Patrick Joseph Healy (P. J. Healy)

Biography

Patrick Joseph Healy was born March 17, 1840, in the County of Cork, Ireland, the thirteenth child of a poor farming family, and emigrated with them to Boston at age 10. He worked the bellows of a church organ for organist Bancroft, who helped him get a job as errand boy for music dealer George P. Reed, and he rose to a responsible position at Oliver Ditson & Company. Ditson sent him to establish a branch in Chicago, and in 1864 the firm of Lyon & Healy was founded; Healy reported over $100,000 in sales within the first year, exceeding Ditson's ten-year prediction. Renowned as an obsessively methodical statistician who tracked daily business data to guide bold decisions, Healy was said by the author to have outworked every other figure in the American piano trade. Under his leadership Lyon & Healy expanded into harps, guitars, mandolins, church organs, and eventually pianos, and became a corporation in 1890 with Healy as president. He died April 5, 1905, at age 65, honored as 'the grand old man of the music trade.'

Highlights

• Co-founded Lyon & Healy in Chicago in 1864 with the backing of Oliver Ditson & Company
• Built Lyon & Healy into what the author calls the greatest music house in the world through relentless, statistics-driven business methods
• Known in the trade by the sobriquet 'the grand old man of the music trade'

Source

Alfred Dolge, Pianos and Their Makers, Vol. I (1911), pp. 350, 351, 352, 353.

Public domain.