The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

I was reading about life "being simple" in Dayton in 1902 from a booklet printed in 2002 celebrating Grace Episcopal Church's centennial. "Only 14 percent of the homes in the entire country had a bathtub," it read. I noticed there was no mention of pianos in the homes, but that's what was on my mind.

I took piano lessons in the '20s and '30s. It occurred to me that many of my friends or acquaintances did have pianos as well as my family. That was during the Depression.

I have felt blessed that my parents kept paying for my lessons, and I learned to practice regularly. Today I am glad I did because I am able to use my talent to entertain others, and I think I enjoy it more today than I did back then. I play every week for residents and guests at the Booker Rest Home in Dayton, and recently I've been asked to play at Garrison Creek, a retirement home in Walla Walla.

During my days as a youth, we did have electricity and telephones - but no stereo systems, television or computer.

There was more time to see one's friends and neighbors, and music making at home was popular.

According to "The Piano Shop on the Left Bank," a book I've been reading by Thad Carhart, "the piano was the popular instrument." A vast quantity of popular music was written for the piano - and most of it was played for entertainment at home.

My father had a special background performing in small-town quartets in Cashmere and Kettle Falls. He also sang solos for different affairs.

One of the main home entertainments was singing around the piano. I remember an uncle who played the old jazz on the piano while others sang.

In reading "The Piano Shop," I discovered that a piano boom began in the 1850s. Production of pianos topped half a million of which 350,000 were made in the U.S. alone, Carhart wrote.

"There were about 300 makers of pianos in the U.S. in 1910," he wrote. By 1950, that number had dropped significantly, down to about 30.

"A piano was one of the few luxury goods available to a majority of consumers," Carhart went on to explain. "It was among the first to be available through financing schemes allowing payment over time."

Pianos came to be regarded, Carhart wrote, "as one of the indispensable accomplishments" that made middle-class women "charming, attractive, and not least - marriageable."

For some this was a mixed blessing.

Some idea of the piano's prevalence in polite society can be taken from this turn of the century quote by Oscar Wilde: "I can assure you that the typewriting machine, when played with expression, is not more annoying than the piano when played by sister or near relation." piano." She wanted to show me off. I'm glad of it now.

Irving Berlin expressed the feelings of many of us when he composed "I Love a Piano."

"Run my fingers o'er the keys, the ivories, and with pedal I love to meddlehellip;So you can keep your fiddle and your bow, give me a P-I-AN O."

Now-a-days, the piano is my companion. Playing for others keeps me busy and social, just as it did when I was a child - just as it did for many of us. Bless my parents for their gift to me of music, and praise God for allowing me to keep on playing.