Some people play guitar, others like to play piano. For one graduate student in pharmacology and toxicology, he likes the accordion.
Mackey Newman took up the instrument as an undergraduate student to impress a girl. Today, he takes it with him all over campus, even into the nearby Meijer.He never ceases to be amused when people stop and ask him to play his accordion. However, when a Dunbar library worker asked him to play something, it came as a shock.
“I was like, really? It’s a library!” Newman said. “It’s kind of loud.”
“I was the first to call him Accordion Kid,” Neroscience Professor Thomas L. Brown, Ph.D, said. He knows Newman from his work in the labs in the Health Sciences building and as an occasional mentor.
However, there is more to Newman than just one of the three accordions he likes to tinker with and occasionally stroll around campus wearing. He also plays the piano. He owns nearly a hundred keyboards of various sizes, guitars, basses, a ukulele, pan flutes and a clarinet.
“I just got a trombone,” Newman said. “No idea how to work that, but trying it.”
Newman got the collecting bug from his dad who collected guitars. When asked if he might be obsessed, Newman played it down. He is more than willing to sell his musical collection to any interested parties and would like to do so on Ebay.
Also, twice a year his parents put on a guitar convention where people can sell or buy their guitars, amps, effects, etc. Newman takes his keyboards purchased from a local Goodwill and re-sells them at the event.
Newman invites Wright State students to check out what the convention has to offer. The next Ohio Guitar Show is in January. For more information go to http://www.ohioguitarshows.com/. To subscribe to their quarterly magazine go to http://www.guitardigest.com.
