Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
History Quarterly Digital Archives

Source: July 1995 Volume 33 Number 3, Pages 103–114

Club Members Remember Piano Lessons and Other Cultural Adventures – and Misadventures

Page 103

Introduction

It appears that as we were growing up, a number of the members of the History Club were "exposed to" music lessons -- with varying degrees of success.

Here are some recollections of these experiences. It is another in our series of "Club Members Remember" and a reflection of "how we lived" and everyday life a little while ago.

Mildred Kirkner

I took a few piano lessons from Lotta Burns. One of my close friends was her niece, Dottie Burns Pusey, and she was such a beautiful pianist that I thought I should learn to play too. My grandmother had a piano, and she lived only about four blocks away.

When I felt inclined to practice, I would have to walk over to her house. When I showed up at the door, my grandfather would get out of the house!

The lessons didn't last for too long a time, because the fact is that I didn't learn to play like my friend could. I think my grandmother also got rid of the piano. And that was the end of the piano lessons.

Lotta Burns was a very strict teacher. She always knew it whenever you didn't practice. I would tell her that I was too tired to walk over to my grandmother's.

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Virginia Mentzer

I remember going with my friend, Jane Armstrong, who took lessons from Lotta Burns. I remember the lady [Lotta Burns], because she was very outgoing and vivacious - unusually so. Robert Elmore and she were very good friends. (Robert Elmore used to play the organ and was the music director at the Wayne Presbyterian Church.)

But Jane Armstrong didn't play the piano or take piano lessons; she was taking singing lessons.

Barbara Fry

Lotta Burns was the daughter of musically talented parents: William H. Burns, the prominent contractor and builder in Berwyn, who played piccolo in the Berwyn Band, and Ximena Wells Burns, who played the organ. Lotta Burns was born in 1883, the second of seven children: Austin, Lotta, William, Carroll, Roy, Louis, and Helen. Both Ximena and William H. Burns died at a relatively early age, Ximena after the birth of Helen in 1893, and William in 1910.

We have a record of Ximena Burns' singing with her two sisters, Lulu and Lillie Wells, in a concert at the Reeseville Sabbath School in 1873. Their song was "Whiter than Snow". She and her husband also performed at socials and musicales, both as singers and as instrumentalists, in their early married life. The names of their children also appear on the programs of the late 1880s.

The orphaned Burns children continued to add much to the cultural life of the village of Berwyn. In 1913, when he was only 21 years old, Louis Burns was named Choir Director at Trinity Presbyterian Church. After duty in the First World War he returned to Berwyn and married Martha Armstrong, of the Berwyn Methodist Church, and he became Choir Director there. At that time his sister Lotta replaced him as Choir Director at Trinity. (She held the position until 1949.) Helen Burns became the organist at Trinity, and also played the organ at the Berwyn Theater.

Lotta Burns also became the village piano teacher, and the most prominent organizer of recitals in the village. In the newspaper clipping files at the Chester County Historical Society in West Chester are a number of reports of her recitals from 1944 to 1962. She had voice pupils as well as piano pupils.

Other members of the family took part in and supported these recitals. Helen Burns, who, as noted, taught organ and some piano, provided piano accompaniments, and Louis Burns played baritone horn in the orchestra for the concerts. The orchestra was called "The Musical Ten" or "The Musical Eight", whatever was appropriate. The pupils were sometimes also supported by an adult singing group, the "Choral Singers", and always by students of local dancing schools.

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The recitals were always a major musical event in the town. The auditorium of the Easttown School would be packed for them.. As the Upper Main Line News reported in 1947, "Once again Miss Burns has proved that she can not only teach music, but instill into her pupils the mastery and confidence necessary to provide finished entertainment."

Viola Walker remembers that three of her children -- Stafford Jr., Linda, and Susan -- were all taught well by Lotta Burns, and that the recitals were a valuable experience for them. The children went to her house for their lessons, and the price was fifty cents for a half hour.

Dorothy Pusey, the daughter of Louis Burns, remembers that her Aunt Lotta taught her for years, but would take no money because she was "family". She too was taught well: she was an accomplished sight-reader, and went through books and books of music. Lotta Burns would write in Dorothy's books the date each selection was begun, and music is still an important part of her life.

People who remember Lotta and Helen Burns will often remark about how different the two sisters were from each other. Bertha Alleva, for example, remembers Lotta as a "real prima donna", dramatic, flamboyant, and one who dressed the part, while Helen, she recalls, was a very pretty woman, more quiet, and played the organ with great sensitivity and feeling.

The names of literally hundreds of local children are recorded in the recital programs of Lotta Burns, as one generation followed another to her home on Woodbine Avenue for their lessons. The last recital included in the newspaper clippings at the Historical Society was in 1962. Lotta Burns died two years later, in 1964.

Libby Weaver

We also had another music teacher here in Berwyn. I know, because I went to a piano teacher on Orchard Way -- would it be Mrs. Ritter? -- right over by the old North Berwyn School. I remember that to take my lessons I would come on the bus in the morning to the North Berwyn School, and then go down to take my lesson.

When I was about ten years old the woman that I was named Mary after, Miss Mary Mills, called my mother -- she worked at Wanamaker's and lived on 63d Street in Philadelphia -- and said, "I have a piano here that I want Elizabeth to have." So my father found someone with a little pick-up truck, and he and my brothers went together to pick up this piano down in Philadelphia. And in that way I had a piano to practice on. My mother already had a pump organ, so now we had both a piano and an organ.

After we moved to Paoli, I gave lessons to a little girl who lived across the street, for 25 cents an hour. I think Mrs. Ritter probably charged about 50 cents. The only other thing I did to earn money was to baby sit, also for 25 cents an hour, for four boys in one family in Paoli.

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Bob Goshorn

My brother and I did not have the advantages of piano lessons when we were growing up -- largely because we didn't have a piano.

It was not until near the end of my senior year in high school that our family got its first piano, a baby grand, from a friend and business associate of my father, and also quite a musician. It was a beautiful piano, and we were all duly impressed that among others who had played it from time to time was Edwin MacArthur, later the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and for several years the accompanist for the famed contralto, Kirsten Flagstad. Never was so fine an instrument so insulted as when my brother and I "banged" on it.

Our piano teacher was Norman Heintzelman, who, at that time, among other teaching assignments, was the music teacher for the Malvern School. (He later became principal of the General Wayne Junior High School after the formation of the Paoli Area High School System jointure.) But what happened wasn't his fault; he was just too late. By the time we had played through a tune, especially the relatively simple ones with which you begin, my brother and I would have it memorized, so we never really learned how to read music. (I can still play "The Sleeping Kitten", in the key of F, our first song, from memory with only one or two mistakes!)

When the next fall came and I went off to college, that was the end of the attempts at formal piano lessons. But I still enjoy "playing by ear". (Once, when I was playing, the friend from whom we got the piano and his pre-teenage daughter were visiting us, and he explained to her, apparently in reply to her question about the way I played, "Oh, he's what we call 'a stylist at the keyboard'." He was most kind.)

When our children, Kenny and Meg, were growing up we, of course, wanted them to have the advantage of piano lessons, whether they wanted them or not. So early on we bought an inexpensive second-hand upright piano for them to practice on. (Maybe I should have said a "cheap second-hand up-right piano.) Anyway, when it came time to have it re-tuned, the piano tuner told us that there was no way that it could be tuned and hold its pitch -- but were we lucky, because he had just heard about a piano that we could get for not too much, and he would even cart the old one away! It's amazing, the streak of good luck we had, because every time it was time to have whatever piano we had at the time tuned, it somehow could not be brought up to pitch, but the tuner had just heard about --

When we finally bought a new, not second-hand, spinet piano, we offered the old one as a prize when friends came in to play bridge. For months we had a run of the best cards you can imagine, or so it seemed, until one night we actually lost. Our guests were delighted -- and came back that same niqht (it was actually about one o'clock in the morning), before we could change our minds, with their neighbor's pick-up truck, to claim their booty. We often wondered if they were as lucky as we had been when it came time to have it re-tuned.

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The kid's piano teacher was Marian Shank, in Malvern, who had a number of music pupils, one or two of whom, if I remember correctly, later went to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia to study. She was also, as I recall, the organist for the Malvern Baptist Church, and her daughter-in-law, before she married, had been my ninth grade and English teacher at Malvern.

But over and above all that, she had also played the piano at the movies in Malvern in the days of the silent pictures, before "talkies". I believe that a musical score was sent out with each film, but mostly she just improvised as the action progressed on the screen. In later years, at parties she would sit at the piano and play the appropriate accompaniments as we would make up a story -- the motif for the villain, "Hearts and Flowers" for the romantic episodes, the "William Tell Overture" for the arrival of the hero, the chase, and so forth.

The children did much better with their lessons than their uncle or their father ever did, and Meg every once in a while still surprises us with her ability to play, even though she plays only very occasionally, if that often. (She says she would have done even better if there had not been so much of her teacher, as she spent about half of each lesson trying to keep from being squeezed off the piano bench instead of paying attention to what she was being taught!)

Maybe I should also mention my dancing lessons. It was in the fall of my senior year in high school that I suddenly had to have dancing lessons. I had a date for the big dance on the evening after the Radnor-Lower Merion football game, my first dance. The teacher of the crash course was Maude Adams -- not the famous stage actress, but Mrs. D. Hayes Agnew Adams -- in Paoli. (She later had a nursery school, Wenga School [that's Agnew spelled backwards], in her home on Maple Avenue, across from Mary Barbee's.) My recollections of the whole process are now somewhat vague, but everyone seemed to survive.

And it certainly turned out more successfully than my piano lessons!

Marian Aument

To talk about my musical experience I have to begin with my mother's family. Her father was a cellist and played with a group for pleasure. He and his two sons were also singers. One of them was also a whistler, and performed at theaters and on other occasions. It was wonderful to hear him; he sounded like a bird. I don't suppose anybody does that any more. Mother also had two sisters who were violin teachers and two who were artists.

Mother was supposed to be the one who played the piano. She was a small person, and her hands would not span an octave; so she went to bed many nights with corks between her fingers. But it just didn't help -- so she became the family tomboy instead of a pianist.

Grandfather had many hobbies. One of them was making violins. He had a shop in the backyard where he had violin necks, and forms for the ribs, along with pieces of wood. We always had various sizes of violins in the house.

Page 109

When it came time for me to play an instrument I was given a violin and lessons. It was a disaster! I didn't like it -- and didn't do well. So my brother got the violin and I switched to the cello. (That's what we had, so that's what I got to play.) It was a happy choice!

I guess we were considered strange, because we were the only children in the neighborhood who took music lessons. I took lessons from a family friend, and eventually from a man at the conservatory.

I had to be very careful of the "old crow", as my uncle called my cello. It had no hard case to cover it; the case was made of corduroy, lined with bright blue flannel. It had a pocket in front for the bow, and one in back for books, with grippers on the side to carry it, which I did almost every day, taking it to school with my load of books in the pocket.

Being in the orchestra was a special thing; it was like being in the band here. We played at all the assemblies, plays, and special programs -- including class day, when they gave out the honors, and graduation. It was pretty neat being in the senior high school orchestra when I was in the sixth grade! That's when we moved to the high school building. For a couple of years the Rotary Club held luncheon meetings in the biggest hotel in town, and a group of string players performed during the luncheon. We got out of school -- that was the best part -- and went downtown and played soft music on a balcony overlooking the dining room.

I also played in the youth orchestra every Saturday morning. I was always afraid that the conductor, who was a cellist, would notice every mistake I made. This also put a crimp in my Saturdays, because I still had chores to do afterwards -- mostly dusting -- before I could go to the football game.

In spite of being so involved, I managed to do everything else I wanted to do, and although I no longer play an instrument I continue to enjoy listening to orchestral music.

Jane Denk

I can still play the piano a little bit, songs and hymns like "Nearer My God to Thee".

I started my music career back in the Depression, when my father decided I was the one who was going to learn music. So he bought a new grand piano for me, got out the time clock -- and I practiced. I was about eight years old at the time, and he hired a nice young man to teach me music. I was absolutely mortified! The young man had just graduated from the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. He was embarrassed, teaching me, and I was embarrassed, taking lessons from him. I never liked practicing. Then all of a sudden, I liked playing the piano!

Page 110

I still play the piano a little bit. In a Christmas note I wrote I said, "I hope my father in heaven -- my own father -- appreciates those $1.00 lessons he gave me during the Depression, because in just this past week I have played for my garden club's Christmas party and at the Cathcart Home." I said, "Those dollars were well spent."

I also took elocution lessons. I don't know what they were for, or what they did or were supposed to do. We went to some lady's home after school, and paid her a quarter -- and she taught us how to speak.

We also went to another lady's home and took tap dancing lessons. We didn't have regular tap dancing shoes; we just had ordinary shoes with taps that my father hammered on. They cost about ten cents. Believe me, we were no Shirley Temples!

But anyway, I can still play the piano for my husband -- because he has a hearing aid and can turn it off! We have one daughter who is a pianist and singer. When our second daughter took piano lessons, my husband would say, "Now that you can play with your left foot, try the other foot for a while." (She now prefers to pilot an airplane.)

I found at college that when there was a group of kids around, if you could play the piano it really helped. It brought the group together for a spontaneous sing-along and fun.

Barbara Fry

When I was four years old I decided that I wanted to learn to tap dance. My mother found a teacher who agreed to teach us tap -- but first she insisted that all of her students learn classic movements too. So, with the promise of an occasional tap dancing lesson, my sister, who was five years old at the time, and I started dancing lessons. The lessons included both private and class lessons. The teacher, however, rarely fulfilled her promise to teach tap dancing, and we spent about two years on toe dancing and soft shoe dancing. I remember none of the classical movements, but I still remember the one tap dance step she taught us -- a tap-slide-slide to three-quarter time.

In the one dance recital that I can remember, we younger children did a "Tom Thumb Wedding" number, with elaborate costumes. We had to have new dancing shoes for the recital because the silk covered toes on the hard toe dancing shoes were always tattered from practice and the soft shoes were made of cotton. I remember that they were very black and absolutely flat.

The dancing classes ended when I was six and someone in the family gave us one of those enormous upright pianos everyone was trying to get rid of at the time. (It was soon replaced with a new smaller one.) So I was six years old when I started piano lessons -- and this was much too early to start on the piano, at least with the teacher I had.

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I stayed with her all through elementary school, and her style was always the same. As soon as one recital was over, I would start on the selection for the next one. The music was always very difficult, and we went through it measure by measure, learning the notes and the fingering. I remember that we had few pieces beyond the recital pieces, and no books or sight reading. I really accomplished little.

The recitals grew even more important as we grew older. They were held in the piano department of a local department store, and we would receive bouquets after our solos. For the grand finale around twenty girls would simultaneously play a duet on ten pianos.

In junior high school I abandoned music to learn journalism. We had an award-winning newspaper. When I started in 10th grade at the senior high I was discouraged to find it had no newspaper, just a literary magazine for seniors. Because I was lost for something to do, I started with a group taking drum lessons for a fife and drum corps in the making.

I really liked to practice drumming. We learned the rudimentary method, and with practice the rolls would close and the accents and grace notes would form ever-new patterns as they speeded up. The names of the rudiments, such as flam, paradiddle, flamacue, long roll, became part of my vocabulary. Their execution became part of my life. The next fall when the fife and drum corps finally materialized, I was the drum sergeant.

I would have been satisfied to stop there, but it was 1942 and the drummer for the band and orchestra and drum teacher was called into the service -- and I had to replace him in all three positions. Concert band music was very different. At first I had trouble with the off-beats. And we had to play very quietly, tapping away using little of the technique I had so carefully developed. Much of the time the director wanted the drums silent at practice.

But this was not a waste of time; I learned to really listen. Among my treasured moments of all time were the times I spent listening to the band warm up with the beautiful long tones of old hymns, particularly "Abide with Me" and "Nearer My God to Thee".

By now I was going to the elementary schools to teach drum. The band director decided that I should teach clarinet, too. He sold me his old metal clarinet, and sent me upstairs over the band room to take lessons from a man named Jack Hickey. This was another of life's great experiences for me. When he was 17 years old Jack Hickey had been hired by John Phillip Sousa. He went to Europe with Sousa's Band, as well as all over the United States. (You can see him in the pictures of Sousa at Willow Grove, sitting at Sousa's left.) By 1942 his teeth had failed him and he could no longer play in a band, but could he describe the note he wanted: think like a cello in the low range; think like a flute in the upper range. He would sing a more delicate or a stronger note as he wanted it to be. This was a rare experience, and we all knew it. But those days knew no pensions, and Jack Hickey lived alone in one room in town. We were all the richer for his being there.

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I left this wonderful world of music to go off to college, but by then I had found that I could at last sight-read popular music, at least for my own enjoyment. The rhythm patterns fell quickly into place, and I made an effort to play all the notes. Over the years I have collected popular sheet music, mostly from the 1930s but some earlier, and these old selections are an important part of my life.

Bill Denk

I always wanted to play a trumpet in my home-town band. I guess I was in grade school when I started trumpet lessons. The music that we had for beginners showed the number of the key or keys to be pressed on the trumpet for each note. I did learn to play the trumpet, but I never was a trumpet virtuoso.

Our band played on holidays and at ball games. We finally mastered [?] Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever". One summer we had a band member who was expert on the piano. Wow, did he make a difference when we played Sousa!

Howard Housworth

I'm almost like Bill Denk. I started trumpet lessons in the 4th grade, and I progressed very well until I got to 8th grade. Then we got a new music teacher that I liked so much that I would stay after school sometimes to work on something special. He would then drive me home in his little Bantam automobile -- and that was the best part of the music lesson!

Virginia Mentzer

Someone was talking about an organ a little while ago. When my father built the house in Paoli, it was a bungalow. The second floor wasn't finished off. My mother found an old pump organ -- I don't know where it came from -- and we put it up in the unfinished storage room, up on the second floor.

My mother used to tell me that when she and her two sisters were real small children, their father (my grandfather) came home one day and said, "I have an organ that I'm going to get for you." (They couldn't figure out why he was going to get this organ, but, anyway, he got it.) He put it in the parlor, and said to the three girls, "There is the organ. Now learn to play it." Well, neither of my mother's sisters learned to play it, but my mother did. And later, after we moved to our new home in Paoli, many times my mother would disappear, to go upstairs to the storage room on the second floor to play the pump organ that we had put up there.

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By the time that I was in grammar school we had a piano, and I think that by that time the organ had disappeared. My parents had fixed up the second floor as an apartment, and the organ simply had to go. But it was still working, as long as there was someone there to pump it.

My music teacher was Anna McCann -- some of you may know her as Annie Strode, she was my teacher. I think I took lessons for about two years. I loved music. I loved to sing, so music came in handy that way, but I never learned to play the piano.

How many of you remember the Great Valley Choral Society? We met across from the Rumrill house [on Conestoga road]. The leader of it was Shadrack Jones McNamara. She had the Choral Society at the Great Valley Baptist Church Chapel, where the Christian Science Church is now.

This was back when I was in high school. We had quite a big choir, and we sang all over the county. This is where my knowledge of singing really came from.

Edythe Housworth

We used to have a player piano. My father purchased it for my mother; I later turned it over to my daughter as we had an electric organ. I remember "Bye, Bye, Blackbird" and some of the other old favorites when we played the rolls on our old player piano as a child in my parents' home.

Bob Goshorn

We had an old player organ that I bought at an auction; I think it cost five dollars. It was an Esty.

After its bellows wore out, we found a fellow that used to work for Esty up in Vermont, and got him to come out from Philadelphia to look at it. He was about five feet tall, but might have been a couple of inches taller than that if he hadn't been so bow-legged. He brought his tools with him in a little black valise, something like a small doctor's bag. He took the old organ all apart -- had it spread all over the dining room. Then he remembered an appointment he had back in the city and had to leave right away, leaving the disassembled organ all over the room. Somehow we got it back together again, but it was no thanks to him.

We had a couple of dozen rolls for it -- a perforated roll -- and all we had to do was pump it with the foot pedals.

Jane Denk

I wonder if any of you remember Jo Latch. She is the one who started our daughter on her musical career. She played the organ at the Christian Science Church.

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Herb Fry

A tall mahogany-veneer upright piano stood against the living room wall of the Fry farmstead on Pleasantville Road in Lower Pottsgrove for years. It had with it a circular stool which could be adjusted up or down to accommodate the stature of the pianist. The manufacturer's label read Chickering. A long linen piano scarf covered the flat top, on which rested the family photo gallery. The room also contained a music cabinet. A door swung open to expose a neat row of shelves, where music was stacked. Above the shelves and the door, just below the top of the cabinet, was a drawer where the family snapshot-sized photographs and photo albums were stored.

How long that piano had been a part of the family I do not know. Nothing ever aroused my curiosity to ask, but I did raise the question with my eldest sister, Virginia, in a telephone conversation last week, prompted by the recollections recorded here, and she said the piano was always there, even in her earliest memories of home at Fricks Lock, before the family moved to Lower Pottsgrove in 1916. She also recalled piano lessons given by Carrie Saylor and she and sister Miriam playing in a recital at the Saylor farm across the road in 1926. Apparently the piano was bought by our mother when she was teaching school in Phoenixville before her marriage in 1912.

Piano lessons started for me at about age 11. My teacher was Mrs. Albert K. Mauger, who lived on Queen Street in Pottstown. Some years earlier my father had operated a home delivery dairy, and Queen street was part of his route. It seems like my lessons were scheduled on Saturday morning, and I would be dropped off while my father or older sisters attended to shopping chores in Pottstown. The lessons continued for about three years. I never did become a skilled performer, but I can remember playing the piano at school for opening exercises when in 8th grade. Mrs. Mauger's daughter, younger than I, was a talented musician and appeared on radio station WCAU in Philadelphia on the "Horn and Hardart Children's Hour".

There were recitals. The early ones were held in the small church near Mrs. Mauger's home in the east end of Pottstown. My last recital was given in Library Hall above the Public Library, next to the bank in downtown Pottstown. I remember the title of the piece: "Camel Train". I practiced faithfully, but the performance was not without blemish. I ran into a mental block in the memorized notes. The next year I entered the high schools in Pottstown and the music lessons took a back seat to other interests.

After my mother's death the contents of her home were auctioned off in 1979. I hated to see that big old Chickering piano go -- but possibly somewhere children may still be practicing their music lessons on it.