Doug Clark: Cherished family treasure gets second life

The gleaming walnut piano was the centerpiece of my mother Carol’s living room and, until her death last April at age 92, one of the big joys of her long life.

Which is why my older brother Dave and I agonized before finally deciding to let it go in an estate sale after selling the Clark family homestead in late December.

My brother’s wife and daughters are all piano teachers and are up to their elbows in pianos. No one on my side of the family has the floor space or the keyboard inclinations.

Emotional ties? Rich memories?

Oh, yeah. We’re stocked up on those.

My father Kenneth bought the Everett spinet model for mom from a downtown Spokane music store in 1948. This was the same year he finished building our modest one-story orange brick house at 15th and Regal, the only home Dave and I ever knew.

Mom wanted a piano. The “Old Man” got her a swell piano.

I came along a few years later and my earliest memories are of mom sitting on the flat bench seat, banging out hymns and pop standards like “September in the Rain,” and “April Showers.”

My brother, a fine sax and clarinet player, rehearsed his high school jazz combos around that piano. And as a trumpet-playing music major at Eastern Washington University, I spent more than a few weekends trying to gain a bit of chord and harmonic wisdom for my music theory classes.

My dad even tried to make like Liberace for a time, but with ridiculous results.

He loved to remind us of his musical claim to fame, that he was once a member of an Illinois state championship glee club. After such melodious prestige, he boasted that mastering the eighty-eights would be child’s play.

So my mother started giving him lessons out of a book entitled “Teaching Little Fingers to Play.”

Dad got as far as a tune called “Baseball Days,” which he would play and sing in a trilling falsetto while the rest of the family collapsed in fits of hysterical laughter.

My brother recalls the words as going something like…

“Come on boyyys, let’s have some funnn.

“Baseball daaaaays have just begunnn.”

Dad wisely gave up his lounge act shortly afterwards.

My mom’s piano was also a seasonal shrine. It displayed the steadily growing array of carved Christmas candles that I gave her, one for each year dating back to when I was 13.

But nothing lasts forever and in the end, as Mick Jagger once wrote, we’re forced to “watch as tears go by.”

So one night last month I said so long to my old home and mom’s piano and left the keys and garage openers on a kitchen counter for the new owners, a nice couple with fixer-upper knowhow.

And that was that, or so I figured. At least it was until an email arrived on Monday from an affable city parking enforcer named George Good.

“…The other day I bought an Everett piano from an estate sale that I believe was your parents’,” he wrote. “My wife and I bought this for my daughter and her family, specifically our 5-year-old grandson (who is) already showing an interest in music.

“If you have any history to share with us we would be interested to hear about it.”

History? You bet I have some piano history to share.

One of my mom’s neighbors had apparently told Good about who had lived at the corner house while he was at the estate sale. After that I was pretty easy to track down.

A call to Good and a few texts later led me to a North Side residence on Tuesday afternoon.

Inside I found Good’s daughter Chelsea and two of the cutest kids ever: Avery Good, 5, and Elise Cereghino, 3.

And there it stood against a wall, the piano I thought I’d never see again.

Avery and Elise climbed onto that familiar bench and began pushing keys and filling the air with random notes. Already they’d caught up with the Old Man.

Chelsea showed me the original price tag that her father had discovered inside the piano, something I’d never seen before.

The Everett 75th anniversary model had sold for $923, which gave me a new insight on the sacrifice my father had made.

He had barely begun his career as an insurance salesman and 900 bucks was real dough back when Harry Truman ruled the White House.

Before saying goodbye, I handed Chelsea a photo of the candle-covered centerpiece as it was in the living room of where I grew up. Driving back in the rain, I called my brother to tell him that mom’s beloved piano was in good hands and will live on for many years to come.

Doug Clark is a columnist for The Spokesman-Review. He can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or by email at dougc@spokesman.com.