Hi Israel, I could definitely see the need for a small town, rural America tuner. Kind of a gypsy tuner, going from town to town and selling his wares. However, the city I am in has 2 major freeways running through it and 500,000 people within a 20 minute drive. Not quite rural America as I envision it... :-) Rob On Oct 12, 2010, at 19:08 , Israel Stein wrote: > Rob, > > I don't know how prevalent this is now, but even as recently as the mid 1970s (when I lived in New Mexico, and before I got into the piano business) I heard of so called "route tuners" who serviced mostly rural areas, where there was insufficient population density to support a resident tuner. (I think in our area there was a guy out of Texas who worked New Mexico and southern/western Colorado back then...) They worked just like your guy - schedule tunings way in advance, come into an area, spend a week or two there (probably had regular arrangements for housing), tune all the pianos within a reasonable driving radius, and then move on to the next area, traveling in a loop that brought them back home. They lived on the road for months at a time... With growing suburbanization, urban sprawl and rural towns becoming bedroom communities for large cities due to a more efficient transportation network (Interstate highways), it became possible for resident tuners to survive in formerly rural areas - so these "route tuners" became mostly obsolete. Most probably retired - and couldn't sell their "routes" (I have seen "routes" advertised for sale...). And this lifestyle doesn't seem to be conducive to producing heirs to the business... But I guess that between Texas and Southern California there is still enough rural small-town America left to keep this route tuner in business - along with loyal long-time customers in now urbanized areas like your piano store owner... > > Israel Stein -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101012/3ec3693f/attachment.htm>
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