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On A Sinking Note

The Source

Okay, this may seem harsh, but with all the hoopla over the anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking, there seems to be one glaring omission in our mourning. Yes, 1514 passengers lost their lives when that great ship clunked into a 1912 iceberg. I’m terrible at math but with 2224 people but life rafts for only 1178, someone obviously didn’t know how to subtract. A recent New Yorker article quoted one historian as saying, “The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, The Civil War, and the Titanic.” Judging by the recent spate of movies and books, our interest in the sinking ship hasn’t sunk a bit. Fine and dandy, but what about the pianos? Sure, I regret the loss of a thousand and a half lives, but the Titanic carried eight pianos…good ones! New ones! Steinways for gosh sakes? Where’s the memorial to those great instruments? I don’t mean to slight the eight thousand dinner forks that went down in the North Atlantic or the twenty-nine boilers or the jeweled copy of “The Rubaiyat of Mar Khayyam,” but these were pianos! Does anyone realize what a truly fine piano is worth? Does anyone mourn the fact that these precious instruments are now rotting at the bottom of ocean and permanently playing in the key of “sea?” To be exact, there were 5 pianos in first class, 2 in second, and 1 in third. There’s some confusion about how many of them were full-sized grand pianos, and the famous Cameron movie tended to put them into places where later research has determined they would not fit, but still…a piano’s a piano, dog-gone it! I’m blessed with the best piano in the world, and like grandchildren, everyone owns the “best” one. And what makes good pianos good is the fact that there are so many bad ones. It’s not a mortal sin, but a piano is like a drunken preacher. It just doesn’t seem right. I’m the third owner of my Gulbransen. Axel Gulbransen began manufacturing these beauties in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century and by 1917 he’d become one of the largest manufacturers in the world. During World War II, only Gulbransens and Steinways were purchased by the U.S. government. A little German fellow in Quincy, Illinois, used to play my particular sweetheart on the radio and when he fell upon hard times he decided to sell his piano. My mother heard about it and directed dad to drive to Quincy to fetch it back to Perry where I learned to pound on the thing as an excuse to get out of doing the dishes. Mom eventually gave the piano to me and it now sits at the west end of Arenzville’s main drag. I have it tuned twice a year, it thanks me, and in return I can irritate the neighbors to my heart’s content. I could tell stories…in fact, I have told stories…of the horrible pianos that have attacked me over the years. The God-awful thing in a Quincy Catholic fellowship hall that could not be moved away from the wall because the wall was holding it up, a vicious man eater at the Lynnville Methodist Church that would literally gnaw at your fingers while you played it, the old rascal (now deceased) at the Jacksonville K of C Hall on which every third note played…out of tune. Anyone who’s suffered at these various keyboards can appreciate the loss that was the Titanic’s on that fateful day. I could write a book on how to mistreat a piano. First, buy a spinet … that horrible little hybrid of a piano and a chest of drawers. Second, put the piano against the wall, thus effectively blocking off the sound. The third trick is to put in on carpet, which will completely soak up any remaining sound that might be left by sticking it against the wall. Finally, cover it with knickknacks and doilies, tricking it out to look like a Victorian lady’s casket. Want to know how to treat a piano royally? Buy a good old upright if you can’t afford a grand, place it on a hardwood floor with the back facing out, hire a little kid to come and bang on the keys to get the felts toughed up, and remove every bit of decorative backing or fronting that you can tear loose. Your piano will love you! It will breathe! It will sing for you! A high school friend of mine bought a Plymouth Roadrunner. It was gorgeous, it was flashy, and the chicks swooned over the sound of its glass-packed tailpipes. In fact, it only had one real drawback….it wouldn’t run. The car spent half its natural life inside a mechanic shop. A 1912 Renault Coupe went down on the Titanic. It should have been a Roadrunner. The next time you pass a grand piano, a baby grand, three-quarters grand, upright, or even a spinet, take a moment the mourn the seldom-mentioned loss on the Titanic…and then listen closely for a gurgling melody.