To neighbors or visitors, the piano in Dennis and Virginia Stager’s living room might appear to be an ordinary instrument. But to the couple, it represents decades of love and commitment.
The Stagers made Whidbey News-Times headlines in 1978 when Dennis built that piano for Virginia. Now, more than 40 years later, the instrument will be leaving Whidbey Island for a new home, but the memories, the music and the love forged in that act of service will stay with the Stagers forever.
Before coming into the Stagers’ hands, the piano parts that are now in the finished instrument went through quite an ordeal. The piano to which they originally belonged fell off the back of a truck driving uphill and “rolled downhill end over end,” Dennis said. The disassembled keys and hammers were dumped helter-skelter in a box and taken to an Anacortes piano shop along with the harp, or the frame that maintains tension in the instrument’s strings.
The Stagers found the pieces in the shop. Virginia, a pianist since childhood, desperately wanted a piano but knew she and Dennis could not afford one. When they came across the disassembled pieces, however, Dennis decided he didn’t need to buy one — he could build one instead.
Dennis grew up on a farm, where he learned how to be resourceful and fix things. Still, since he didn’t have a background in woodworking, Virginia said she was skeptical of his plan at first.
“He said he was going to build me a piano, and I looked at him, and I said, ‘Are you out of your mind? You don’t know how to do that!’” she said. “And he said, ‘No, but God’ll help me.’”
Dennis’s next stop was a wood shop to buy a number of planks, Virginia said, and then he got right to work.
Learning as he went along and using only hand tools, Dennis constructed the body of the piano, including the soundboard and keylid, and painstakingly replaced each hammer and key into its precise location within the instrument.
He took great care to make the instrument beautiful, splitting beams to expose the most interesting patterns in the grain and using a cabinet scraper to smooth down the wood. The wood, like the piano parts, hadn’t had it easy before coming to Dennis’s woodshop. Prior to being cut down, the tree the wood came from had been shot, and Dennis had to plug up two bullet holes in the planks he used.
Dennis completed the piano in just four months. A friend of the couple built a matching bench.
When her husband presented her with the instrument, Virginia said, she couldn’t hold back her tears.
Virginia taught her three daughters to play on that piano.
Virginia hasn’t been able to play for some time; arthritis in her hands makes playing difficult, and now that the couple is moving to Arizona, they can’t bring the piano with them.
But the instrument will remain in the family. The Stagers’ daughter, Gaile McGregor, will move the instrument to her home in Portland, Oregon. Of all her children, Virginia said, Gaile showed the greatest aptitude for music.
Though separated from its builder and original owners, the piano will continue to bring joy to the family’s newer generations.
“(Gaile) has grandchildren now,” Virginia said. “So she wants to teach them.”
Dennis takes a look at the inside of the piano he built. He had to replace each hammer individually after it fell off a truck in the mid 1970s. (Photo by Karina Andrew / Whidbey News-Times)
Though arthritis has kept Virginia from playing for the past few years, she still managed a few cheerful lines of the ragtime classic, “Entertainer.” (Photo by Karina Andrew)
