Whatever happened to ... the man who restored player pianos?

The Battlefield Boulevard shop where Ted DeWitt long coaxed music out of intricate machinery is gone.

But DeWitt's player piano repair business continues, operating out of his Chesapeake apartment and a friend's garage.

DeWitt closed his shop about three years ago. The demand for repairs on player pianos had gotten so low he couldn't afford to keep the place open, he said.

A friend from church offered to let him store his equipment and do repairs in his garage, and DeWitt "more or less, kinda retired."

But he keeps his hands in the business with a piano tuning operation and still restores an occasional vintage player piano.

He gets those calls only a couple of times a year now, he said. Young people prefer their music to come on iPods instead of paper rolls.

The irony, he said, is that the materials available now to patch bellows and tune machinery will make those pianos last much longer.

DeWitt always loved the sound of a piano, but he discovered when he took lessons at 16 that he couldn't coordinate his left and right hands.

He resorted to a player piano, which required only that he pump the bellows.

DeWitt found a broken player piano at a Goodwill Industries store in 1957. Then he set out to locate someone who could show him how to fix the antique.

An 80-year-old specialist at the Temple of Music took him under his wing, and DeWitt became an apprentice and finally a master.

DeWitt was 18 when he started working on the pianos. He'll turn 70 next month.

Most of his customers over the years, he said, have been the children of people who had player pianos in their homes.

They often inherited the instruments and wanted to reconnect with the days when they'd pump the foot pedal and make music.

That's pretty much what drew John Sawyer of Chesapeake to wonder recently what had happened to DeWitt.

"This one's been in my family for 50 years," Sawyer said of his ailing player. "When my brother died, he left it to me."

Sawyer was anxious to find DeWitt and have him make it sing once again.

Over the years, DeWitt taught himself how to tune pianos, which forms the bulk of his work now.

He says you know you are getting old when you get a call from a child you once tuned a piano for, and she's asking you to tune it for her own daughter's lessons.

DeWitt has a Web site, dewitts-piano-service.com and takes appointments by phone at (757) 487-4204. He works Sundays through Fridays. He's closed on Saturdays.

When he moved into his Chesapeake senior living apartment, DeWitt had to give his own player piano to a woman who once worked for him.

He has no instrument there now and won't bring any work home.

"In the apartment where I live, I can't have one," he explained. "They don't want the noise."

Tony Germanotta, (757) 222-5113, tony.germanotta@pilotonline.com