Piano crunch

Oliver Hammond

In my hometown, there was a music store that took old equipment on trade-in. What they didn't think they could resell went into the alley alongside the building until it could be hauled to the dump. One day I came upon an old Chicaco Cable Company player piano in the alley. The player parts had been removed, and it was badly out of tune, but it worked fine otherwise. I called a friend of mine who had a little Mazda pickup truck, and together we somehow got it loaded into his truck.

Everything was fine until we turned the last corner, half a block from my house. I felt the truck lean, and in the rearview mirror I saw the piano slowly tip over and fall out the side of the pickup. In slow motion, it executed an arc a professional diver would have been proud of, and fell to the pavement. It landed on its lid in the gutter and exploded with the most horrible screeching and wailing a musical instrument can make. It was really rather beautiful to watch in an odd way.

My friend and I got what left of the piano upright and pushed it to my front porch. One of the metal wheels was jammed and left a mark all the way down the sidewalk. When I moved away, that rusty skid mark was still there. Never one to give up on a challenge--some say I'm just plain bullheaded--I spent that fall and winter rebuilding the piano. Key by key, hammer by hammer. Other than a few 3/4" bolts protruding from one side of the case, you'd never have known what had happened. I even tuned it when it was completed.

A few years later, my parents gave it away while I was off traveling.

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