Part I  

 

      We all have incidents in our lives we’d rather not re-live, but that have shaped us, nonetheless, right? Here’s one that happened to me as a cocky teenager in the spring of 1962, and it proved to be the most embarrassing and humiliating experience of my young life, one I laugh about now, but way back then, I didn’t know how funny it was—to everyone else.

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     Growing up in Buffalo, in Cheektowaga to be exact, the second son in a family so thoroughly Polish, our veins had no blood, just bits of Cabbage Pierogi floating around to confound the medicos unfortunate enough to treat us. Like so many other families after the war, my father wanted something better for us, and despite their poor beginnings as children in large families where their fathers could neither read nor write, they struggled to make it happen.

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     And so, when I was about 7 or 8, my parents decided that one way of showing a successful migration to the lower middle rungs of the social ladder was to have a child who could play an instrument. I have no idea who put so crazy a notion into their heads, but instead of focusing on my older brother who was busy delivering The Buffalo Evening News every day after school, they chose me to represent the family’s musical prowess, even though no one in generations had been known to play even a harmonica.

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     When they asked me what instrument I wanted to play, I was smart enough, young though I was, to see hard work ahead and lost time away from my pals. In my clever little brain, I looked around our modest home on Shanley Street, and deducing no room for a piano, I thoughtfully said, “I want to learn the piano!” Naturally, my parents, Ed and Irene Gasiewicz, were smarter than I was.

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Part II

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     A week later my parents admitted they couldn’t afford a piano, but lucky for me, they felt the next best thing for a nice Polish boy would be the accordion. The accordion? “Think of it,” they said, “you can play at family parties. Your grandparents will be so proud.” Disaster loomed.

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     The next thing I knew, they marched me into Walt Struba’s Music Center on Clinton Street (I have no idea if his name was Walt Struba, but let’s let that go for now), and soon, he was showing me the indented C key on the left side of the giant squeezebox thrown into my lap, and then, the scale on the keyboard. “It’s easy,” he said. Right. That I was left-handed seemed not to matter to Struba or my parents. They were hell-bent on finding something to keep me busy and out of their hair. All smiles, they were. I was not, and too big to cry, I thought. Looking back, I should have tried that trump-card technique every kid knows.

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     In a few weeks, my very own accordion arrived, one which my loving parents bought on the installment plan. It was a silvery-grey marbleized number—you’ve seen them, for awhile they made kitchen table tops that looked the same—and for me, it weighed a ton, but made a nice first impression on sweet old ladies, especially those hard of hearing.

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     Worse than being enrolled in this school of horror, I learned that my parents weren’t going to drive me to those Friday night lessons. Oh, no. I was going to have to walk the seven or eight city blocks to Mr. Struba’s Chamber of Torture right near the Strand Theater—lugging along the instrument of said torture. I always wondered why Mr. Struba wore earmuffs—he said he was cold, but I suspected even then it was not the reason for him to plant them on his shiny bald head as soon as I walked through the door, and began to show my “progress” for the week.

Mr. Struba was patient, but never seemed to hear me say that I hated the accordion and never practiced, anyway. Instead, he encouraged me and my parents to continue with this evil, or at least as long as the weekly lesson and installment dollars kept coming.

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     Naturally, I told my parents Mr. Struba said that I was so good, I didn’t need to practice songs like the Morris Dance and Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue, not to mention the Beer Barrell Polka, the Clarinet Polka, and Nola, as well as a half a dozen Christmas Carols. If I did fifteen minutes some days, I must have been sick with something.

Lawrence Welk was popular around then, and it seemed to be the only show my parents watched with my grandparents. And every time Myron Floren was showcased, I was obliged to lay on the floor and admire his fancy fingerwork on you guessed it, the accordion. He was supposed to be my hero. And here I thought it was supposed to be the Yankees’ Phil Rizzuto, Whitey Ford, or naturally, Mickey Mantle!

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Part III

 

     At Christmastime, I was forced to drag out the great silver beast to play Silent Night, Noel, White Christmas, and so many others that I know my aunts and uncles, despite their frozen smiles, wished for a truly silent night once I began playing.

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     Then, in 1958, the big news came that my Dad was being transferred from the Ford plant in Buffalo to the giant new plant in Lorain, Ohio, and that we were moving to some town where my cousins lived right on Lake Erie. From the accordion anyway, I thought I was saved. Boy, was I wrong.

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     And so, in the summer of 1958, we moved to Huron, Ohio, and what a new life it was. From the industrial, urban setting in Buffalo, we found ourselves in a beautiful beach town, not five miles from Cedar Point, even then, one of the best coaster parks around. Life was good, I thought, especially with no accordion to hug every day. I buried it in the closet.

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     Summer went into Fall, and I was happily enrolled in St. Peters Elementary School, surrounded for the first time by twenty some other kids I didn’t know, and I was the new kid with the long Polish name nobody could pronounce, much less, spell. The nuns were good, though, and the days passed happily. Until one October day.

Huron was so small, it didn’t have the one thing my parents were unreasonably passionate about—some poor soul who would give accordion lessons to their beloved son. In that knowledge, I was comfortably smug, but like all kids, I underestimated my parents’ persistence.

 

     With only one car in the family, planning was everything, and so, my Mom insisted that my Dad take us to Sandusky every Friday night after dinner for a round of shopping. What else? The big A&P store there was the big draw, and I should have expressed my enjoyment pushing the cart, but was I to know what was to come?

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Part IV

 

     My parents had another motive for shopping at the Sandusky Plaza, I came to learn. Not a hundred yards away was Larry Fortunato’s Music Store (was that his name, exactly?), and behind his plate glass storefront, Mr. Fortunato held forth as the local master of you guessed it, the accordion. The poor soul had no idea what was coming.

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     After making nice with Mr. Fortunato and praising my keyboard skills, soon thereafter, while my Mom was raiding the A&P shelves, I was nearby lying to Mr. Fortunato about how much I practiced on the great silvery beast half as big as me. The good man was patient, but soon, he too caught cold, and donned earmuffs when I showed up every Friday at 6:30p for my 30 minute lesson.

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     In Ohio, almost no relatives would be around at Christmas, so I didn’t have to worry about another holiday session of horrors, but my parents, a lot of fun mostly, developed a good circle of friends, who, despite the requirement that they listen to me play Christmas carols, continued their relationships with them. It never bothered me that even when I pounded out old favorites at yuletide that some of them would ask, “What song was that?” Sing-alongs weren’t going to work either.

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     Thus far in my career as an unsuccessful purveyor of strange squawks coming from an otherwise fine instrument—Mr. Fortunato made sure I knew that on several occasions—I managed to get away with minimal time with that thing strapped to my shoulders. I claimed it was ruining my posture for all time, but no one believed me.

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     All the time I plotted and pleaded to forego the Friday night evil—I wanted to be at the Huron High School’s stadium watching our Tigers do their best, after all—I suppose, looking back on it, Mr. Fortunato was planning his escape, too. The great silver beast as well and the earmuffs were getting to him, I suppose, but I could never have imagined what would come next.

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Part V

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     It must have been sometime in the spring of 1962, that my final comeuppance came. Mr. Fortunato announced to my parents that he had a special relationship with the manager of the local radio station, WLEC AM&FM (1420 on the AM dial). And lucky for me, he said, I was to have the opportunity of playing my accordion, live, on the radio that April. My parents, naïve souls, were astounded, thrilled. “But,” Mr. Fortunato said, “You’re really going to have to practice, Philip! You’ll be playing Lady of Spain and Easter Parade.” 

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     Play on the radio! Wow, I thought. That’s pretty cool. But how foolish could I have been? And there was no way out. How could I not foresee the consequences of years of keyboard neglect! So, dumb was I that I mentioned the forthcoming radio show and coming fame to my girlfriend and her parents, and naturally, my parents were equally naïve enough to tell their friends as well.

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     I don’t remember the exact date of my most public disgrace—on the radio, no less, but it was a chilly Sunday morning when my parents pulled up in front of the radio station. You know the kind of place it was. The entire facility was no bigger than an average bedroom, and so, while I went inside trudging the instrument of my doom with me, Ed and Irene had to sit in the car to hear their son’s live “performance.”

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     There I sat in the tiny studio, fumbling with my music stand and the notes for Lady of Spain and Easter Parade before me. Soon, I could see the announcer point his finger, and I began to play, kicking over the music stand after the first few notes, but in a few minutes, it was all over. In my ego-driven teenaged mind, I thought I’d done alright. I couldn’t hear anything the announcer had said, but he was smiling as he pointed me to the exit, and out I went, lugging my music and the great silvery beast.

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     Back in the car, my parents gamely said how “nice” that was, but said little more except that one of the perks of Mr. Fortunato’s arrangement with WLEC was that they were to have a 45rpm record of the entire performance as a treasured keepsake. My girlfriend and her parents were kind enough to pretend they’d forgotten to tune in for my seven minutes of radio fame, and though my feelings were hurt a bit, I thought little of it.

    

When the day came that the 45rpm record arrived in the mail, my parents insisted that we all listen to it together on the big stereo in our living room—did you have one of those? The announcer’s voice came through the speaker with quite a nice intro before I began to play, I was pleased to hear. Then, I listened, and suddenly, couldn’t breathe. Could the violent noises coming through the speakers be me torturing my accordion? When I finished with Easter Parade, the announcer said, “Wow! Irving Berlin would never believe he wrote that one.”

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     Although he was hearing it a second time, my father chuckled, and my mother covered her smile with her hand. When the needle slid to the center of the record, I said, “Don’t you two think it’s time I moved on to something else?” “Why?” they asked. “I don’t want to compete with Myron Floren,” I said. Don’t get me wrong, I love accordion music and listen to polkas on Pandora, but fast fingers on two keyboards were never going to be me.

    

     The announcer’s parting line stayed in my head until a few years later when I understood what he was really saying. Fortunately for radio listeners everywhere, I did find other pursuits—girls for one, and no, that 45rpm record no longer exists. Bye, Myron Floren!

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My second most embarrassing incident as a junior in high school had yet to occur, so I’ll save that for another time. Many thanks and happy reading.

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