My father, Robert Hofstetter, RTT, had little patience for anyone who wanted to buy parts or get free advice about how to work on their own pianos. He was often kurt with such people. One day a young man phoned him and started asking to buy two universal replacement stickers. The phone calls kept coming in for advice on how to do this or that, but for some reason my father did not turn him away as he normally would have done. More surprising about all this is that the young man was working on a piano belonging to one of my dad's customers! Eventually my dad told the young man that he should probably go to Napa to the junior college where I was teaching and learn how to do it right. Sometime later a pickup truck arrived driven by a long haired, bearded man with the young man as a passenger and the upright piano in the back. The young man had gone to a piano tech school where he had "learned to replace hammers" and he had sold his landlord on the idea of trading the work for his rent. By the time he was finished, the piano was unplayable. So the young man took my course for a year, during which he exhibited many unusual behaviors (he would hang over a piano for seemingly hours, just playing single notes and listening), he dressed like a bum and had a shaven head (this was in 1981), he didn't interact with anyone much at all. He worked away at the piano and listened in and watched others working on their pianos. Near the end of the year he finally had straightened out the hammers so that they all cleared each other and hit the strings squarely. He called me over to see and, thinking of how hard it is to redo bad work, and especially depressing if it is your own bad work, I told him how impressed I was with what he had done. He said in a low voice, "it's the only thing I have ever done right in my entire life." He never went into piano work, he phoned me every so often for years later from different parts of the country. He had taken up truck driving. I haven't heard from him for about ten years now. As for my Dad's former customer, the "hippie", he sent us three students for our piano school, purchased two new pianos from us for his private high school (sight unseen), introduced us to our current landlords, hired us numerous times to work on pianos at two of his schools, was instrumental in a Christmas rental of a grand for Seagate Technology (hard disk manufacturer) where he was the head of manufacturing (and our landlord's boss). My Dad's kindness to that young man changed our lives forever. Diane _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.
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