photograph by dave stevens
Dear Vance: I have a baby grand piano (above) which I was told was actually made in Memphis. Can you confirm that? — D.S., Munford, TN
Dear D.S.: I can indeed confirm that your beautiful George Steck piano was made in Memphis in 1968. I know this because I spoke with Don Flippin, who has been tuning pianos at local schools, churches, and private homes for 56 years, 26 of those working for his father. He consulted the Pierce Piano Atlas, now in its 70th printing, an amazing resource that documents the production of almost every piano made in America, based on the serial number stamped inside.
“I’m familiar with the piano owned by D.S., because I’ve tuned it, and it’s a really nice baby grand,” says Flippin. “Steck also made a parlor grand, back when homes had music parlors, and even a concert grand, which is nine feet long. Prices for some of those can begin at $120,000.”
I also spoke with Rick Jefferies, vice president of Amro Music, in charge of their piano division for 35 years. “George Steck was one of the better products from the Aeolian Corporation,” he says, “and if it was made in 1968, then it definitely came out of their Memphis plant.”
But if it’s Memphis-made, why does the piano shown here say New York, Paris, and London on the “fallboard” above the keys? “That’s where George Steck originally opened his factories,” says Flippin. “A Baldwin piano, though today made in Mississippi, might still say Cincinnati on the fallboard.”
Okay, but how does Aeolian fit into our story? Why isn’t the company called George Steck? Well, I’ll try to keep this simple. Let’s begin with the piano owned by D.S.
Born in Germany in 1829, George Steck learned the art of piano-making in Europe and moved to New York City in 1853 to open his own firm. He gained contracts for supplying pianos to schools and won prizes at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair and the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. When he died in 1897, his company was acquired by the Aeolian Corporation.
In 1887, an enterprising businessman named William Tremaine established the Aeolian Organ and Music Company in Meridian , Connecticut, to produce pianos, organs, phonographs, and records. (“Aeolian” was a type of harp used in ancient Greece.)After moving to New York City, over the decades the company began merging with other well-known piano-makers, such as Chickering, Knabe, Ivers and Pond, and at least a dozen others. By the 1920s, Aeolian was producing almost one-third of the pianos made in the United States, and even branched out into player pianos, which used a pneumatic system to “read” the notes punched in paper piano rolls. But let’s bring this long story back to Memphis.
In 1951, The Commercial Appeal reported that a piano manufacturing firm, Winter & Co. of New York, planned to establish a “research division” here at 2718 Pershing, “to devote itself primarily to wood technology and construction.” The one-story building just north of Summer most recently served as a warehouse for Firestone Tire & Rubber Co.
This was a humble beginning, and over the years, the newspaper told readers very little about the growing operation taking place here, sometimes referring to the company as Aeolian, and at other times, by its main division, Ivers and Pond. “They just kept a low profile,” says Flippin. “They weren’t like Steinway, Baldwin, or Kimball, using worldwide advertising.”
photograph by steve davis
Strings are attached to a cast-iron plate strong enough to sustain 20 tons of tension.
In 1964, after a multi-million-dollar expansion, the property on Pershing occupied some 250,000 square feet in three separate buildings. Three years later, the company consolidated all of its operations in Memphis, prompting The Commercial Appeal to declare, “Aeolian Corporation is the world’s largest company devoted exclusively to piano manufacturing.” Their reputation soared when New York’s Metropolitan Opera selected a Knabe concert grand — made in Memphis — as its “official piano.” Rudolph Bing, the Met’s conductor, even declared that Knabe “was the favorite piano of many of our artists.”
The plant also ramped up production of player pianos, produced under the names Duo-Art, Cable, Musette, and Pianola. Anyone who visited a Shakey’s Pizza Parlor was listening to a player piano crafted in Memphis.
“The Memphis plant now turns out every type of modern piano,” reported The Commercial Appeal, “including grands, consoles, studio uprights, players, and spinets.” Now employing more than 800 skilled workers, by the late 1960s production exceeded 100 pianos daily.
Disaster struck on the night of August 15, 1969, when a three-alarm blaze destroyed two of the company’s main buildings. The fire, its origin never officially determined, caused $5 million in damages, and slowed but didn’t stop operations. The company resumed business in temporary facilities across town, while clearing away the debris to construct a larger, more modern plant at the Pershing site. “We hope to be shipping pianos again in November,” company president Henry R. Heller Jr. told reporters, “about 75 a day, and all employees will eventually return to work.”
In February 1985, our magazine featured the Aeolian Corporation (“Piano Forte: Making Sweet Music in Memphis”). Writer Mark J. Davis offered readers a tour of the plant, calling it “one of the best-kept secrets in Memphis,” while noting that it was now producing 20,000 instruments annually. By this time, there was no trace of the devastating fire, and he wrote, “Perhaps as a testament of Aeolian to remain the largest company in the world devoted to the production of pianos, only 60 days passed before production resumed.”
Davis considered the Action and Keys Plant, which occupied an entire building, “a marvelous monument to man and machine. And if you ever examine the ‘action’ — where the hammers and dampers transmit the pianist’s movements from key to string — you’ll understand what a remarkable ‘machine’ a piano really is.” More than 4,000 separate parts go into a typical piano, and he was impressed by Aeolian’s “refreshing commitment to quality.”
Just one example: “Each keyboard is cut from a single piece of wood,” he wrote. “The resulting set of 88 keys remain together for the life of the piano. It is just such ‘marriages’ of parts which help make a piano an instrument, rather than a noisemaker.”
photograph by steve davis
Each piano was tuned in special sound-muffled rooms.
Readers probably never imagined the variety of wood that goes into pianos. “Hard-rock maple, walnut, spruce, pine, and basswood are but a few of the types graded and chosen to perform various duties,” Davis noted, and those were just for the structural or “action” parts. Other species — cherry, pecan, walnut, and mahogany — formed the outer casing. “In the course of a year, some four-and-a-half-million board feet of lumber are unloaded from flatcars originating from every corner of the nation.”
All of this wood was carefully stacked for a special “curing process,” which gradually reduced the moisture content — as high as 60 percent in some species — down to the 4 percent acceptable for a musical instrument.
Davis described the stringing operation — 245 individual strings, in sets of two or three for the 88 keys: “They work like weavers at a loom, leaning to and fro, side to side, until the strings are in place, a lattice-work of steel strands.” These are attached to a massive iron plate, cast in a foundry also owned by Aeolian, strong enough to sustain some 20 tons of string tension.
After each piano was carefully assembled, with testing and inspections at each step of the way, the instrument was moved to the piano tuner, working in special sound-muffled rooms. “Key by key, note by note,” he observed, “they will detect qualities in pitch and tone that are indistinguishable to the untrained ear.”
Davis’s story came out in February 1985. By June, sooner than anyone expected, the company was in financial trouble. “When I started at Amro in 1981, there were eight piano dealers in Memphis,” says Jefferies. “By the time I retired ten years ago, there were three. A piano is such a labor-intensive instrument that nobody in the U.S. could compete with giant factories in Japan, Korea, and China.”
Aeolian hired Peter Perez, the former president of Steinway, to rescue them. The Commercial Appeal wrote, “Retuning Aeolian to Right Key Is Goal of Newly Formed Firm,” which would reorganize and even rename the company as Chickering & Sons.
Business leaders stepped in with loans and bailout plans, but the Wurlitzer Company — best known for its organs and jukeboxes — bought Aeolian in 1985 and shut it down. The buildings still stand on Pershing, now home to a packaging supply firm. The Aeolian motto, proudly displayed throughout the plant, was: “You either have a quality piano, or you have no piano at all.”
Hundreds — perhaps thousands — of those quality pianos crafted here have survived, though the business that produced them is barely remembered.
Got a question for Vance?
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MAIL: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis Magazine, P.O. Box 1738, Memphis, TN 38101
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