Elo Kalkoff on Elinden Records

This orchestra was based in Fort Wayne, Indiana and played in the Midwest USA in the 1940’s, and 1950’s. They recorded seven (7) 78 rpm records.

Although not everyone was playing on the recordings, the personnel of the Elo Kalkoff Orchestra were: Elo Kalkoff on clarinet, Karl Russeff on trumpet, George Toskos on drums, and unknown musicians on saxophone and trombone.

(from bandcamp.com)

Elia E. Kalkoff, as he is credited on the seven discs he self-released at the end of the 1940s, was born May 21, 1891. The majority of his documentation and his grave marker give him as Elo Calcoff but he also went by Leo, Louis, and Henry at various times. A reference on the Kounadis Digital Archive gives his place of birth as the village of Vyssinia in the municipality of Kastoria in northern Greece. His American papers invariably list his place of birth simply as Macedonia.

He and his wife Anna were married in 1912, and their first daughter Olga was born June 1913, shortly before they arrived in the U.S. Kalkoff got a job along with many other Macedonians at the Bass Foundry in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the iron works founded after the Civil War by industrialist John H. Bass that has been reported as having been the “world’s leading manufacturer of railroad wheels […] and other essential rail-related items.” The foundry had 1,100 employees, largely immigrants, at its peak in the early 20th century but was bankrupt by 1939 at which point it was down to 270 men. It stayed open through WWII and closed shortly thereafter.

In Fort Wayne, Elia and Anna Kalkoff settled on S. Hanna St., straight down the road from the ironworks, and had two more children, one of whom, Marie (b. 1924), survived childhood. Elia was involved in the Macedonian Political (later, Patriotic) Organization, founded in Fort Wayne in 1922, an organization that sought an independent Macedonian state. By the mid-20s he was an inspector at the foundry.

He also had work on the side, evidenced by a June 1930 report that on 11 PM of a Friday night, a group of 11 local police officers and federal agents descended on a soft drink parlor in Fort Wayne where they found an intricate series of locks and buzzers slowed their entry. When they finally got in, one cop, a motor patrolman, jumped the bar and seized a pitcher from the bartender, our own Louis Kalcoff, who was pouring its contents of moonshine whiskey down a drain. The remaining drops in the pitcher were used as cause to arrest Calcoff for possession of liquor in the midst of prohibition.

Shortly after the steelworks closed, prohibition by then a thing of the past, Kalkoff took steady work tending bar at Kip’s Tavern from about 1942-59. It was during that period that Kalkoff and his band made his recordings. He died after a week in the hospital on Jan. 11, 1962, at age 70, only a couple of years after retiring. Anna lived until 1979.

credits

released October 22, 2024
Transfers, restoration, and notes by Ian Nagoski
Discs from the collection of John Pappas courtesy of Larry Weiner. WIth many thanks to them.
Cover photo: Elia Kalkoff ca. early 1920s via an anonymous family member on ancestry dot com.
Attached photo of the band originally from the Macedonian Tribune ca. 1940s.
Attached photo of Kalkoff in the first decade of the 20th century also via ancestry.