Early BBU Board Members

It is perhaps not surprising that BBU president Stan Zdonik’s first bluegrass show was a BAF show. He gives a bit of his backstory: “When I was 5, my parents moved to Arlington from Brookline. I grew up in a Polish family and music was important. My dad was a huge stereophile. He had an impressive collection. So, I was always exposed to music. When I went to college – M.I.T. – I continued my interest in classical music, but I played electric bass in a rock & roll, blues-oriented band. We had a short-lived band in the area. Played a few gigs, but nothing much. We called ourselves “…and the Horse You Rode In On.”

Stan graduated from M.I.T. in 1970. “I hung out with some of the guys who were in my rock band, but one day – one fateful day – when I went to Harvard Square during my lunch hour, I heard this music when I was walking around. I said, ‘Wow, this is really cool.’ There were three fiddle players. I can’t tell you who they were, but they were obviously in the Boston bluegrass scene. I went back to work and talked to people about these guys with the fiddles and asked, ‘Does anybody know what that is?’ Somebody said, ‘Yeah, I think that’s bluegrass music.’ I thought, ‘Cool, I’m going to find more of it.’ I went to a concert that Nancy [Talbott] produced, and it was Joe Val. That was the birth for me.”²⁵

Stan had been a Research Assistant at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. He became a professor of computer science and served on the faculty of Brown University in Providence from 1983 until he retired in 2025. His profile on Brown’s website said he “specializes in database management systems. His work addresses new applications by applying data management techniques to novel database architectures.”²⁶

He not only served as the first president of BBU but later served several years on the board of directors of the International Bluegrass Music Association, as Vice-Chairperson from 2007-2010 and as Chairperson from 2010-2013.

Since 1991, Stan has been married to Gail Mitchell, herself originally from Providence. Gail became a stalwart supporter of the music.  

Richie Brown came from Mount Vernon, New York, and had been active in a folk music club as far back as high school in 1962. That was the year he saw his first bluegrass – played by Winnie Winston that November. “I got really blown away. It brought about a change in my life.”²⁷

Richie had played ukulele in his later grade school years, son of a mother who was a nurse and father who was a craftsman working with leather shoes and dresses for women. Richie turned to guitar in high school. Danny Kalb was two years ahead of him at the time, and Richie often went to Washington Square on Sundays. He began to take bluegrass lessons from Steve Mandell, who was in a band with David Grisman at the time. He’d met Jim Rooney in New York, and Bill Keith, and in 1964 Keith and Rooney and Jim Field played at Gerde’s Folk City in the New York Ramblers. Artie Rose took Richie to Ralph Rinzler’s place where he met Doc Watson and Bill Monroe himself. He soon turned to mandolin, which became his primary instrument. He met Joe Val who played a show in New York as one of the Charles River Valley Boys, taking over from Ethan Signer.   

When Richie moved to Boston to start at Tufts Dental School in 1969, he reconnected with Joe Val. He was around the Cambridge scene and even appears on a track on the very first album that Rounder Records ever cut – the Spark Gap Wonder Boys album recorded in the summer of 1970. 

As a side note, Dan Marcus – one of the signers of the first BBU announcement – had gone to high school in Mount Vernon, a year or two behind Richie. The two had gone to Boston and to Hillbilly Ranch together a few times in 1965.²⁸ Dan later went to college at Northeastern in Boston and had worked to help Nancy Talbott and Boston Area Friends. 

Richie met Margaret Gerteis in 1972. They both played in Apple Country and later married. He met Stan at some of Joe Val’s shows and both he and Margaret often went to Ray Magliozzi’s house in Arlington and all would get together there. That’s where he believes the idea of forming a new organization was first born. 

Margaret recalled, “We didn’t have any money but we all put in 10 bucks each to pay for the very first band. I was part of that group. Raymond was unofficial treasurer; I was unofficial secretary, at first. I started meeting with Michael Melford. I wasn’t one of the incorporators but at times after we got our nonprofit status, I was treasurer for a while. The mailing list, for a long time, was just index cards. We did the mailings out of our house on Frost Street. It was our telephone number and our address for a long time.”²⁹

Ken Shay was the first Treasurer of BBU. A graduate of UCLA, he came to Boston to study Geology at Harvard in the fall of 1974. A fledgling banjo player himself, he saw a sign on a lamppost about a bluegrass show. He also worked part-time at Sandy’s Music. He connected with Nancy Talbott and Fred Bartenstein and volunteered to help Boston Area Friends. Ken played some with Paul Silvius and Diane Della Vella. He later worked in dentistry and geriatrics, then worked 10 years in Milwaukee and Ann Arbor. Though at the early meetings, he was more of a name on the by-laws than an active treasurer, in what was – in any event – still quite a small volunteer organization. Susan Bartholomew had the connections at Harvard Law to help them prepare the by-laws and articles of organization. Susan thinks that Ken was just being a good sport to sign on as treasurer. A signature was needed for the form, and he said, “Sure.”³⁰

Neither Ken nor Susan were around very long after the organization was formed, because Susan left Boston (and her husband at the time, Stan Zdonik) for Southern California and Ken went with her. He hadn’t gone to many of the first few shows because it was already becoming awkward between him and Susan and Stan.

Susan and Stan had been married for about four or five years at the time. Susan Bartholomew was originally from Arlington, Massachusetts, where her siblings still live in 2024. As BBU got underway, she was the assistant registrar at Harvard Law School. She had helped out with BAF, in charge of the membership roll, and when things became contentious with Nancy Talbott, she kept all the IBM punch cards. “She wanted them back and I decided I wasn’t going to give them back to her. I’m not sure we ever used the cards, but that was the point at which we decided we were going to do our own thing.” ³¹

Susan wasn’t around long, though. She has just a vague memory of going to the church, but within a short period of time she got divorced and both she and Ken went to California. Susan lives in the Bay Area now and is involved with the California Bluegrass Association. She does some copyediting for the CBA’s Bluegrass Breakdown newsletter.  

Duties as treasurer had also been performed by Ray Magliozzi, prior to incorporation, and Margaret Gerteis, after Ken Shay left the area. Margaret remembers discussing an early upcoming show, and Ray saying, “Throw them a deuce.” She explained, “That’s what we were paying people – two hundred bucks. You’d try to get groups who were going to be in the area and get them another gig. I took the money in and paid it out, but I don’t remember keeping books (laughs). There was kind of a cash box that I carried around.”

Footnotes –

25. Author interview with Stan Zdonik on March 12, 2025. 
26. Prof. Zdonik’ s profile on Brown’s website, accessed in September 2025: https://cs.brown.edu/~sbz/
27. Author interview with Richie Brown on March 1, 2025. 
28. The Hillbilly Ranch, located in Boston’s Park Square, burned in February 1980 and did not reopen. A couple of YouTube videos provide an appreciation of the Ranch. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPsHDUpldkg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH4PpYEIM4w
29. Author interview with Margaret Gerteis on November 6, 2025, and followup email on November 18, 2025.
30. Author interview with Susan Bartholomew on February 28, 2025.
31. Interview with Susan Bartholomew. It is odd that both Bar and Susan take “credit” for not returning the mailing list to BAF. Susan recalls someone at Harvard Law writing a letter supporting that, but can’t recall any details and allows, “When I think of it now, it seems insane. How anybody could have supported that or thought it was OK, but we were really battling with her. I’m sure it was all her personality, which was SO difficult. She was telling us when to get up in the morning and when to go to sleep.”