Historic piano will soon play again at Mount Rainier inn

The instrument was encased in a framework of rustic Alaskan yellow cedar logs by German carpenter Hans Fraehnke, in the 1920s. Now it's getting close to playing quality again when the inn reopens this spring after a two-year seismic upgrade and renovation.

And it will sound as good or better than it did when it was first heard in the lobby in 1925, say the two piano men who have carefully taken it apart. They are putting it back together in shops in Washington.

Jim Snyder, a Bonney Lake, Wash., piano tuner and restorer, won the $11,800 contract from Mount Rainier National Park to rebuild the piano. He hired Delwin Fandrich of Centralia, Wash., a nationally known piano craftsman and innovator, to install a soundboard of solid Sitka spruce. The old one was cracked.

Given to car analogies when talking about the complexity and limits of rebuilding old pianos, Fandrich compared the park's piano to a Yugo. Much like the cheap import car, he said, the piano "was poorly designed ... and poorly built."

Even a new soundboard can't turn the Schmoller and Mueller into a Steinway, Fandrich said.

"But we're going to turn the Yugo into a Pontiac," he promised.

Restoring the Paradise Inn piano, however, is as much about maintaining park and inn history as it is about restoring the keyboard's tone.

Since the piano was installed in the soaring log-framed lobby of the inn, both regular guests and VIPs have sat at the cedar piano bench with the hinged top, touched the keys and given the instrument voice.

Perhaps the most famous person to play it was President Harry S. Truman, according to Mount Rainier National Park Museum curator Brooke Childrey.

On a surprise trip to the park while visiting the area on June 22, 1945, Truman, who played piano beginning as a boy, sat down and performed a few pieces.

His playing only added to the piano's historic cache.

Movie stars and other dignitaries — Sonja Henie, Shirley Temple, Tyrone Power, Cecil B. DeMille — stayed at the mountain inn, and it doesn't take much imagination to see them gathered around the 7-foot-tall piano for apres-ski fun.

Over the years, Paradise Inn management also hired pianists to entertain the guests in the afternoon as they read or played Scrabble in the lobby.

Ellen Gates, the park's historical architect, said it was longtime inn pianist Carl Amberson who suggested it would be great to fix the piano.

During the last summer season in 2005, Gates recalled, a top pianist from New York City was at the inn.

"He said it was terrible and wouldn't play it," she said.

Decades of sitting alone in the unheated inn during the winter offseason — contrasted with the May-to-October guest season — played havoc with the piano, affecting its sound. When the inn reopens, Gates said, the piano will be moved each winter to a heated storage room.

The piano was made distinctive by its rustic framework.

Alaska cedar posts with whittled points mark all four corners. A lid fashioned from three log pieces rolls back to reveal the keyboard.

Fraehnke also designed furnishings including a 14-foot-tall grandfather clock, benches, throne chairs and tables. All will be reinstalled in the inn.

Gates said the use of oversize furniture of natural materials is in keeping with the park's architecture of that era.

When Snyder had the piano delivered to his Bonney Lake shop last fall, the first thing he did was remove Fraehnke's handiwork. He hired a carpenter to do the delicate disassembly.

Dozens of cedar pieces, including plugs for screw holes, are stacked in his shop to be put back on when he finishes.

Once the soundboard is installed in Centralia, Snyder will haul the piano back to his shop on the plateau. He will repaint the 200-plus-pound, gray-iron plate that holds the 235 strings. Then he will install new strings made to the exact specifications of its current ones.

"There are 30 steps to restringing," Snyder explained.

Next will come installation of new custom-built, felt-tipped hammers that strike the strings. The old dampers¡ that adjust string vibration will be reinstalled. The piano keys are getting new plastic caps.

The precise age of the piano is somewhat of a mystery, though Snyder said the serial number on the instrument indicates it was built by Schmoller and Mueller in 1925. Park records indicate Fraehnke made his furniture and framed the piano at the inn between 1919 and 1923.