![]() A Fender Strat pictured at Capsule Music in Toronto with neck initialled by Tadeo Gomez and dated October 1954. ![]() He was carrying out some electronic maintenance work when he received a shock that threw him off a ladder. Tadeo’s second term at Fender ended in 1969, after an accident at work. Perhaps Tadeo was happy to be doing less physically demanding maintenance work and besides which, the Fender factory was still making pretty great necks during that time. He began his second stint when he was in his mid-60s, and carving necks by hand is quite arduous. It might also be instructive to look at Tadeo’s birthdate and do the maths. Neck fashions had changed, too, and by the mid-1960s, none of the major manufacturers were making the sort of chunky V-shaped necks Tadeo was known for. No doubt this is partly true, but Fender’s manufacturing process had evolved since the late 1950s. Some cite this as an example of CBS’s ineptitude, because Tadeo’s expertise could surely have been better utilised. The greatest neck shaper in Fender’s history was re-employed as a maintenance man. The subsequent CBS years were very much the dark days of Fender, when the company’s reputation was almost ruined by questionable management. By that time, Leo Fender had sold his company to the giant CBS Corporation. Instead, he took a job as a carpenter working on the construction of Disneyland and this job lasted until the mid 1960s, when he returned to Fender. Tadeo left Fender in 1957 due to disagreements with a new supervisor who felt that his work wasn’t up to the required standard. ![]() So maybe Tadeo routed a few bodies while he was at Fender, too. It’s been noted that things were pretty chaotic at the Fender factory prior to eventual VP Forrest White’s arrival, and that employees would work all over the shop. During the course of researching this article, we also found pictures of ’51 and ’52 Telecasters with ‘TADEO’ and ‘TG’ signatures in the neck pockets. There are also necks signed ‘TAD’ and even ‘TADEO’, and it has been speculated that Tadeo eventually took on more of a foreman’s role, supervising neck carving and authorising other workers to sign the necks off once he had approved them. Much of this arises from inconsistencies in the handwriting, because some Initials appear squared off while others are quite rounded. However, there is some debate and controversy about whether every one of the necks with Tadeo’s signature was actually carved by Tadeo himself. Once he was satisfied with a neck, Tadeo would initial and date the end of the truss rod in pencil then these marks would be sealed under the lacquer finish. Nacho Baños declares that Tadeo’s style has become “a master reference by which today’s reproduction necks are judged” and some people even call this the ‘Tadeo taper’. Some credit him with developing Fender’s ‘soft V’ profile, and he’s also known for shaping the soft transition from the back of the headstock to the area behind the nut. Two features appear to characterise the necks shaped by Tadeo Gomez. Sometimes, he carved a little to get it just right. He told the La Habra Journal: “Dad would be outside sanding and shaping the necks. Tadeo would occasionally take his son to the Fender factory, and Benjamin remembers his father often worked under a canopy. La Habra is just five miles away from Fullerton, where Leo’s factory was famously located, and Tadeo’s son Benjamin recalled that “there used to be quite a few from La Habra that worked at Fender”. In his book, The Blackguard, Nacho Baños notes that Tadeo was almost certainly working for Leo Fender during 1950, because his signature has been found on some very early Broadcaster necks. By 1943, Tadeo, Petra and their six children were living in the small city of La Habra, in Orange County, California. He married a woman named Petra in 1925 and they followed the crops to Northern California. ![]() Tadeo eventually made it and began working in the mines, where one of his brothers would later be killed. Walking was the only way he could get there, so he followed the railway tracks for over 1,000 miles, surviving on banana peels and other leftover food that passengers had thrown from train windows. His older brothers had already left Mexico and were working in a silver mine in Jerome, Arizona, so Tadeo decided to join them when he was 13 or 14. Both his parents died within two weeks of each other when he was just 12 years old, and Tadeo was left to take care of his younger siblings. Tadeo Gomez was born in 1902, in a town called La Cueva in the Mexican state of Jalisco. ![]()
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