BOCAGE • COUNTRY CLUB • HIGHLAND • JEFFERSON TERRACE KENILWORTH • PERKINS • SOUTHDOWNS • UNIVERSITY CLUB
ADVOCATE THE SOUTHSIDE
T H E A D V O C AT E.C O M
|
W e d n e s d ay, au g u s t 28, 2024
If you would no longer like to receive this free product, please email brtmc@ theadvocate.com.
1gn
Danny Heitman AT RANDOM
How Richard Nixon made me a nature boy Although grown-ups are supposed to shield children from scandal, my parents didn’t bother sending me out of the room as news of the Watergate cover-up forced President Richard Nixon from office 50 summers ago this month — on Aug. 9, 1974. I was only 10 years old, not likely to grasp what was happening, anyway. The older people around me didn’t seem to understand Watergate much better than I did. Life had changed for us the summer before as the U.S. Senate held televised Watergate hearings from May through August 1973. Lawmakers wanted to learn what Nixon knew about a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building in Washington. Both of my grandmothers, who fretted about having their afternoon Nixon soap operas preempted by the hearings, weren’t as riveted by questions of constitutional order as the senators who droned through our days. Those long Louisiana afternoons of my childhood now felt even longer. Watergate jumbled my routines, too. Summer for me had meant late afternoon matinees on the television, which usually broadcast monster flicks like “Frankenstein” or “The Invisible Man.” Instead, the most ominous part of my summer was testimony by Nixon associates John Dean and Alexander Butterfield. The tone of the hearings, which combined scolding homilies and the narrow parsing of fact, reminded me of school, a drudgery that summer was supposed to relieve. In those days before 24-hour cable news, we didn’t expect the world to sit in our living rooms from dawn to dusk. Except for assassinations and moon landings, current events confined themselves to the newspapers and broadcasts at the top and bottom of the day. But Watergate made us feel as if the news had spilled its banks somehow, flooding every hour with urgency. With little but Watergate on TV all summer, I escaped outside — turning over rocks, playing with the dog, dousing dragonflies with my water pistol. I trace my interest in the outdoors to that strange season when a drought of decent television programming nudged me to think about trees, birds, and grass instead. One August afternoon in 1974, I came inside
From lifting keyboards to finding Nicolas Cage, piano tuning is never boring for Rebecca Rumfellow BY ROBIN MILLER
M Staff writer
ost people do a double take when Rebecca Rumfellow sits down at their pianos. Why? Well, piano tuners aren’t usually 26-year-old women. That’s not a politically incorrect statement, it’s a fact. Piano tuners usually are men. These days, they’re men who are nearing retirement. New Iberia piano tuner Preston Hebert confirms this fact. He is 80 and is in semi retirement in the Acadiana area. The tuners he knows are, of course, younger than him by 20 years, which places them in their 60s. “There are five piano tuners in the Acadiana area, and they keep busy,” he said. “But the youngest ones I know are a man in his early 60s, another in his 60s and my cousin — who travels from Acadiana to Mississippi to tune pianos, and he’s also in his 60s.” So when Rumfellow expressed interest in learning the trade, O’Neill’s Music House’s affiliated piano tuners jumped at the chance to teach her. “I’ve been doing this two years, but I’m really still in training,” Rumfellow said.
STAFF PHOTOS BY ROBIN MILLER
ABOVE: Rebecca Rumfellow uses a tuning hammer to tighten or loosen piano wires when tuning a piano. The tuner on the iPad gauges whether or not the strings are in tune. TOP: Rumfellow, a 26-year-old piano technician at O’Neill’s Music House, removes the action board from a baby grand piano. That’s her story. Clients see it differently. Once they invite a piano tuner to work on the instruments in their homes, that tuner becomes their tuner. It’s just the natural way of things within the business, and now Rumfellow is the tuner for quite a few piano owners in the Baton Rouge area.
Piano tuning was never her lifelong dream, though she’s always loved dabbling in repair work. “I’ve always enjoyed doing things like this,” Rumfellow said. “I’ve always told myself that if I don’t do something like repairing
ä See TUNING, page 2G
This isn’t something that women my age usually go into. They were in need of someone to work with them, and they appreciated that someone younger wanted to learn.” REBECCA RUMFELLOW, piano tech
ä See AT RANDOM, page 2G
Black inventor created airship in La. before Wright brothers The U.S. Patent Office’s blueprint for Charles Frederick Page’s airship. Page applied for the patent in 1903 and received it in 1906. The patent was granted months before the Wright Brothers received their patent for the Kitty Hawk. PROVIDED PHOTO BY MICHAEL WYNNE
BY ROBIN MILLER Staff writer
The Wright Brothers are known as history’s flying pioneers, the first to invent, build and fly the world’s first successful airplane. The legendary test flight of their plane, called the Wright Flyer, took place on Dec. 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. These days, that same plane hangs from the rafters of the Smithsonian Institution’s
National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.’s, National Mall. What you won’t see in that same museum is Charles Frederick Page’s airship. The Black inventor apPage plied for a patent eight months before the Wright brothers took flight. But why isn’t it there? Well, that’s part of the question posed by Abigail Miller, of Slaughter. Miller noticed a display about
Page in the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in New Orleans. She was returning from a trip and time was short, so she didn’t have time to stop and read the exhibit’s panels. But she did take note of Page’s name, as well as a model of his airship in a glass display case. “He was a Louisiana inventor,”
ä See CURIOUS, page 2G