Geraldine Herrera

Geraldine Herrera was working at J.C. Penney in Southern California right out of high school and preparing to attend Fullerton Junior College to pursue her dream of becoming a schoolteacher. While there, a regular customer, Irene Vasquez, encouraged her to take a new job that would boost her pay from sixty cents to a full dollar an hour. Geraldine agreed and soon found herself at a workbench winding pickups for a fledgling guitar company called Fender. The year was 1949, and she worked part time and during summers, side by side with the company’s founder, whose bench was just across from hers. After completing her studies, Geraldine embraced her calling as an educator, teaching third grade for one year before pausing to raise her children, and later enjoying a remarkable 25-year career teaching in Encinitas. Though her time at Fender was brief, it placed her at the very heart of history in the earliest days of an iconic and world-changing musical brand. When Geraldine sat down for her NAMM Oral History interview at the age of 94, she spoke with immense pride, recalling that every single Fender pickup produced from late 1949 through 1951 had been carefully wound by her own hands — a small but extraordinary contribution to the sound that would inspire generations of musicians.