Things would have started breaking really quickly.”Īt the same time, Brown says the instrument was in remarkable condition.

It still played, but it hadn’t been tuned in decades, and the strings were so rusted, and the hammers were so worn down, that it wasn’t possible to tune it. “The piano had been there by the ocean since the early 1900s and the corrosive salt had pretty much eaten away everything that was metal. “It was quite a sight,” Brown says with a laugh.

The challenge that awaited the veteran piano technician was both daunting and exciting, in equal parts. “But we know there had been no restoration since that time.”īrown was thrilled to be hired after Paula Karman, wife of Tor House board member and Jeffers scholar Jim Karman, agreed to underwrite the restoration of the instrument at a cost of $9,000. We actually have a photograph of Una giving a house concert, with Teddie playing his cello,” says Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, vice president of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation and a docent at the historic home. “The piano has probably been at the Tor House since 1919. Jeffers helped carry the 610-pound piano into the parlor with assistance from the Wermuth Moving Company. Remarkably, Teddie remained friendly with both his ex-wife and Jeffers and, in fact, gave Una the Steinway. The next day she married their friend and neighbor, Robinson Jeffers. His romance with Una faded, and their marriage was dissolved after 12 years on August 1, 1913. (He later designed and built Carmel’s original Golden Bough Playhouse). Kuster was a musician himself : He had been first cellist for the Los Angeles Symphony, an orchestra he co-founded. Its original buyer is believed to have been Edward “Teddie” Kuster, who purchased the instrument for his wife, Una, a classically trained pianist. Brown, of Santa Cruz, had spent the previous two months restoring the interior parts of the Steinway grand piano to its former glory - the condition it was in when the company shipped it to a dealer in San Francisco in 1904.

Tor house