Leonardo Nunes

Leonardo Nunes
Leonardo Nunes was one of Manuel Nunes sons and learned to make Ukuleles from his father. He started out working for his father but he left the M. Nunes & Sons Company and started up his own in 1914. Soon after, (before 1920), he moved from Honolulu to Los Angeles and set production up there.

In Los Angeles Leonardo Nunes produced Ukuleles for a lot of the major Californian music shops and branded them Ukulele O Hawaii, (He had some sort of distribution deal with Gretsch for the rest of the U.S. and they also used Ukulele O Hawaii on their Kaholas range?)

Leonardo Nunes, as a company at least, continued producing Ukuleles into the 1930's. The output was mainly Sopranos to start with, with different levels of binding and decoration. Beyond the standard Soprano range Leonardo Nunes also made Minis, Concert scale Taropatchs, Tenor scale Tiple Ukuleles and a Soprano scale 6 string 4 course Ukulele, This was not a Lili'u, as it was the middle 2 courses that were doubled with the outer courses being single strings so possibly it was meant as some kind of cut down Tiple Ukulele?

I have never seen a Leonardo Nunes made Pineapple Ukulele and I have seen it suggested, though I've not seen documentary evidence, that he followed a similar decoration scale to the Kumalae one, except there was no style E and the style 0 had no rosette at all.

In 1926 the Radio Tenor trademark was registered by Leonardo Nunes for use on a new range of Concert scale Ukuleles, (apparently production of them actually started in 1925), though it was considered a Tenor at the time. He also appears to have switched to a pin bridge for all of the Ukuleles around this time and used less rope and more ring decoration.

For some reason, (possibly before 1926 because I have not seen it on a Radio Tenor and possibly due to some issue with the Gretsch deal as they both stopped using the Ukulele O Hawaii branding at the time), there was a period when the use of a headstock decal was stopped and there was just the sound hole label? The ones I have seen like this also all have fret markers on the 5th and 7th frets only.