By all indications, the Piano Hospital will be remembered fondly.
Officials just announced that it will be shutting down in a few months after 68 years serving blind students and piano owners. Online readers have been sharing plenty of love in their comments.
On the other hand, a lot of items in the School of Piano Technology for the Blind (its formal name) were forgotten years ago.
They include an empty rum bottle, tiny black shoe and lots of playing cards. As we noted in a story a year ago, there’s a display case filled with the stuff near the front door. And every item was found inside a piano.
The biggest single category seems to be playing cards — just about all from different decks.
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 1/2 years old.
One-of-a-kind items we inventoried in the 2016 story included a table-tennis racket, tea cup, that empty rum bottle, an empty Coke bottle 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 81-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.
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.
