Yep. I've seen Conn drums before. I saw one that was perforated with holes. The cool thing about old drums like that is the many different and unique ways each maker was working out different technical ways to make tensioning devices. There was just so much creativity back then with everything and drums were especially cool.

I have always kinda been intrigued by different tuning mechanisms on drums, Although that Conn drum looks like it's wearing stirrups, I can see what the idea was behind the design...to widen the distribution of downward pull across the rim without adding more hardware to the shell. Ingenious, really. I wonder how well it works.Burger Kin

I have a very similar drum, only the shell is "corrugated" brass (I think).

In fact, it was the first drum I ever bought on ebay...back when ebay had 3 pages of musical instruments...back then, ANY drum to come up was cool....but I digress...

The cool thing about that Conn design, is that the tension rods for the bottom head have reverse threading...so that when you want to tighten the bottom head (with a wrench, not a key) you tighten clockwise for both the top AND the bottom. Pretty cool, considering back then, with a calf head that size, the drummer was probably re-tuning constantly.