My grandfather, Sam Kuhn, married my grandmother, then Minette Stroock, around 1920. They were from well-to-do families, and received a Steinway baby grand piano as a wedding present. By the time I first remember seeing it in the 1960s, my grandmother and her decorator had replaced its original black finish with a bright red, meant to resemble a Japanese lacquered box.
When Sam died in the 1970s, the piano moved to my family’s living room in Princeton. Since I was the only person who (sort of) played the piano in my generation, it came to me when I had a place for it, in the mid-1990s. I moved it four times since. Our current house is not small, but the living room couldn’t accommodate both it and living. So it lived in a corner of the dining room starting in 2010. In addition to be impractically large, time had taken a toll on its mechanics since being rebuilt in the 1970s, and the lacquer red had faded unevenly to a kind of orange. It took a lot of patience, but I was finally ready to part with it last year.
To bring it up to a fully playable standard would have cost about twice value. We were reluctant to put in that much investment, and so were the potential donation recipients we considered. So we were very fortunate to be able to donate it to the North Bennet Street School (NBSS), where students in their Advanced Piano Technology training program learn how to bring it and pianos like it back to fully-functioning life. Once it’s served in that capacity, it will be sold to help keep the school going.
We were delighted that we were able to see it and some of the folks working on it when we visited NBSS’s open house. This is what the piano looked like on Dec 7, 2024:
