie
