Page 39 - Fall 2006

Denmark, England, France, Japan, Norway, and Wales. There was one woman charter member. The membership was com- prised of people working in architectural acoustics firms, musical instrument companies, universities and at least one aircraft company. All of the major movie studios were repre- sented including Paramount, Warner Brothers, Columbia, RKO, United Artists and Fox.
2. Organizational years/great depression • June 1929–1940
In 1929, Wallace Waterfall was given some manuscripts. He later recalled that he “asked the Council what I was sup- posed to do with them and I got the answer; ‘Go publish them.’ I said we had no money and they said that was my problem. I was with Celotex then, so I hit my own company for a sizeable contribution and other companies chipped in to get us started. We set up an Editorial Committee and I held the job of Managing Editor for 4 years.” The first issue of the Journal was published in October 1929, the same month as the stock market crashed. It contained 8 papers in its 163 pages. On its cover was the 1929 logo that Wallace Waterfall had designed, later fondly remembering that: “A printer and I got together with a compass and we spent a lot of time, had a lot of fun, drawing that thing.”
The Executive Council met on December 12, 1929 to appoint an editorial board, elect new Fellows, and to incor-
porate the Society that was approved on February 4, 1930. By March 1931, the membership was comprised of 632 mem- bers, 128 fellows, 10 sustaining members and one honorary member. The membership grew to 800 in the mid-1930s, but dropped back below 700 by 1939, reflecting effects of the depression.
During the depression years the Council made decisions on Society operations that included business matters, out- reach to the public, standards issues, and appointing standing committees to handle special subjects that required deeper deliberations. The membership category of “Fellowship” was established and “foreign” membership in the Society was encouraged. Decisions on JASA operations included appointment of an Editorial Board, approving advertising, setting prices for single copies and a subscription rate for libraries, and establishing a $2 page charge for authors of arti- cles published in the Journal. (The first complaint about this charge was received soon thereafter!) The Council consid- ered working with CBS TV to develop educational broad- casts about acoustics and adopted a resolution advocating more liberal appropriations for the U.S. Bureau of Standards. Committees were appointed—one to prepare a brochure to be distributed to mayors of U.S. cities about what could be done to reduce noise, and another to cooperate with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that was con- ducting research in developing standards for acoustical
History of ASA 37