I repair antique clocks, clocks that are maybe as old as your
player pianos, and these accounts of 'spinetizing' are simply
agonizing to read.  But as I think about it, a 'spinetized' piano
is as representative of the past as any other old instrument.
No, they had no business wrecking nice old uprights, but that's what
society demanded at the time and it's interesting to speculate why.

Our smallish house was probably built in 1889 and those nearby are
lots older.  Our furniture has come from everywhere (including my
1950 Hamilton upright) and we've discovered an odd affinity for old
stuff -- even our washing machine is a 1962 Maytag, though we didn't
buy it because of that.  (We _keep_ it because of that, and because
it works!)  And essentially every piece of furniture has a story,
for few pieces are new.

And this infuriates some people.  My mother-in-law was one, and the
neighbor lady was another.  Why, they inquired, do you have such old
stuff?  It's old, they said.  Throw it out and buy new.  It was kind
of like two extremes of the political spectrum nowadays: neither side
could conceive of the other's opinion.

Natalie, to whom I've been wed for around 20 years plus the 12 we
spent horrifying the Roman Catholic Church, is a perceptive lass.
Her mother is from the Calabria region of Italy, where poverty is
such that the Communist Party makes quite a bit of sense (there's
a headquarters in their ancestral town of Falerna.)  Mother and
Natalie's older sister spent World War II in Calabria, and they were
poorer than South Sudan.

The lady next door is from northern Athens County, Ohio, not far
from here and the poorest in the state (and occasionally the nation.)
They were coal miners until the mines closed in the 1930's, and after
that they were just Appalachians, living on whatever work came along.

People who are raised in poverty, said Natalie, typically do not
appreciate antiques very much and don't understand people who do.

Now, consider the 1950's piano buyer.  They grew up during the
Depression, when there were no jobs, no welfare, no food, and no
trustworthy banks.  They laughed when they considered that they were
economically rescued by the bloodiest warfare and strictest financial
controls ever visited on the United States (and elsewhere.)  They
struggled through, more or less rising from poverty.  They did _not_
want antiques, and if there was a way to modernize grandmother's old
piano, great.

I know that you restore pianos, and I restore clocks, and that none
of us is legally responsible for restoring history.  But our pianos
and organs and wall clocks are part of history nonetheless, so I guess
we're kind of its guardians.

Mark Kinsler - currently recovering from the restoration of a post-war
Japanese cuckoo clock.