Who Can Resist A Player Piano?

4-9-10

By JIM KEVLIN

The sound of ivories being tickled has been wafting through the air at the corner of Main and Dietz lately.
But peek in the door of the Greater Oneonta Historical Society, and you won’t find anyone tickling them.
You will see a G.B. Shearer Co. piano, though, and as you approach you will see the piano eerily performing all by itself.
It might be “Garibaldi’s Hymn,” “The President Coolidge March” – GOHS Executive Director Bob Brzozowksi’s favorite – “Polka de Concert” or dozens of other tunes not often heard these days.
Yes, spooky.
What your looking at is a gift – a player piano from the Crandell family of Otego, in memory of Margaret M. Crandell, who passed away in 2004 – that keeps on giving.
Brzozowski and Eric Mazurak, the piano tuner and GOHS board member, picked up the gift early in 2009 and drove it down to Outback Mechanical Music in Bainbridge.
There, David Smith – he and brother Tom are in business together – spent a year repairing the apparatus, painstaking step by painstaking step.
The $4,500 price tag was paid, in part, by a $1,500 grant from Oneonta’s Jackson H. Fenner Foundation.
As history/music enthusiasts became aware the player piano was there, they began dropping off rolls they happened to have around the house or in the attic.
Jim Strolin, a Hudson Street resident who used to have a player piano of his own and began collecting rolls, alone contributed 70, including “Spirit of Independence” and World War II marches.
(He hung on to a few of his favorites, including the theme from the “Batman” TV show autographed by Adam West, and a Little Rascals medley signed by Tommy “Butch” Bonds.  His wife, Melissa, enjoyed “Keep The Home Fires Burning,” so he kept that, too.)
And as passersby heard the wafting, many stopped in and before long have found themselves seated at the controls, pumping the bellows and enjoying the music.
The GOHS has a special player-piano bench – it’s slightly slanted to give players’ legs and little extra leverage against the pedals.
The Shearer company was assembling player pianos in the city – in the vicinity of The Depot, Brzozowski believes – during early decades of the 20th century, the heyday of the piano.
David Smith, who is giving a lecture/demonstration at 1 p.m. Saturday, April 10, at the GOHS, said there were “many hundreds, perhaps thousands” of piano-assembling companies across the U.S. at the time Shearer was in business.
Norwich had two.  Walton had one.  Chauncey Pease founded the Pease Piano Co. in Cooperstown in the 1840s, later moving it to New York City.
These assemblers would order parts from manufacturers – the Wickham Piano Plate Co. of Springfield, Ohio, for instance, made “harps,” the heavy frame that holds the strings – and put together the final instruments locally.
While redoing the Shearer, for instance, he found the hammers were from Pratt & Reed, “the king of the piano-action business.”
The GOHS piano, Smith said, “was your typical unrestored, unmolested find.  It had not been subjected to weather and any elements.”
Still, because the playing mechanisms have parts made of leather, rubberized cloth and rubber tubing, time takes its toll.
There’s a main bellows, then individual smaller bellows for each of the 88 keys.  Smith estimated he cleaned or repaired 800 individual parts.  All the gaskets had to be replaced.
He estimated the refurbishing took “a couple of hundred hours” over a year.  Brzozowski and Mazurak brought the piano to the GOHS headquarters in February.
The Crandell piano arrived just as the Smith brothers were rebounding from the Flood of 2006.
The water rose 4-foot high inside their 24-by-48-foot studio on Front Street, Bainbridge, ruining 100 pianos and organs in various stages of repair.
Except for occasional jobs like the Shearer, the brothers are making a living doing electrical work.  Still, David has an interest in the history of music and the piano in particular.
He quotes a favorite passage from the 19th-century “General History of Music” by Bill & Bill:
“Probably no greater or swifter progress was ever made in any artistic or industrial pursuit than marks the piano and organ manufacture in America.”