It Could Always Be Worse

HERMOKIWI · Heavyweight Member Joined: 24 Dec 2008 Posts: 2581

No matter how badly your horn gets damaged it could always be worse:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/angela-hewitts-rare-fazioli-piano-dropped-by-movers/ar-BBZSTHN?li=BBnbcA1

Yikes!
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kehaulani · Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2020 1:34 pm Post subject:

I was at a summer workshop in Italy and a guy I knew traveled with his bulky Hammond B-3 organ. On it's train ride from Switzerland to Italy, it got trashed completely; totaled. The guy was sick.

BTW, he didn't have insurance!

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LittleRusty · Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2020 5:20 pm Post subject:

I once worked on a maintenance crew for a college. They had furnished married student apartments that often included pianos.

On one occasion the school decided to take one of the pianos, an old upright, out of the apartment and take it to the dump.

This was a third floor apartment, no elevators and very narrow front and back stairs. It definitely wouldn't meet code standards for today.

On the day of the move our foreman had a great idea. Rather than try to manhandle it down the stairs, we could instead remove the railing of the third floor outdoor landing and toss the piano onto the concrete below.

So we did. It made a glorious musical crumpf as it hit the concrete. I only wish that we have portable cameras back in the early 70's.

kehaulani · Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2020 6:32 pm Post subject:

A school apartment with a piano!?

My married-student apartment didn't even have room for a kitchen.
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blbaumgarn · Heavyweight Member Joined: 26 Jul 2017 Posts: 705

Back in the 70s, in my college football days, I had two opportunities to move an upright piano down into and then a few years later back up and out of a basement. Two different homes and pianos. We got 'er done but I like the "take the railing off" and toss it out the window better. You are right, if you had it recorded you'd have millions of hits on YouTube by now.
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bean_counter · Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2020 8:08 am Post subject:

when I was in college in the early '80's, the American Legion band I played in marched a particularly grueling 4th of July parade. We got to the end, and one of the high school kids dropped his Sousaphone where we stopped in the parking lot and ran off to find a cold drink.

Moments later, somebody in a Saab convertible backed out - and over the Sousaphone. I'll never forget that sound.
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blbaumgarn · Heavyweight Member Joined: 26 Jul 2017 Posts: 705

One of my acquaintances in my AA group for years had a Saab convertible. I am just sitting her thinking of that pretty red car backing over a sousaphone. Oh my. It is pretty priceless.
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"There are two sides to a trumpeter's personality,
there is one that lives to lay waste to woodwinds and strings, leaving them lie blue and lifeless along a swath of destruction that is a
trumpeter's fury-then there is the dark side!" Irving Bush

LaTrompeta · Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2020 9:47 pm Post subject:

These are cool stories and all, but a sousaphone is definitely no Fazioli piano.
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LittleRusty · Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2020 10:17 pm Post subject:

teacherdad · Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2020 8:18 am Post subject:

Great thread : )

I'll add: I moved an upright grand into a mid-century modern (only about 6 or 8 steps up to the front door and then straight into the living room) with my short-order cook neighbor and two of my teacher-colleague's college rugby players. It was as the sun was going down and in a light, cold drizzle--was dicey there for a few minutes.

Way better though: rumor had it that about ten years before I was there in College Park (Maryland), Terrapin quarterback Boomer Esiason and a host of offensive linemen threw a full soda vending machine out of the top floor of one of the high-rise dormatories.

Like the piano out the window story above, i wish i could watch video footage of that one, too. : )

(Of course, worth looking up on Youtube: the various old Letterman bits where he and his crew throw various things off the roof of nearby buildings, and replay them in slo-mo.)

Brad361 · Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2020 6:51 am Post subject:

Piano story (likely untrue): I had a college professor who was rather well known for stretching the truth, although he was in fact an excellent musician. He liked to talk about his days in the Navy, one story he told, to illustrate military waste, was about an aircraft carrier he was on that needed to immediately shed some weight due to an emergency. So, the crew allegedly pushed four full size grand pianos overboard....because he was a rather powerful figure in our small private music college, no one questioned him as to why an aircraft carrier would be carrying four grand pianos.🙄

Brad
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