An excerpt from Jonathan Kellerman's foreword:   "When it comes to music, the human factor is all. Yet so many books on musical instruments obsess on the fine points of construction while neglecting the talented people who began the process: transforming planks and slabs and slivers into masterpieces of sonic beauty. That's understandable; many players and collectors live and breathe trivia. But it's an approach that misses the point. In 'Kalamazoo Gals,' John Thomas has chosen to rise above that, fleshing out the most human of stories without neglecting the techno-stats that guitar geeks crave.   The goal John set for himself was monumental: illuminating the elusive history of a legendary group of WW II-era Gibson guitars known in the vintage trade as 'Banners' because of the decal affixed to their headstocks. Now recognized, nearly three quarters of a century after their manufacture, as among the finest acoustic guitars ever produced, over 9000 Banners were built during a period when, according to 'official' accounts, no Gibson instruments were produced because the company had shifted to churning out war goods. Even more remarkable, much of the work that went into Banners was performed by a group of young Michigan women with no prior training in musical instrument construction!   The contributions of Rosie the Riveter and her cohorts to the survival of American manufacturing during the 'Good War,' are well known and beyond profound. But until now the contributions of a band of intrepid, unpretentious, stunningly skillful, thoroughly American women to both the war effort and to the endurance of one of the greatest musical instrument manufacturers ever known, has gone unheralded.   Kudos to John Thomas for telling their story." "[R]ecommended reading for a range of collections, from women's history and music to World War II and American history. ...[A] powerful saga that is packed with historical links and rare glimpses of a guitar maker and a war, and a group of women whose jobs changed lives." Midwest Book Review/California Bookwatch "John Thomas' personal quest to find the lost Kalamazoo gals is endearingly told in Kalamazoo Gals: A story of Extraordinary Women & Gibson's 'Banner' Guitars of WWII . This is not just one story but many; finally giving these women their voice, to talk about the guitars they made for a manufacturer that denied they ever existed." Feminist Times "[A]n enchanting story of brittle and eccentric company founder Orville Gibson, these very special guitars and the testimonies of the surviving Kalamazoo Gals." Mojo Magazine "[A] warm and engaging book that reconstructs the lost story of how [the Kalamazoo Gals] built some of the greatest flat-top acoustic guitars ever manufactured - and then, after the war, stepped quietly back into domestic home life. ... Thomas has written a book that communicates on many different levels; as a work of social history, this has a far broader appeal than just guitar lovers." Songlines Magazine "I've always believed that behind every great guitar is a great story. The so-called Banner Era Gibsons made in Kalamazoo around World War II are among the greatest flattop acoustic guitars ever made, and the story behind them--and the women who built them--might be even better. John Thomas has given the guitar world a gift by telling this great, and largely unknown tale." -Allen St. John, author of Clapton's Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument . It's a haunting image. At least it was for author John Thomas. Some seventy women sit in four rows in front of the Gibson Guitar factory in the mid-1940s. Conventional wisdom and company lore had it that Gibson had ceased guitar production during WWII, with only "seasoned craftsmen" too old for battle doing repairs and completing the few instruments already in progress. What were these women doing there? The image so bedeviled Thomas that he eventually set out to find at least one of the women in the photograph. He found a dozen. Along the way he would discover that despite denials that endured into the 1990s, Gibson employed a nearly all female workforce to build thousands of wartime guitars and marked each with a small, golden "banner" pronouncing that "Only a Gibson is Good Enough." The banner appeared on the guitars at the moment those women entered the factory in January 1942, which fate choreographed to coincide with the precise instant when Glenn Miller's "I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo" reached the pinnacle of the pop charts. The banner disappeared at the end of 1945 when the war ended, the soldiers returned, and most of the Kalamazoo Gals ceded their guitar making jobs back to their male predecessors. On his personal journey, Thomas tracks Orville Gibson from his birth in upstate New York to the founding of his namesake company in Michigan and to his return to his birthplace and death in a mental hospital. He takes us to meet these women in Kalamazoo and to tr