My parents were musical. They both played the piano, organ, and violin, and each sought to achieve a certain degree of skill in music in general. That’s probably why they started to teach me piano lessons at an early age. I was about six years old when my piano lessons began. Mom and Dad were the teachers. I would go outside and then ring the doorbell to signal that I had arrived for my lesson. Dad opened the door and let me in and had me sit down at the piano.
The first thing I needed to learn was how to play a scale. I did it just fine, but I couldn’t get the fingering right. Mom and Dad showed me the correct way over and over again, but I just couldn’t get it. It sounded alright, but from a technical standpoint, it was wrong. I crossed my first finger over my thumb at the wrong time and that made it so everything was wrong.
The whole idea of piano lessons was frustrating for me and for my
parents. Pretty soon we all decided to bag the idea for awhile. Maybe Mozart could be a virtuoso at an early age, but not me.
When I was in second grade, my neighbor, Douglas Datwyler, who was two years older than I was, joined the fourth grade band class at school. He was going to play the drums. He even got a pair of drum sticks to practice with. I decided that I was also going to play the drums when I got in fourth grade.
Imagine how my very musical parents felt when I announced my intentions. Yes, the percussion section of a band is very prestigious and requires a lot of skill, but an elementary school drummer does “Boom Tat ta, Boom Tat Tat” for three years before he does anything really exciting in junior high bands.
My parents decided that before I started fourth grade (and the dreaded drums,) I would learn to play the piano better. It was near the end of second grade, so they figured I would have about a year and a half to take piano lessons before drums would have to be heard in our house.
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