By Pat Gracey
I Love a Piano
The Spirit of Tehachapi
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On Sunday mornings when our church choir is practicing and warming up before Mass we are in a classroom that contains a vintage piano. It is an old upright grand with lots of fine brass “innards” and there is no manufacturer’s date showing but I know it’s in there somewhere. It does say it’s guaranteed for ten years! Since I can trace its beginning back to the early days of the twentieth century the guarantee, obviously, expired over ninety-five years ago. I cannot help but think of the old Irving Berlin song, written in 1915, I Love a Piano, which, on rare occasions, one still hears.
A longtime friend of mine, Mary Farrell, said that her two aunts, Elizabeth and Ethel Erbel, had married two Tehachapi men: Sam and John Cuddeback, who were cousins. To keep one from wondering, Elizabeth married Sam, and Ethel wed John. The newlywed couples acquired some household furnishings among which was the upright piano of which I speak.
Sam and John Cuddeback were the owners of the Opera House, the City of Tehachapi’s meeting place, and wanted the piano for the silent movies which were also featured in their building. The old silent movies usually had a pianist who set a musical scene by playing mood music to get people properly inspired for the glad, bad and sad scenes. It was an important piece of equipment. It just happened that the brides, Elizabeth and Ethel Cuddeback, had a niece, Margaret Erbel, who played piano quite well and who secured work accompanying Charlie Chaplain and other movie stars as they “silently” overdramatized their actions in that amazing invention “moving pictures”. It also served traveling troops of show people and concerts until 1920 when the Opera House was torn down.
Elizabeth Cuddeback gave the piano to local girl, Margaret Sola, daughter of a local barber. She took lessons for a while. Margaret later loaned it out to friends for their children to learn how to play. Then our traveling piano, twelve hundred pounds of solid oak, brass, with real ivory on its 88 keys, ended up at the old French Hotel located where the Hitching Post Theatre now stands. I remember, as a child, walking past and hearing the beautiful French/Basque songs wafting out to greet me.
The French Hotel ceased to be in 1945 in favor of an Italian restaurant called The Tehachapi Inn with John Rizzardo, native Italian, as proprietor. Margaret Sola, still the owner of the piano, finally donated the instrument to St. Malachy Catholic Church and it has since remained in the classrooms located behind the church. By this time, someone had painted it a sickly green and as I recall there were chips in the paint showing other colors prior to the green.
There was a time in 1984 when Father Godfrey Raffel, a gifted pianist and at that time Chaplain at the California Correctional Institution in Cummings Valley, thought he’d like the piano to use for the inmates in the chapel. As a joke, St. Malachy parishioner, Mary Farrell, put an article in the local paper with the headline, “Prison Padre Purloins Piano.” She listed the piano’s genealogy and the article got a few laughs from those reading it.
Delores Smith, also a St. Malachy parishioner, after reading the news article, volunteered to refinish the vintage piano before its confinement began. Multiple coats of paint were removed and a beautiful oak wood exterior was revealed. As it turns out, old “88” didn’t do any time at CCI. Father Raffel’s duties ended and the piano with the face lift still stands in one of the classrooms. The brand name was erased from the front by the many coats of paint but inside on the brasswork it reads, “STEINERK #33918”. Today, there is a Steiner Piano Company. My thinking is that somewhere during the past century someone dropped the K. These days when someone plays it, you will hear mostly church hymns but somewhere in its interior, among those many hammers, strings and keys, one might imagine he echo of those French/Basque songs from the old French Hotel.
