Piano tuner retires after 51 years traveling Alaska

Upright pianos in Skagway bars dating from the Gold Rush. Grand pianos worth tens of thousands of dollars in Anchorage and Sitka. Bob Hope's piano while he was on a USO tour in Alaska.

Plus private, church and school pianos in Wrangell.

Virgel Hale has tuned them all in his 51-year career traveling around Alaska.

But now, at age 81, he's retiring, and will be staying home with his wife, Patsy, who has health problems, in Mountain Grove, Missouri, closer to kids and grandkids.

"I hate to call it quits," he said. "I'll miss Alaska."

Can he estimate how many Alaska pianos and piano owners he's met in his travels.

He laughed. "Oh, no," he said. "But it's a lot."

Although he's been blind since contracting meningitis at 14 months old in Arizona, he's traveled by plane (big and small), boat and train throughout the state since 1969.

Hale had been a regular in Wrangell for at least the past 40 years, said Alice Rooney. "Virgel was special because he really liked coming here and spending time in Wrangell."

He used to come to town twice a year, tuning as many as 10 or 11 pianos on some visits, Rooney said.

In Sitka, he would check in at the Sitka Hotel and set up house calls. One Sitka name he couldn't recall was that of a woman who he said owned one of the oldest pianos he's worked on - it came to Sitka via the Cape of Good Hope at the southern end of Africa in the late 1800s.

Among pianos in the worst shape was one that had arrived at Anchorage's Ft. Richardson Army base with parts destroyed by termites. "The felts had been eaten up, the soundboard had to be repaired, new hammers ... it was in really bad shape."

Another challenging piano was one at a church in Edna Bay, about 60 miles southwest of Wrangell, which had been nibbled at by, well, church mice.

"They had eaten the felt," Hale said. "I got it fixed up, and advised the pastor to get a couple of cats."

Bad weather was another challenge.

"I got weathered in a lot," he said. "Once I went to Kake for the day and wound up there for four days."

Another time a charter plane pilot dropped him off at Teller and told Hale he would pick him up in a couple of hours, after he'd tuned the church piano. But a snowstorm blew up and the pilot couldn't get back until the next day, and then had to land on a lake a few miles from Teller.

"The pilot asked this Native man on a snowmachine to go get me, but the snowmachine broke down halfway on our way back and we had to walk through big drifts of snow the rest of the way. The man said, 'I don't know about these white men's machine - I'm going to get myself some dogs.'''

One of the oldest and most interesting pianos he worked on wasn't in Alaska but in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he had gone to visit with a friend's aunt and uncle. "They asked me to look at their piano. It was in pretty poor shape, and I took the keys out ... and there were two or three bundles of Confederate money!" Hale said.

Hale is from Springerville, Arizona, in the White Mountains. He attended the Colorado School for the Blind in Colorado Springs, and while he "plays the piano a little bit," his interest at school was in sports such as wrestling and track.

He did learn about piano tuning, though, from a man who had a piano business, and when Hale attended what's now the School of Piano Technology for the Blind in Vancouver, Washington, he needed only one year to graduate because of the mentoring.

He went from there to Alaska, where he got a job with the Anchorage House of Music. Starting in 1959, he tuned, repaired and rebuilt pianos and at military bases throughout the state. That was when he was a contractor with Bob Hope's show, as it entertained troops at Alaska bases.

He went south for a couple of years, returned in 1969 and stayed. He started his own business, Hale's Piano Services, and continued traveling the state.

He and Patsy have been living in Missouri for the past 16 years, and he'd been flying to Alaska for his piano tours until COVID struck. His last Alaska trek was a year and a half ago.

"I miss it," he said. "I'd like to get back, but ..."

Piano owners miss him too. "I am beginning to notice" the out-of-tune piano tones, Rooney said, adding that she is looking to find another traveling tuner.