When my older brother younger sister and I were in grade school back in Evansville Indiana, our dad traded a vacuum cleaner for an old upright piano. It belonged to the Bagby family next door. I remember how they laid 2x10s in the dirt yard to wheel it over to our house. Uprights weighed between 200 and a 1000 pounds. This one was probably around 500 pounds. It took a lot of neighbor help to accomplish the task.
Once it was firmly in our house, our parents decided we three kids should take piano lessons. They arranged for the Nun Sister Bernadette from St. Joe grade school to give us a weekly lesson. As best as I can remember they paid her 25 cents. We kids ran hot and cold on this as most kids do. It was the daily practicing that we objected to. However, we did manage to learn how to play the piano, and our parents had the pleasure of sitting through our annual recitals.
When my brother and I reached the eighth grade, the nuns were no longer allowed to teach us private lessons, and so our music education ended. My brother never went any further. I joined the high school band and self-taught myself to play the baritone. Eventually I bought a trombone and learned how to play it. After high school my music career ended too. My sister continued to take lessons through high school, and then stopped.
After the three of us had left home our father with help wheeled the piano into the back yard and dismantled it with an axe. I don’t even want to think about why. However, as each of us got married, they gave each of us a new piano so we could experience the same pleasure of giving our kids piano lessons.
My brother had no children, and I have no idea what transpired in my sister’s house, but Martha and I had three children, and they all received piano lessons. We suffered the same fate of getting them to practice, but persevered number of years.
Julie figured it out. She said she knew why we were so insistent on them taking lessons and practicing. It was so when they were grown, they could never say “You never let me”, and she was right.
