Photos by Erin Nelson.
Bob Tedrow, holding Tufie, a 5-week-old miniature Australian shepherd, Klari Tedrow, and Slam, a 3-year-old border collie, outside their Homewood home.
It’s a pretty fair distance — in miles, in years — from where Bob and Klari Tedrow first met, up in the northern part of Colorado, just east of the Continental Divide.
Bob was playing banjo in a bluegrass band with Klari’s brother when the pair met, and it’s too simple to say that it was love at first sight. Settle for attraction.
“Do you really want to know?” Klari says, laughing. “I thought he was cute. I started taking banjo lessons from him. I thought that’d be a good way to get to know him.”
It seems to have worked. Bob is now 65 years old, slim and silver-haired. He’s comfortable in his shop, Homewood Musical Instruments. When he talks about Klari, a smile springs easily to his face.
“Well, you know, when a woman marries a musician, she’s in for it,” he said. “But we get along because it’s always my fault. No matter what it is, it’s my fault.”
All jokes aside, the story of Bob and Klari Tedrow is fascinating.
Klari was born in Budapest, Hungary. When she was 3 years old, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 began, as the citizens began a national uprising against the Hungarian People’s Republic and its Soviet-inmposed policies. The revolution was short-lived, lasting from Oct. 23 until Nov. 10 that year.
Klari’s family fled. Her father had survived the concentration camp at Auschwitz during World War II, and with the country in the throes of violence, he made a fateful choice: They would go to the United States. Even now, when she talks about it, Klari’s body language changes. She leans forward in her chair, her eyes intense.
“If you were going to leave, you couldn’t carry anything with you,” Klari said. “You couldn’t go to the bank and withdraw your money. You couldn’t pack; you couldn’t take your property with you.”
Her family built a raft to cross the river into Austria. The men swam. The women and children rode. And eventually, they made it across. But there was still the arduous journey to the United States left to come.
The family ended up in Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. Finally.
“We didn’t come through Ellis Island,” Klari said. Instead, they ended up in Cleveland, Ohio.
“I turned 4 in February [1957],” Klari said. “And you know something? I never really knew a language barrier. I learned the language from playing with other children, and from TV.”
Her family would end up in Colorado, where she met the banjo player. And as they began to date, things just seemed to come together.
“We were in forestry school together at one point,” Bob said. “I wanted to be a forest ranger — until I found out you could just buy the hat.”
By the time Bob was 23, he and Klari were married. They headed east to the hills of North Carolina, where Bob put his degree in occupational therapy to good use in one of the state’s hospitals.
“North Carolina in the 1970s was more like the rest of the world was in the 1950s,” he said. “We used a lot of arts and crafts and modalities for occupational therapy.”
But the time there was important for what came next. Bob used the tools on hand at the hospital to teach himself how to repair musical instruments. And when Klari accepted an offer to go to the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, the pair moved to Birmingham. She became a U.S. citizen in 1990, one year after graduating from Cumberland.
With Klari busy in law school — at one point she was the editor for the school’s law review — Bob opened Homewood Musical Instruments. As a child, he’d learned to play the ukulele, then moved on to the banjo. He got his musical interest honestly. His grandmother played jazz piano, and his mother played music as well. With music always in the house, it was natural that Bob would pick it up, too.
“You know, I missed the sexual revolution,” Bob joked. “I was playing banjo.”
There’s something about the music that still captivates him, even after all these years — Homewood Musical Instruments has been in business for 32 years, first at the original Hamburger Heaven location, and now at its location on 28th Avenue South.
“This is an old-school shop,” Bob said. “The stuff we do here used to be common in the 1920s to the 1950s.”
Bob takes his work seriously. While teaching himself how to repair musical instruments, he also taught himself how to build them. A concertina he created was part of a display of the Southern Regional Highland Craft Guild at the Smithsonian Museum. He also built a mandolin that was purchased by the preeminent mandolin player in the country, Dave Grisman.
“When you play, things come together,” Bob said. “First, there’s the sound of the musical instrument itself, and then the control you can exert over it. It’s the rhythm, the notes. You can make something happen that’s beautiful, but it passes. It’s ephemeral.”
Love of music is a great equalizer, Bob said. Even if a musician isn’t very good, there’s still the idea that playing brings people together.
“There are people who are talented,” Bob said. “But a lot of times enthusiasm, tenacity and obsession are better than talent.”
Bob and Klari Tedrow have been married 42 years, with three children and five grandchildren.
“You asked me what makes it work,” Klari said, “and I think the answer to that is growing and developing with each other over time. We have different interests and careers, and you just kind of roll with the punches. You have to realize that life has many seasons, many changes.”
For example: Klari didn’t set out to be an attorney. Instead, when she and Bob moved to North Carolina, Klari pursued a teaching degree.
“I wanted to teach microbiology, but I never did the internship,” she said. Instead, she turned her fierce intellect toward the law. Today, she’s a well-respected immigration lawyer. Her firm, Tedrow and Myers, specializes in helping physicians immigrate to the U.S., helping place doctors in areas where they’re needed. It’s a highly specialized area of law.
“It’s a very niche area,” Klari said. “A lot of people wouldn’t even put their toe in the water of this kind of law.”
But it’s not all work for the Tedrows. For fun, Klari trains dogs to compete in agility competitions. At her office, a border collie named Slam greets patrons when the doors open. And Klari enjoys the aspect of training and competing.
“I always tell people that they should never underestimate an old lady running with a border collie,” she said.
