One of my earliest enjoyable memories was going to Grandma's house. Until 1945, when I was 5 years old, Grandma and Grandpa Nichols lived on the farm just north of us. Grandma always had cookies and other special stuff for us kids. And Grandma had a player piano in her dining room.
We had a piano in our home, too, in those years, and my mother played it quite often. But I hadn't yet learned to play the piano, being only a little boy, and with Grandma's player piano, even a little boy who didn't know how to play piano could make great music on it just by putting the music rolls on the drum and pumping the pedals. I had to be a good boy for awhile before Grandma would let me operate the player piano, so I didn't always get to do so every visit, but still she seemed ready enough to let me make music, and she taught me how to handle the paper rolls and how to do each step without breaking or tearing anything. Grandma had dozens of music rolls to "play" the piano with. There were gospel songs, popular Broadway songs, country songs, dance songs from the 1920s, and so on. Many of the music rolls had the words of the song printed across the paper roll, so that if one liked, they could sing along as the piano played the notes of the song.
Those were the days before electricity came to the farm homes around Pea Ridge. So Grandma's player piano was entirely manually operated. There were no electric switches, no electric motors, no electronics of any kind. I had a few occasions to see the piano opened up, and one could see not only the strings and all the felt-covered hammers which sounded the strings, but also the intricate old mechanism that made the instrument a player piano. It was basically a vacuum-operated system. I am amazed, thinking back on it, how sophisticated it was, to have been produced in the 1920s, without the luxury of having any electrical components, and how well it worked and what great music it produced.
The power for the player unit was leg power, exerted on two pedals which folded out from the lower part of the piano. One opened up two sliding doors in the lower front of the piano, brought the pedals down into pumping position, and pumped with both feet. It was work, the pumping was, and every now and then my 5-year-old legs needed to be rested and refreshed. But it was well worth the work to hear the music play, and to watch the music rolls flowing over the bronze pickup bar in front of you. The player unit had about 80 separate note-actuating mechanisms, each consisting of valves, tubes, and little flexible leather bellows units. There was a bellows for every note that could be played on the piano. A few of the highest notes could not be played by the automatic player -- no bellows for those. The music rolls were produced in a factory which could cut rows of slots in the paper at precise placements. When the slotted paper moved across the bronze pickup bar, the precisely placed slots opened up air passages in the bar, releasing the vacuum to operate the note controlled by that air passage. The system was a bit like the old punched cards used by some early data processing computers.
Disaster struck in 1945, when Grandma and Grandpa were getting ready to retire from the farm and move to town. Something went wrong in the player mechanism on Grandma's piano. I remember one evening when my Dad and Uncle Earl had the pieces of the piano strewn all about the dining room, trying to find the problem. They never solved it. So, for years Grandma's player piano sat in her parlor in the house on the hill in town. We kids were not ever to go into the parlor without specific permission by our Grandma and our Mom. So, rarely, but sometimes, we might go play the old piano, by the keyboard, not the auto-player. The player unit was never repaired until years after my Grandma had passed away.
When the old player piano came to live at my Dad's house in the 1970s, he decided to pay to have the player mechanism rebuilt. I think it cost him about a $1,000 to have all the leathers redone, new tubing, new felts, new leather vacuum valves, and so on. I think he loved playing the old unit as much as I did. I used to tune the piano for him every year or so. It never held its tuning very well.
I think the old player piano originally cost about $50 in the 1920s. After 2000, the mechanism needed rebuilding again. The only technician we could find to bid on the repairs asked us $4,500. We thought we couldn't afford to have it done. That was a whopper of a lesson in inflation!
•••
Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Editorial on 06/18/2014