The History of SummerKeys

In the spring of 1991, I was living in my beautiful brownstone in Jersey City, NJ, purchased for $19, 500(!), and maintained by the income from two apartments, one on the floor below mine and one on that above. Icing on the cake were the huge front windows with unobstructed views of New York Harbor and a garden I created with planters in the backyard. The PATH trains to New York City were a five-minute walk from the house, providing an easy commute to the Settlement Music Schools

Where I taught: Turtle Bay, on East 52^nd St., and Henry Street, on the LowerEast Side.

Freezing pipes and bickering tenants were ongoing problems, but nothing in life had prepared me for my encounter one evening with a young neighbor who came up behind me on my walk home, showing a gun, and demanding money. Since he was known in the neighborhood, I assumed he was faking, walked away, and he shot me in the back. Long story short: I spent most of that summer in the hospital, with two major surgeries.  Young John was arrested, and I recovered, but my opinion of life in “beautiful Jersey City” never recovered from that incident.

Then the Persian Gulf crisis erupted around 1990 and, at the same time, I received a small inheritance from a distant cousin, which set me to thinking that maybe I could find a small place not in Jersey City.

 By this time, I’d spent eight summers teaching at The Amherst Summer Music Centre in Raymond, Maine, a really wonderful, idyllic place with a full symphony orchestra, a concert band, a chorale and an Opera Workshop, where single male faculty were housed in private cabins, open to the elements except for pull-down shutters. There, I encountered a jovial 11-year-old Andrew Litton, among many other vastly talented youngsters.

Back in Jersey City, I’d purchased a car and grown accustomed to weekend jaunts with local friends out to the “countryside”, where we all decided to take a fishing trip to Maine to revisit my old haunts, and guide my pals around the storied Maine lake country. We took a plane to Portland early one Saturday, and had a grand time visiting the Old Port and the Art Museum, etc..

Only when it became time to find a place to stay did we realize how much had changed since I was last there – rooms were all sold out by that early evening.  We had to drive over three hours north to Bucksport to find a motel! So now we were almost “DownEast”, winding our way through Ellsworth, then a few hours more to the Blueberry Festival on Machias. It was there, while my friends toured the Festival booths, I was walking through the town, and was amazed to see several Real Estate windows showing houses for sale at the price of USED CARS in a village called Lubec.  Nobody but me saw any reason to stop in there, since it wasn’t planned, but I prevailed, and the next day we were there, and I FELL IN LOVE! I couldn’t see much of it, but managed to find the name of Don Lord, a local Real Estate Agent who sent me a list of Lubec properties for sale.

I spent a lot of time with that list, and made an appointment with the realtor for the following March, staying at a B&B I’d heard about down at Bailey’s Mistake (a seaside inlet just south of Lubec). We viewed a lot of properties, but the one that stuck with me seemed to have separated space for several pianos (my SummerKeys vision was fuzzily starting to form); it was on Bayview St. and owned by a friendly person named Lorraine Casey. She and I came to an agreement, and I made a down­ payment on the house!

That June, I persuaded an old college chum to come with me, and I took possession of it. We arrived at night, just at the start of a horrendous thunderstorm as I thought, “What on earth have I DONE!?” But the next morning dawned sunny  and bright, and the first thing I saw as I opened the front door was a Bald Eagle soaring over the ocean! That vision seemed to start something almost cosmically ordained in motion:  I started talking with neighbors about a piano.  They all thought that hilarious, except Kathryn Rubeor, the owner of Bayviews B&B, who sat me down with a stiff scotch: “Let’s plan!”  With her encouragement, I sent a press release to every major newspaper in the USA, and The Washington Post picked up on it with a small squib, and an article was printed on the FRONT PAGE of their SUNDAY TRAVEL SECTION, the next spring.  I got over 400 phone calls from that, and the first batch of 40 students for our opening in 1992!

Meanwhile, I purchased our first piano, a lovely Hardman· grand, from Elmer’s Barn, an antiques store in Coopers Mill, ME, plus two Mason and Hamlin uprights and a nice spinet from a piano dealer in the Lakes region(three of the aforementioned are still with us!)  Talking up the quandary of soundproofing, three local movers suggested something I’d never heard of before: egg cartons! That did it! They work!  So as the new studios were being painted, we ordered the cartons from a local farmer, to be painted also!

During our second season, Peter Lewy, a cello instructor from dear Turtle Bay Music School, decided to try his luck in Maine, bringing in more students. Then I persuaded one of my students, Steve Gelfman, to play a concert in the Sacred Heart Parish Hall on a piano we’d installed there. We put it in the local paper, wondering if anybody would attend.  The place was packed!  And that started the summer series we’ve continued every year.

I could go on and on about our success and expansion: George and Helen Lelievre joining in to help with “paperwork”, and creating our registration program(!);Gregory Biss becoming our first Maine faculty member; the welcome afforded us by the Congregational Christian Church when the Sacred Heart hall became too small for our audiences; but as you can see, that bald eagle I saw knew something!

With Affection, Bruce