Pianos

I don't know why, but I had a longing for a piano. In 1957, while living with my parents at 1614 10^th Street in Corpus Christi, I got Mom to accompany me to a piano store way out on Ayers. A cooperative salesman demonstrated several used pianos, and made me a price, to include delivery, on an old but serviceable spinet.

For $125 I owned a piano.

In retrospect I must admire Pop for his tolerance — for I did all this without his permission — all the while ignoring his reaction to my Horn playing at 4329 Kostoryz.

I enjoyed the piano, but I abandoned it without regret when I married Marty and moved out.

PIANO #2

A few years flew by, and in 1960 I was living in Austin with my second wife Doris.

We visited her biological father's sister at her home north of Austin. There I discovered an old piano, very rough in both appearance and functionality. It was sitting out, exposed to the rain, and really looked bad. And played worse.

It was mine for the asking.

Doris' Aunt's two sons were strong, healthy teenagers — and her husband, Vince Rush, was a very healthy, functional sixty year old. Who owned a pickup truck.

We moved the sad old piano to the living room of my apartment at 306-1/2 W. 42^nd Street in north Austin.

Vince was born in 1900. At the time described above I was twenty-four. I regarded Vince as an old man. Today, as I write this I am eighty -six — and I look back with sad longing for what I was, and for what I could do, when I was sixty.

I addressed the cosmetic issues on the piano. Quantities of “plastic wood” were used to reform the rounded-off corners, and sandpaper and black high gloss enamel transformed the appearance.

In that period I was attending the University of Texas, and welcoming my daughter Elizabeth to our existence.

School by day, and working part time at various jobs — including full-charge bookkeeper for a small manufacturing firm (Toungate and Coates, mfg of fiberglass cooling towers), and then as a printer's assistant on a huge four color printing press at the Steck Printing plant.   I found occasional part time work in helping two brothers who owned a used furniture store, where I bought furniture for our apartment, when they delivered furniture.

Through them I contacted a piano repairman — a somewhat elderly colored man who came to my apartment, deftly removed the “works” from the piano, and returned and reinstalled it a week later, and tuned the piano, for a very nominal fee.

I was proud. I was the owner of a beautiful piano which played like a brand new one. I enjoyed it.

At the end of the spring semester at UT I grew discouraged when I could not find a job — prospective employers refused to invest in a new worker who would certainly quit when the next semester started.

So when Pop came to town, driving his big yellow Ford pickup truck with the cow skull, complete with horns, mounted on the front of the hood — and announced that he (along his wife and daughters) was moving to Tucson, I said “Wait for me — I'm going with you!”

He did, — and I did.

I left that beautiful black piano in the care of the furniture dealer brothers.

PIANO #3

Fast forward, through more moves, new jobs, and two more children for me and Doris. We lived in Alice, Texas, where I worked for NCR. In the living room of our house at 765 Schallert was a beautiful upright piano.

Doris commented on the look of serene ecstasy that showed on my face while I was playing.

Her awareness of my attachment to the piano doubtless figured in her decision to take the piano with her when she left me in late 1966. Movers came in while I was at work and emptied the house. She also emptied my life — taking my three children from me. There began the most agonizingly sad period of my entire life.

PIANO #4

I survived — and in 1969 I married Evelyn. We bought a house at 1907 E. Warren in Victoria in 1973, and in 1975 I bought a NEW piano.

In 1979 I left Evelyn.  And the piano.

PIANO #5

More unwise and regrettable decisions led me through a progression of relocations, through Corpus Christi,  Austin,  Denver, then Birmingham, and a return to Texas in 2003 -- where I settled in Alice.

While living in a house that I bought in 2006 at 1145 E.5^th Street in Alice I bought a used piano in a downtown junk store. Stan Russell and his trailer helped me get the piano home. From 2007 until 2013 I spent hours playing that old piano — styled, incidentally an UPRIGHT GRAND. Rich tone.

Regrettable and unwise decisions found me leaving Alice in 2013 — and I left tha piano when I vacated the house.

Now, when I buy a lottery ticket, I dream of the special treats that I will enjoy should I ever win. I visualize a house with a living room capacious enough to embrace a GRAND PIANO. Such a juvenile longing. But understandable. After all, somewhere, piano number six awaits . . .