At 95, Upper St. Clair resident continues to make music
George Geiser has been playing piano since the 1920s.
George Geiser has been playing piano since the 1920s.
George Geiser has been playing piano since the 1920s.
Like most children, George Geiser took piano lessons. And also like most children, he decided to stop after relatively few of them.
His aunt, Margaret Smith, though, managed to pique his interest in the instrument.
“In those days, you bought sheet music for piano, like they did records later and CDs now,” he recalled. “She’d get that sheet music, and I started playing, simple. Of course, the more you play, you ought to get a little better. So that started maybe in 1927, ’28.”
As for Aunt Margaret: “She’s still living, and she’s 107.”
Geiser, an Upper St. Clair resident since 1961, isn’t far behind. The Johnstown native is 95 and continues to, as they used to say, tickle the ivories.
He does so despite a few potential roadblocks. About 15 years ago, he lost the use of one of his fingers.
And about 80 years ago, he started to lose his auditory sense.
“I’ve been wearing a hearing aid since 1938,” Geiser said. “Right now, if I turn my hearing aid off, I can scarcely hear the piano. I’ve got to have the hearing aid on to play the piano.”
That he does, often entertaining his fellow residents at Friendship Village of South Hills, where he has lived for more than two decades.
“The people I’ve mostly been with in here were in my era,” he said. “And my era was Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey. That’s the kind of music that I’ve always played.”
He has quite the repertoire.
“Over the years, people ask you to play songs, and I’d write them down,” Geiser said, and although he writes the titles in relatively small print, they cover an entire standard-sized piece of paper that fits folded neatly in his shirt pocket.
As for the sheet music that Aunt Margaret purchased, he never relied on any of that, as he has played by ear for all this time, memorizing tunes and letting his fingers do the walking, so to speak.
“When you play the piano by ear, you build up a mental library of chords,” he explained. “To me, all music is do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do. I can play a lot of chords, but I don’t know whether it’s a B diminished or an A augmented, or what the hell it is. Your brain just tells your fingers, make that sound, that certain sound.”
A Penn State graduate with a degree in commerce and finance, Geiser worked for Westinghouse Electric for 43 years. He lived in Bethel Park in the late 1950s before settling in the municipality directly to the west in 1961.
While he was in college and during World War II, he played piano – “sing-along stuff, not concerts” – in clubs and other establishments, including the historic Hotel Henry on downtown Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue.
And when he lived in Sharon, during the course of several Westinghouse transfers, he also entertained at Conneaut Lake. In that neck of the woods, he served as president of a highly successful barbershop quartet organization.
“We’d put on a program, and tickets would be gone the next day,” he recalled.
Whether it’s vocal or instrumental, Geiser is highly complimentary of his chosen avocation.
“Music’s great therapy. I can go home and kind of be down in the dumps or something, and” – there, he’ll pause to make piano-playing motions – “It’s good for you.”