| | Pianist Drew De Four on Barbara’s Baldwin. (Photo submitted) | |
Last week, my good friend and chicken guru, Jim McNulty, called to tell me that he had found the piano he was looking for. It was down in Middlefield and he wanted to know if he could have the use of my truck to bring it home. “What kind of piano is it?” I asked. “It’s a Winter spinet,” Jim said. I knew the brand. Last year, my son, Jonathan, and several of his friends had a terrible time getting a Winter piano out of a basement. It was very heavy. “You better get some help!” I told Jim. “I got plenty of help,” Jim said. “Billy Donnelly’s coming, my son-in-law, Bill Bowers, and Jack Purcell. Including you, that makes five of us.” “That might do it,” I said. But, I really didn’t think so. My wife, Alice, told me to call Jim back and tell him to draft some younger guys, but I told her I had already agreed. What I pictured was a congregation of the Over-The-Hill Gang. For one reason or another I thought that none of us had any business moving pianos. A story about my old friend, George Horrigan, came to mind. He had bought a large piece of antique furniture from a fussy guy in West Winfield who kept telling him not to do any damage. George was in the process of moving it down a flight of stairs with the guy breathing down his neck, when it became impossibly wedged between a wall and a banister. My friend struggled for a long time to free it but without success. His back started to bother him so he decided to take a break. That’s when I ran into him having a beer at The Park Inn. When he described his predicament, I asked, “How are you going to clear the guy’s stairway?” “I’m not,” George said while twitching his eyebrows and rubbing the small of his back. When the piano moving day arrived, there was an added pressure. Our friend Barbara Smith’s niece was bringing a professional pianist to town to give an informal concert on the Baldwin at Barbara’s house. She wanted all of us to attend. The performance would begin at one o’clock sharp, which required us to push moving the piano an hour ahead. We had two hours to get it from Middlefield to McNulty’s at the foot of Panther Mountain. If we were late, Barbara and her niece, not to mention the pianist, would be very disappointed. In keeping with a musical motif, Donnelly showed up for the move with a Blues Brothers hat on. Bowers came along with a come-along. Purcell was already limping and eager McNulty was impatiently strutting around like a rooster. We headed out in two vehicles. I pictured us all later, a bunch of Bassett cases trying to bargain with the hospital for a group rate on hernias. As luck would have it, the piano was on the ground floor. It was about 60 years old, which meant there was no chipboard used in its construction, making it a lot lighter than many of today’s pianos. Two notes and the long pedal were down like dead soldiers, but the rest of the ivory keyboard was level and even, with no chips. Things didn’t look too bad. Most of the weight would come from the cast iron harp that a piano is built around. The owner, a 30-year-old woman, was nearly in tears as we raised one side of the spinet to put it on a dolly. She said that her mother had bought the piano for her when she was a little girl. Now, she never played and it was taking up needed room. To my surprise, the five of us easily got it onto the truck. Billy wanted to do some horse trading with the piano woman’s husband but I reminded him that we were on deadline so he told the man he’d get back to him. The rest of the gig went smoothly – except for the two times the piano tipped over and almost fell off the truck. I didn’t know my way home and was trying to keep up with McNulty who has a lead foot. Also, we had forgotten to bring enough rope to tie our cargo down securely. When we dropped the Winter off at McNulty’s and headed for Barbara’s, I was expecting to hear pianist Drew De Four play five easy pieces. Instead, he dazzled us with music that ranged from Rachmaninoff to Jerry Lee Lewis. There was some heavy, serious stuff at the beginning and then the joint was jumpen! The 6-foot-7, 24-year-old De Four was all over the keyboard. He was a gazelle and a jaguar. He played a lot of blues, ragtime and stride style jazz. He made that piano talk. He sang many of his own tunes. Two hours flew by like two minutes. McNulty was inspired and eager to get his “new” Winter into working condition so that he could start practicing. The very next day, he called to have his broken piano glooed – that is, put right, by local tuner, Eric Gloo. The move and the concert wound up giving all of us a serendipitous Sunday. For more information on Drew De Four and to hear some of his music, key in his name on the Internet. Terry Berkson is a freelance writer from Richfield Springs.
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