St. Louis Blues

    From its earliest days, this famous old river town has been home to gamblers, speculators, bunko artists, and other "nifties". So it was in the immediate pre-World War II years, George and his family removed to the "Gateway To The Golden West" to set up shop. 

    "Shop", in this case, being acquisition through a newspaper real estate classified of a onetime mansion in one of the once most exclusive neighborhoods in the city. This was, in fact, the Liggett Mansion - he, of the drugstore fortune. This beautiful old Victorian home stood in a secluded neighborhood of genteel but now slightly rundown homes inhabited, as George liked to note, by the equally down-at-the-heels descendants of the Captains of Industry who built these homes at an earlier time. Now their decadent scions lived largely on booze and memories, and ducked their numerous creditors.

    This had the makings of a most salubrious climate for George, and he moved right in. The Liggett place must have been something to see. As George told it, it had been a wedding gift to his daughter by old Liggett. And it seems to me, in rather gothic style she had expired on her wedding night and never actually lived there - or at least not very much (especially if she had died!). But the house had one feature that George felt he might cultivate to his advantage. This was a music conservatory, a round, spacious room on the first floor at one corner facing the street. Outside it had molded bow windows that followed the interior contours. Inside it was quite grand: it had bas-relief wood and plaster insets of musical instruments over the windows and as a frieze around the room. Parquetted floors. The works!

    Best of all, for George's idea a-borning - was the fact that the existence of this music room was somehow common knowledge, and everyone in town knew about it and how it was Liggett's wedding gift to his daughter and all... and she such a talented musician... etc. ... and wasn't it a crying shame she died and all and so on and so on.

    Central to the developing scam was further common knowledge that Ms Liggett had had a very rare and expensive imported French spinet in that music room. As the house was partly furnished when George took over - the vox populi simply assumed the spinet was still where it had always been.

    Not long after this, George began to buy up old upright pianos around town. "Buy", that is, where he absolutely had to - and never for more than about $5 tops. Mostly, these big old monstrosities then, as now, were become heavy, cumbersome items to their owners and most were glad to give them away for the hauling. George and Chuck had a trailer behind their car, and weekends they could bag two, maybe three uprights with ease. These pianos were all brought back to the Mansion after dark, and spirited away in the cavernous basement where George had set up his woodworking shop.

    Working nights, George had perfected a most unusual transformation: with power saw and ingenuity, he figured out how to cut down upright pianos and transform them into - spinets!

    The plot thickens, no? Soon, a small classified ad began to appear innocuously in the weekend editions of the St. Louis Dispatch:

    Ah-h-h-h-! But what that ad did not say, no sir! was that this was the spinet owned by the former mistress of the house. No - George relied on human nature to supply that datum...!

    Came Sunday morning and all was astir in the old Mansion. Below stairs, Chuck and Don were busy pushing one after another of the uprights-cum-spinets out and lining them up on a back porch out of sight (they had maybe ten or twelve - a sizeable number!). George was meanwhile dusting the flecks from the sleeve of his best dark suit and ushering in the first of the answerers to his little ad.

    And proudly showing them - as advertised! - a "spinet" sitting grandly alone in the middle of the conservatory floor. All further conclusions of the "marks" as they reached for their wallets were drawn by them and them alone. As soon as one party had left and before the next one arrived, as Chuck recalled, he and Don would "tag" the spinet with the buyer's name and push it out on the porch and to the end of the line. And then push in the next spinet up for sale - and the little ritual would be repeated all over again.

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