You know, I'd forgotten about this. My uncle Bob Groot used to travel outside of Grand Rapids to do a lot of tunings. He died back in 1994, heart attack. Anyway, he would travel to Newaygo, 45 minutes one way north of Grand Rapids. From there, he went up to Freemont, another 15 minutes further. Or Grant, within 10 minutes of either of these two towns along with many other nearby communities. I was amazed at how many pianos there were up there. He worked through music teachers and music stores that he had acquired up there over the years and music directors from local churches. He had them set up appointments giving them discounts for doing so with their students families and then call him with the amount of tunings needed that "week." Sometimes it was several days worth of work. He started by traveling up there only a couple of times a year. He would stay in a Motel 8 type place for a few nights, tune 5-7 pianos a day and move onto the next town/area to do likewise. He eventually acquired a whole lot of customers up there to the point where he was traveling up that direction sometimes once or twice a month. He traveled to other towns in the same manner all 45 minutes to an hour or a little more from G.R., going in all different directions. There wasn't (still isn't) anyone living up there locally that was any good). He put on an awful lot of miles and went through a lot of cars but, he also acquired a lot of customers over the years too. Customers because he was so good that would have nobody else. Very few of the rest of us including me, wanted to travel that far in any one direction. I will however, service for churches that my dad had tuned since 1948 that are 45 minutes away probably more because I am nostalgic than anything else. It is kind of cool to walk into these places. It brings back a ton of memories and sometimes a few tears as well for me. Yet, these days, I charge for $20 more per tuning to get there and back. My choice. Uncle Bob loved doing this and he did very well with it. It "gave him play time while driving" he said. "It is relaxing." This is very true especially if you love driving like we do. Whatever blows your hair back I suppose. Jer From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Rob McCall Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2010 3:46 AM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] Traveling tuner Maybe I should see how many tunings I can do on my drive to Kansas City next summer? We could all drive and get every piano in rural America tuned either on the way to KC or on the way back home! :-) I never really though of the possibilities until today... Rob On Oct 13, 2010, at 00:25 , tnrwim at aol.com wrote: >From Israel I don't know how prevalent this is now, but even as recently as the mid 1970s (when I lived in New Mexico, and before I got into the piano business) I heard of so called "route tuners" who serviced mostly rural areas, where there was insufficient population density to support a resident tuner. (I think in our area there was a guy out of Texas who worked New Mexico and southern/western Colorado back then...) Back in the early '90's, I did some tuning in Southeaster Colorado and Northeastern New Mexico. At that time I heard about a traveling tuner who served the small towns on the Great Plains. He was more or less like a migrant worker, tuning pianos in the south in the winter moths, and traveling north in the summer. I guess it's not a bad way to earn a living, if you don't mind living out of a camper all the time. One time, on my way back to St. Louis, I stopped in a small Kansas town for gas. The attendant asked me what I did for a living. When he heard I tuned pianos, he said, "I've heard about guys like you". I guess he thought I was one of those itinerant tuners. Wim _____ avast! Antivirus <http://www.avast.com> : Outbound message clean. Virus Database (VPS): 10/13/2010 Tested on: 10/13/2010 8:15:29 AM avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2010 AVAST Software. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20101013/6f17304a/attachment-0001.htm>
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