Sometime during our three year stay at 10th and Broad Sts. in Akron we got a piano in the house. I was probably about nine or ten years old. Daddy had been doing some remodeling for someone who had an old player piano that no longer worked. They said he could have it if he hauled it away. He borrowed a truck and brought it home one Saturday. Most of the keys were stuck and the player part didn't work at all. The next day he started opening it up to find out what was wrong. Mother was not too happy about this, since it was on a Sunday afternoon, but Daddy kept on working.
Evidently a mouse or a squirrel had gotten into the piano and filled it with chewed up newspaper. That's why the keys were stuck. After the newspapers were cleaned out, Daddy found that the bellows on the player had been chewed through. He took everything apart and cleaned it all up. He must have gotten the bellows repaired somehow, because we soon had it playing. A number of piano rolls came along with the piano. A piano roll is just that, a roll of paper with holes punched in it. As the paper passes across a set of openings, one for each key, suction is applied to the roll. When a hole passes across the opening, that particular key is struck. In fact, one of the rolls had a lot of extra paper on it. Dad laid it out and punched holes in and it played the old hymn, "Nearer my God to Thee." I thought that was pretty clever of my father to be able to do that.
The piano was terribly out of tune, and so Daddy had someone come in to tune it. Then he hired a piano teacher to give Arvilla and me lessons. Mr. McHose was a funny looking little man, but he was a good musician. I do remember that he had terrible halitosis. One afternoon my buddy Cy Dietrich came over while we were getting lessons from Mr. McHose. Cy was always cutting up and he started imitating Mr. McHose behind his back. My Dad thought that was hilarious. We took lessons from Mr. McHose for about six weeks. Then I suppose Daddy thought it was costing too much money and that was the end of the lessons.
I did continue to practice playing on my own. I don't recall if Arvilla did or not. The player had a speed control on it and so I decided to slow the piano roll down and mimic the keys to learn one of the numbers entitled, "The Robin's Return." I spent a lot of hours on that project and learned to play the song rather well by that method. I also learned to play some four-part harmony from the hymn book. However, when we moved away from Akron, Daddy didn't want to move the piano and we left it behind with the house. That was the end of my piano playing for a lot of years.
Some years ago, I built an electronic keyboard from a kit marketed by the Wersi organ company and I taught myself to play again. The sound on that instrument was rather tinny and I replaced it with a Casio keyboard. Later on I replaced the Casio with a Yamaha keyboard that I still play on occasion. However, I mostly use it for writing music for some of my hymns. Even though I never became a pianist or organist, I did learn a lot about music and chords. That was very helpful as I learned choir music.
