I am pleased to be able to tell you that the Lobelco grand piano has now been repaired and tuned. At one point there were literally hundreds of pieces of piano laid out on tables, but Scott Matsuda, the piano repair man just smiled at me when I asked ‘are you sure you can put it all back together again?’ It took him four days including evenings to ‘get it all back together’ with a full set of new damper felts. It sounds great.
Elmer Ratcliff did some repairs to the doors to the cubicle that the piano lives in and it looks to be mouse proof. We’ll have some bait in there ‘just in case’
I want to thank all of you who donated money to help us with this. With the donation also of accommodation and a borrowed car the total cost of bringing Scott up and getting the repair done was just over $1900, which was fortunately less than we anticipated. Our total donations were an amazing $2925 with some very generous contributions. I want to particularly thank CCCS for a major contribution.
We would like to put some of the remaining donation money towards bringing Alan Stiles and the Joe Trio up to Bella Coola in May to perform. Alan grew up in Bella Coola and began his piano lessons here. We also thought we should assign most of the excess donation money to on going piano costs such as tuning, insurance and storage, as this fits most closely to the purpose for which the money was raised.
It was heartening to see the community response to this request. This is part of what makes Bella Coola special.