Not all heroes wear capes. And travel heroes, in particular, come in all shapes, sizes and styles. We’ve gone over some of them before:
- The passenger who fixes broken pancake machines as he finds them in Alaska Airlines (and other) lounges
- The flight attendant who tells it like it is
- The people who got petty revenge on lounge chair hogs
- The woman who’s a packing superhero
We just discovered another of these capeless heroes.
If you travel enough, you’ll sometimes find pianos in public places that are there simply for people to play them. We’ve personally seen them in the U.K. (St. Pancras International) and in several spots here in the U.S., but as it turns out, there are literally thousands of such pianos all over the world. In fact, there’s even a privately-owned index of such pianos online; people are encouraged to add to the list when they find “newly discovered” pianos.
Chicago O’Hare International Airport has such a piano. It’s a Kimball baby grand, located near Gate 17, next to a wine bar. Like other public pianos, it’s available to the public to play, which means at any given moment, you might be hearing the dulcet tones of Clair de Lune, Maple Leaf Rag, Hit Me Baby One More Time, or Chopsticks.
Unfortunately, if you did sit down to tickle the ivories on the ORD public piano in the past couple of years, you’d discover that the ivories were, well, kinda sticky. And the piano was WAY out of tune, too. A guy named Josiah Jackson, who had been playing piano since he was 4, noticed that while he was on a layover about 3 years ago, and, as any pianist will tell you, a neglected piano just hurts.
“When I sat down to play, I was so disappointed. This piano sounded terrible, and the keys felt really sticky,” said Jackson. “At the time, I was 17 years old and I was just starting to learn how to tune and repair pianos, so I made a mental note of it and decided if I was ever flying through that airport again, I would take some time to fix it for free.”
And he was true to his word.
Y’see, Jackson started his own piano tuning business in Grand Rapids not long ago. So he had the tools and the know-how. And when he realized he could have a substantial stopover at ORD, he jumped at the chance.
Of course, he did things the right way – he contacted the airport to ensure the piano was still there (it was) and that he wouldn’t get in trouble for fixing it (he wouldn’t). He got in touch with HMSHost (they of food and beverage services at airports all across the country, including O’Hare) to mail his piano-tuning equipment to the airport, since some pieces of his equipment are sharp and wouldn’t make it through the TSA checkpoint.
“Everyone was all in on me tuning the piano, but even though I was just taking the basics, I didn’t want any problems going through security,” Jackson explained to the Washington Post.
Jackson had an 8-hour layover and it’s a good thing, too – the piano was in terrible shape and he needed just about all that time to get the instrument back to the point where it could just be played, never mind sound decent.
“It was in very rough shape — dust was everywhere, and there was a gluey substance under the keys that prevented them from working,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like it.”
He used his equipment to suck up dust, to pry each key off to thoroughly clean it, to scrape off gummy crap that was stuck to the inside, you name it.
“I figured out the reason the piano was such a sticky mess was because it was next to a bar, and people had spilled their drinks on the keys,” he said. “It was definitely the biggest challenge I’ve ever had.”
It took him 7 hours to clean the instrument – he didn’t even stop for lunch. But when he was done, the piano sounded, according to him, “really good.”
Before he left for his flight, he left a sign on the instrument that says, “No drinks by piano, please!” Hopefully people will listen.
The airline allowed him to fly home with his tuning equipment.
Since becoming a piano tuner, Jackson has started a YouTube channel, called The Piano Doctor, that showcases his “fixes.” And yep, ORD’s piano – his most challenging fix to date – is included. Here it is (it’s really kind of fascinating!):
Feature Photo: The Piano Doctor / YouTube
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