How old would little Claudia be today?
Was that bottle of Coca-Cola used as a mixer for that bottle of rum?
And how did a tiny black shoe wind up in a piano?
You could say the same thing about all the stuff in that display case, of course. Everything in the glass-topped cabinet was discovered inside pianos, at what’s known informally as Vancouver’s piano hospital.
Don Mitchell, director of instruction at the School of Piano Technology for the Blind (the official name) isn’t sure how long it’s been accumulating, but it might date back to the 1960s.
The biggest single category seems to be playing cards. They’re totally random, and someone who wanted to deal a few hands definitely wouldn’t be playing with a full deck.
There are a lot of holiday mementos, such as valentines and Christmas cards. Lots of photographs, too, particularly wallet-size photos of kids.
One black-and-white shows a serious-looking girl named Claudia; she was 2 1/4 years old.
One-of-a-kind items include a table-tennis racket, a tea cup, those empty rum and Coke bottles, and a girl’s shoe.
Some items have dates on them. A fast-food card, good at McDonald’s locations in Oklahoma, expired in 1986. Someone took a snapshot of a neighborhood and wrote on the back: “View from my balcony 1981.”
One 80-year-old artifact is from a Portland piano tuner, who penciled “Oct 26 1936” on his business card. That’s 13 years before Emil Fries started his piano hospital, Mitchell said.
The collection isn’t a lost-and-found box, Mitchell added: “It’s just things that have been found in pianos.”
Still, there was one lost-and-found moment that he witnessed.
“I was working on a piano and a young woman came in and starting pawing through” the display case. She pulled out a photo and asked someone in the office if she could have it.
The office worker wanted to know why.
Mitchell heard the young woman explain: “It’s a picture of me.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
