Tadeo Gomez was a neck sander, carver and shaper who worked for Leo Fender when he first started out in the early 1950's in Fullerton, California.Today the necks that bear his penciled initials 'TG' command hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Indeed, the reputation of the Telecasters from the early 50's are legendary and many a famous guitarist has made seminal and incendiary music with the help of a 1952 type Telecaster.
It's also worth noting that, unbeknownst to Tadeo at the time of his employment with Fender some 60 years ago, the Telecaster is now the longest running production model electric guitar in music history. Players today still lust after the simplicity of the Telecaster and it's straight-forward design that incorporates things like a fixed bridge with 3 saddles, an easily accessible and user friendly set of controls and 2 very unique sounding pickups, all of which lend itself to a wide range of performance styles or present a template that is ripe for 'hot-rodding'....if that's your bag!
Many players have taken advantage of the Telecasters design 'quirks' and in doing so have further helped cement the reputation that the Telecaster presently enjoys; that is one of being a 'guitar players guitar'.
Just listen to Roy Buchanan's haunting volume swells, James Burton's chicken-picking or Jim Campilongo's behind the but bends for a taste of what the Telecaster is capable of.
But I digress.....
A cursory investigation into 'Blackguard' history (the term Blackguard denotes Telecasters produced from 1952 to 1955 that were finished in a butterscotch blond with a 5 hole bakelite black pick-guard) reveals that one of the most noted design aspects of the first Telecasters were their neck shapes. These were, of course, all finished laboriously by hand and as such results were often highly variable unlike the uniform products of the CAD age that we now live in.
The further one digs into early Blackguard literature then the more likely you are to come across terminology like Boat-neck, Soft V, or Baseball Bat, with many players convinced that the necks on these early Telecaster's contribute hugely to their wonderful sound.
Tadeo Gomez was originally from a tiny town in Jalisco, Mexico and was made an orphan when, at age 13, both his parents died within weeks of each other. Thereafter, he travelled to Jerome, Arizona by following the railroad tracks and survived by eating banana peels thrown from the windows of passing trains. Once there he worked with his brothers in the silver mines. He was a self-taught woodworker.
In the mid Fifties, disgruntled with his employer, he left Fender to work at Disneyland as a Laborer. He later returned to work at Fender as a custodian.
