How a Cold War submarine officer traded listening to ships for tuning vintage player pianos in Portland

Molly Gilbert grew up in the 1990s, with a big old TV in the living room. But it was her family’s player piano nearby that she remembers most fondly.

“We had several Christmas rolls. So we’d get down and it would just go through a medley of five or six Christmas songs. And we’d all be singing along,” Gilbert said.

“It’s as if it’s playing with six hands.”

Gilbert learned to play on the old piano, but when she went to college, the 800-pound instrument was rolled into the basement and forgotten.

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Gilbert recently bought a house and gave birth to a son. She thought the piano might help her recreate some of her fondest childhood memories. So she called one of Oregon’s few remaining player piano experts, Michael Bryant.

“Michael told me what it might cost.$10,000!” Gilbert said. “And we’ve just bought a house and we both have student loan debt.”

So Gilbert did what player piano owners have been doing for decades: She asked Bryant to take the player mechanics out and just get the piano part back in tune.

She stored the mechanics in the garage of her East Portland home. But now if she ever has the money to put them back, it won’t be Bryant who does it. After six decades, he says the work’s too physically demanding now.

‘The Sting’ effect

Looking back on his career, he says it all started after he served as a sonar officer, deep underwater in a nuclear submarine, during the Cold War.

“We were right in Vladivostok Harbor with these missiles,” Bryant said. “And we would just stay quiet.”

Bryant had excellent hearing. So it was his job to listen to ships passing overhead and determine, from the sound of their propellers, whether they were freighters, warships, or another sub.

When he got out of the Navy, Bryant didn’t want anything more to do with war. So, he got a job in an antiques shop fixing old wooden things, like instruments. He’d worked on a couple of guitars in high school, and he had a romantic notion of being a craftsman.

Then something extraordinary happened. It was 1974 and the movie “The Sting” was becoming a box office hit. Suddenly, the ragtime music of Scott Joplin was popular again, which gave Bryant’s boss an idea.

“He would rent a semi, go on vacation with his family, drive across the country, and come back with 12 pianos that had been in barns,” Bryant said.

The instruments had straw, dust and dead rats in them. It fell to Bryant to bring them back to life with new rubber hoses, bellows and elbow grease.

“They sold like hotcakes,” Bryant said. “And we knew it was all because of ‘The Sting.’”

People would pay up to $2,500 for a good one, which was the price of a new car in the 1970s.

A fading craft

Just like that, Bryant had a skill that would last a lifetime, and it wasn’t easily copied. Extremely specific and expensive materials were needed for certain parts. One tiny valve requires kangaroo leather, nothing else will do.

“Because it’s absolutely air-tight and very fine,” Bryant said. “There’s no friction at all.”

Player pianos in the Pacific Northwest have had particularly hard lives, according to Bryant, mainly because of the ash from the eruption of Mount St. Helens.

“It was very abrasive,” Bryant said. “There are 4,000 moving parts in just a piano. And it would tear up the felt and the leather, just like you’d put sandpaper in it. All of a sudden the piano would start sounding like a typewriter.”

Player pianos use long paper rolls that have holes in them and travel over a bar. The holes release a vacuum, prompting the machine to play a note. Many rolls had lyrics printed on them, so people could sing along.

Portland piano tuner Denis Wilkinson stopped working on player pianos a few years ago, because it’s so hard and few people are interested nowadays.

“They’re expensive to maintain. They take up a lot of space,” Wilkinson said. “Computers and all the modern electronic things are just more interesting to younger people.”

An 800-pound memory

But not everyone has given up on player pianos. In the front room of retired Portland financier Al Menashe, there’s a beautiful 1922 Stroud player piano that he’s happy to crank up.

The mechanics whirr, the paper roll spins and notes start to spill out.

“In the 1930 and 40s, people would sit around the piano and watch and sing along with the roll,” Menashe said. “They’re just great fun.”

Michael Bryant looks back fondly on those sing-along songs, as well as the classical music he’s heard the pianos play.

“I remember hearing a roll by Rachmaninoff,” Bryant said. “That he had actually been the guy who recorded it at the factory. And when it got played, you thought you were seeing Rachmaninoff on the bench. You couldn’t imagine that it wasn’t him.”

Now, a cursory search on Facebook Marketplace can turn up eight player pianos, all within an hours’ drive of Portland and all free.

Of course, each one needs a team of people to move it, and it might be hard for most people to come by the thousands of dollars it would take to fix one. And as Bryant retires, it may be even harder to find anyone who can fix it.