Six Friends, Six Strings

Six Lowell Tech students who met as roommates or in student organizations formed a lifelong bond over folk music and rock ‘n’ roll. 

Four of them already played guitar when they started college, and the other two learned quickly. During the 1972-73 school year, three of them rented a cottage on Long Pond in Dracut, where they could make music together. A couple of weeknights and every weekend, all six jammed on the porch or in front of the fieldstone fireplace. And anyone else who came, friends and girlfriends, joined in, says Frank Smith ’73, a retired Hewlett-Packard executive turned consultant. 

“The rule was that if you were there, you had to play an instrument—even if you didn’t play an instrument,” Smith says. “So we had kazoos and tambourines. I sometimes played the spoons just to change it up.” 

Five decades later, the men still meet for a few days every year to play guitar, bass, banjo, ukulele, piano and harmonica together, minus Jeff Pfeiffer ’74, who died last July. 

During their first year at what was then Lowell Technological Institute, Pfeiffer taught his roommate, Ron Hamel ’74, how to play guitar. Likewise, Smith—a sophomore—taught a few chords to roommate Frank McLaughlin ’74, who practiced obsessively and learned fast. The “two Franks” met Rich Goldman ’73, while working at The Text, the campus newspaper. 

The whole crew came together through the Apple Corps, a student group that brought top musical acts to campus, helping to load and unload equipment and running errands for the visiting musicians. Jere Anderson ’74 was a key member, Smith says. 

“We had J. Geils, Livingston Taylor, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Thunder [Revue], the Byrds—the list goes on,” says Smith. “We had the Steve Miller Band, Santana, Aerosmith, Judy Collins, Sha Na Na, Frank Zappa and even Cheech and Chong. Incredible for what was then a small New England college.” 

On campus, the six friends were instrumental in starting the Spring Carnival and opening a musical coffeehouse in the basement of Eames Hall, where Goldman and Anderson often played together. Ultimately, the six formed their own band. “We played in nursing homes and coffeehouses,” Smith says. The first time someone asked “What’s the band’s name?”, Smith said, “Jere and Friends,” because Anderson was usually the lead vocalist. 

After graduation, they stayed in touch, even as life and work pulled them in different directions. Anderson, a plastics engineer, is now working for a microbrewery. Hamel worked in software engineering, including for L. L. Bean. Goldman worked in strategic business processes and transformation, while McLaughlin worked in the commercial baking industry. 

Pfeiffer was so serious about music that he apprenticed himself to a luthier in Concord, Massachusetts, after graduation and learned how to make classical guitars. Although later he worked in both engineering and general management, he used his luthier skills all his life to fix up and donate guitars to members of the military serving overseas as well as for music programs on the North Shore. 

Pfeiffer and Smith remained especially close, thanks to Smith’s wife, Jeannie. When Pfeiffer’s college girlfriend broke up with him right after graduation, he told Jeannie, “I just want to meet a nice girl who wears denim skirts and peasant blouses,” Smith recalls. Jeannie introduced him to her close friend, Nancy Dow. Pfeiffer and Dow married and raised three daughters together. 

When the men had reached their mid-50s and most of their kids were grown, Smith took advantage of a perk that Hewlett-Packard offered—vacation time at a cabin campsite on Cape Cod—to organize a guitar reunion. “I said, ‘Gee, it would be fun to get the guys together to play music again,’” he says. “That was 24 years ago.” 

The group met each fall, sometimes at a ski cabin in North Conway, New Hampshire, sometimes in rented beach houses in Maine. At first, everyone came except Goldman, who had settled in the Pittsburgh area. One year, though, Smith and Anderson drove out to a guitar workshop in Ohio and visited Goldman on the return trip. He’s been coming to the reunions ever since. 

In 2021, Pfeiffer asked the group to schedule their annual get-together in Woodstock, New York, where an international luthiers’ convention is held every October. The Woodstock Invitational Luthiers Showcase was canceled because of a surge in COVID-19 cases, but the six men had a great time playing music together in the house they’d rented, which had a large fieldstone fireplace and a porch, just like the Long Pond cottage where they’d spent so many happy evenings as college students, Smith says. 

It was their last full reunion; Pfeiffer died last July. He had amassed an impressive vintage guitar collection—and he willed one of his prize instruments each to his five friends, who all came to the memorial service. “His daughters had the guitars lined up, with our names on them,” Smith says. 

In October, the five went to Woodstock again in Pfeiffer’s honor. “We all brought the vintage guitars that Jeff willed us, and each of us prepared a song to perform,” Smith says. 

With Pfeiffer gone, it was bittersweet, like playing a sixstring guitar with a broken string. But they appreciated their time together all the more, and at the luthiers showcase, they all agreed: 

“Jeff would have loved this.”