Lori Amstutz’s narrowing eyesight helped her find her calling.
The incoming director of instruction at the Emil Fries School of Piano Technology for the Blind was in her 40s before her world started darkening due to retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition. She’d earned glowing reviews for her work as a dental clinic manager in Calgary, Canada, but quickly lost a similar job here in Vancouver.
“It was a big blow to my ego,” said Amstutz, who’d worked and earned all her life. “A great big brick wall was suddenly right in front of me.”
This was in 2004, after Amstutz and husband, Harold, moved to Vancouver so he could pastor the Laurelwood Baptist Church here. She’d figured on a continued management career, but because of her inherited eye disease, Amstutz couldn’t see any future at all.
But tuning the church’s piano one day was Ken Serviss of the School of Piano Technology for the Blind, a unique Vancouver nonprofit organization that trains seeing-impaired people for careers as piano technicians. Serviss was the school’s longtime director, and when he learned about the church wife who played beautiful piano but was losing her sight, he talked her up back at the office.
Serviss’ protégé Don Mitchell, the school’s lead teacher, started reaching out to Amstutz and didn’t stop. “He wouldn’t take no for an answer,” she said. “I tried to put him off.” But she also kept “trying to fit into a world where I no longer fit, and it didn’t work,” she said.
That’s what many seeing-impaired and other disabled people find in the world of work. According to 2014 figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities (12.5 percent) is more than double the general unemployment rate (5.9 percent) — and the vast majority of people with disabilities are not even included in that calculation because they’re not considered a part of the labor market.
Here’s another number: Approximately 40 percent of adult Americans with significant vision loss were working in 2013, according to the National Federation for the Blind. And blind people are far more likely to live in poverty than the general population.
Amstutz grew up believing she could “do anything,” she said. When her vision started disappearing, she realized, so did her options.
Extra trust
That dilemma is exactly why Emil Fries, a blind piano tuner and teacher at the Washington State School for the Blind during the 1940s, refused to accept the phaseout of his vocational program. Fries reportedly sold his possessions and mortgaged his property to start his own piano-tuning school. Nowadays, the so-called Piano Hospital offers a two-year course of study for sight-impaired piano technicians while selling reconditioned pianos from its showroom at 2510 E. Evergreen Blvd.
“What this school does is open up a whole world of successful employment possibilities for people who have been hanging around the sidelines,”Amstutz said. Piano tuning is one of the few fields where visual disability just might be a (psychological) advantage, she said.
“It’s a feather in your cap to say you went to this school,” she said. “It seems like people have extra trust in a blind person to tune their piano.”
But there’s also a glut of piano technicians in this part of the world, she added — so, after graduating from the school in June 2007, Amstutz and Harold returned to Calgary where she launched Amstutz Piano Tuning. The business was a hit, she said, and she even trained Harold to do some of the heavier, dirtier jobs she preferred to pass on.
Since her own ability to drive was gone, Harold also became her driver — while their youngest son, Kenton, started digging into his mom’s specialized skill set. That’s because Kenton inherited his mom’s degenerative eye disease. The plan now is for Kenton to take over the piano tech business in Calgary; meanwhile his parents have relocated to Vancouver so Amstutz can begin a two-year transition at the Piano Hospital, with Don Mitchell — who’s been here for well over four decades — gradually handing over the instructional duties.
Those duties go far beyond the guts of pianos. Part of what Amstutz wants to convey to her new students is business acumen.
“I’ve got years of experience building and running a business,” said Amstutz. “My goal here is to reproduce the success I’ve known.”
Loving to teach
There’s plenty of opportunity for that success, she said, and no real danger of pianos’ disappearing or giving way to electronic keyboards. “Retro” is always cool, Amstutz noted — and even if acoustic pianos stopped being manufactured tomorrow, the world remains full of literally millions of instruments that need ongoing maintenance and tuning. The Piano Hospital also has a program to save decent pianos from the landfill by getting them donated to schools, churches, nonprofit institutions and even low-income homes.
The place graduates a handful of students per year. Amstutz said she hopes to accelerate that.
Her musical taste? It’s mild and churchy — “baroque and easy listening,” she said — and Amstutz joked that she can slow down and smooth out any song, no matter how edgy, so it sounds like it belongs in a worship service.
She grew up in a big, musical family with a mom who gave piano lessons. She played flute in her church orchestra but realized that she’d better choose something louder if she wanted to get heard. So she picked up the trumpet — and never put it down again. But piano always was her “springboard instrument,” she said. Eventually she majored in music at a theological college in Alberta.
Studying at Vancouver’s Piano Hospital meant discovering a new way forward in life, she said. “It just felt so right,” she said. Afterwards, when she was a graduate starting her own business, training her husband and son to be her co-workers brought the same feeling. She hated running out of things to teach them, she said.
“The joke became that I needed fresh blood,” she said. “I discovered how much I love to teach.”
