Before the concert, he scribbled a setlist and tucked the paper into the pocket of his polo: five songs he hoped he could play, if his hands held up.
George “Bud” Kassel has been plunking pianos since 1932.
This would be his first solo show.
“Come here for a second,” his wife, Barbara Bowdoin, said outside Fletcher Music Center Monday morning, pulling him close. She pinned a green ribbon above his heart: It’s My Birthday.
Classmates from the music center had brought cards and a cake. Someone had taped up a sign: Happy 99th Birthday, Bud! As he walked into the recital room, the teacher shouted, “There he is!”
Joe Fontechia, 82, runs what he calls “band camp for senior citizens” and has taught more than 1,000 people to play the electronic organ. Bud is his oldest student and one of his favorites.
When Joe had suggested this birthday performance, Bud had hesitated. He plays almost every day at home, except when his hands hurt too much from arthritis. He just wasn’t sure he wanted to be alone up there while everyone watched.
The teacher had asked, “If not now, when?”
Bud sat backward on the piano bench, facing the folding chairs. He framed each song with a story, pulled from a century of memories.
“I started playing when I was 5. My dad played. We had this little spinet,” he told his classmates. His earliest memories are of watching his dad sing at neighborhood parties and of his four brothers tormenting him, banging the keys while Bud tried to play.
“My Aunt Bonnie tried to teach me piano,” he said. “But she was always three sheets to the wind and only wanted me to play scales.” He took lessons for two weeks. “Sports were more important then,” he said.
But it’s hard to play baseball when you’re 99.
“Music stays with you,” he said. “Well, it did with me.”
He turned to face the double keyboard. “You want a rhythm track?” asked the teacher, pushing a button on the console. “Here you go.”
The organs are designed to be electronic orchestras, programmed to play 500 songs. Seniors who purchase the $1,000 models get free lessons for life. They can pick out tunes with just two fingers, add Beatles back-up singers and Yo-Yo Ma’s cello, make the keys sound like trumpets or trombones, splice in drums and change the tempo.
“Not so fast,” Bud told his teacher as the backbeat thunked through the room. Joe slowed the pace. “OK, that’s better,” Bud said.
His right hand fingered the top keyboard. His left kept up bass on the bottom. Confidently, if slowly, he worked his way through the first song he’d ever learned, “The Bells of St. Mary’s.”
When the applause ebbed, he pulled the paper from his pocket, then told another story. At 18, he was in the Navy, stationed in California during World War II. “Did they have cars back then?” his teacher teased, walking up to change the tempo.
“Oh, they had cars,” Bud said, smiling. “I need a 16-beat standard for this one.” Then he launched into “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
He got married after the war, went to college, had a son and a daughter. For 30 years, he taught sixth grade. When he retired, he and his wife moved into a Largo mobile home park for seniors.
Bud can read music but prefers to play by ear.
He met Barbara at the mobile home park, where he rode his bike and she taught clogging. Somehow, they started talking about music. She and her husband had found a keyboard at a thrift shop and, at 65, she had started taking lessons at Fletcher Music. She invited Bud to come and play.
“He fell in love with my organ,” said Barbara, laughing.
After their spouses died within three months of each other, a mutual friend invited them to a trailer park dance. Bud started visiting more often to play Barbara’s keyboard. Sometimes, they did duets. At 85, he started going with her every week to Fletcher Music — the first lessons since Aunt Bonnie.
“Not long after we started dating, she went to Texas for a wedding,” Bud told the audience. “I got really lonely. So I wrote this song for her. It’s called ‘I Never Fell in Love Like This Before.’”
“Great!” shouted a woman near the back. “Now we’re all going to cry.”
The teacher started a slow soundtrack. Bud leaned over the keys, concentrating. He had searched their trailer for the lyrics, which he couldn’t remember. So he just played the music.
Barbara, now 90, beamed. She knew every word.
Music, Bud said, has always distracted him during bad times, buoyed him through the good.
“When you’re playing songs, you can just get lost inside them,” he said. “You can’t dwell on the world, or any problems you’re having. I can go from one song to the next.”
The average lifespan of an American man is about 76. Fewer than 2% live to be Bud’s age.
So what’s his advice?
“Stay calm,” he said. “Music keeps me calm.”
Twenty minutes into his recital, he played “The Rose,” which Bette Midler made famous. Next on his setlist: Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine.”
But his fingers felt stiff. He wasn’t sure he could pull that one off.
“Play that razzamatazz one!” Barbara urged. Joe dialed in “Alabama Jubilee,” and Bud jumped in, joyously.
Then he played some Dixieland and a Disney tune.
After the clapping subsided, Bud scanned the room. He had hit the highlights over a half-hour, and now his hands hurt. “OK,” he said, “that’s my repertoire.”
As he stood up from the piano bench, a woman shouted: “Encore! Play one more!”
Bud shook his head. “We’ll do this again next year,” he said. “I gotta save something for 100.”
