Adjusting (or not) to a post Covid World
Two signs of life struggling to return to so-called normal.
Face-to-face bridge
More Master Points if you play in a live tournament. The American Contract Bridge League, which rules the world of tournament bridge and the awarding of Master Points, is offering a 20% bonus if you play face-to-face in an online game. Here is an offer from a bridge club I play in online. Much too far away to drive. By the way, this tournament offers Silver Points, which I need to become a Life Master.
Dear Fred,
ONE MORE WEEK!
ACBL has increased overall masterpoint awards by 20% at this tournament!!
Niagara-on-the-Lake (NOTL) Sectional Tournament
June 3 - June 5, 2022
NOTL Community Centre
***
As a bridge addict (with 300 Master Points) I have enjoyed playing online. If I play in a club game, it means driving or subwaying 20 minutes to play. Much easier to play online. I play online with a partner a couple of times a week— at the peak of the lockdown it was every day.
Players are not heading back to in person play.
“I cancelled the face-to-face as nobody came so I went back on line and still people aren't coming online in great numbers. Anyway, I have decided to continue online - at least for the rest of the summer,” says Karine Dorey, who runs an ACBL sanctioned bridge club in Cowansville, Quebec.
Airbnb bookings down.
My coffee shop friend, Mike Losey, telling me rentals at his Knowlton, Quebec, property were going crazy during Covid. Now renters are demanding discounts and his place was actually empty for a while. A country Covid retreat no longer beckons.
“Airbnb hosts are panicking about a summer slowdown” reports online mag Business Insider. It says last year was a record year for short term rentals. Not now.
Condo owners who rely on Airbnb rentals to cover mortgages and home equity lines of credit now seeing less traffic and higher debt payments. In theory some will panic and be forced to sell, putting more pressure on the over-priced housing market.
Markets ignore Memorial Day
And go up on Friday. If there is a long weekend — as there is in the United States— traders sometimes sell off— stocks and currencies— in case there is a calamity over the weekend and they are left looking at losses without being able to sell — or buy.
American stocks were up more than 6% on the week. Apple and Alphabet each up more than 4% after getting beaten up in the last few weeks. Proof you can’t time markets and a lesson for young traders who have never seen such a sustained sell off. I own some Alphabet, aka Google. It dropped about $1,000 a share during the recent tech-stock collapse. It splits 20 for 1 next month.
Street Fighting Elements
US States by Exports. The South is King. So is Oil.
“There’s a guy works down the chip shop swears he’s Elvis, he’s a liar and I’m not sure about you.”
There was a music streaming service playing in the background when I heard this. I thought the chorus was incredibly funny and when I heard `chip shop’ figured it must be a Brit, even if the sound was country. Kirsty MacColl wrote and sang this in 1981. The British singer died in diving accident in Mexico in 2000. Very talented woman.
Essay of the Week
A recent issue of The Economist had an obituary of Franz Mohr, a master piano tuner for Steinway. The likes of Glenn Gould and Vladimir Horowitz would take him on the road for their concerts. It reminded me of an obituary I wrote of Paul Hahn, the owner of a piano store in Toronto. It prospered— and is still going strong— while others closed. His sold Steinway pianos and had a close relationship with Henry Steinway. Mr. Steinway died just after I interviewed him and before this obituary appeared in the Globe and Mail.
Alice Hahn still runs the store on Yonge Street in Toronto.
***
The piano has been in decline since 1911. First the gramophone, then the radio, movies and television distracted people from playing. Paul Hahn of Toronto battled the trend and built a successful business by restoring, tuning and selling old pianos. New pianos might not be hot sellers, but put a vintage $60,000 Steinway in the window and people will snap it up. For more than 40 years, he prospered while many of his competitors went out of business.
The showroom of Paul Hahn & Co is filled with more than a dozen pianos, a mixture of uprights and grand pianos, some grander than others. He said one of the reasons for the success of his business was the number of spectacular pianos bought by people who could afford them in the early 20th century.
"There's a Steinway concert grand in our workshops now that would sell today for about $130,000," Mr. Hahn told a reporter two years ago. "That same piano could be bought in Toronto in 1910 for $900."
Many of those pianos fill the two floors of workshops in the Paul Hahn store, which is now run by his daughter Alex Hahn. They are there to be tuned or restored. And the phone rings often with people wanting to know if Paul Hahn & Co. would like to buy the family piano.
The business began just before the First World War, but it wasn't until Mr. Hahn took over that the business prospered. Although blessed with scant musical talent, he was a friendly man whose charm allowed him to make friends with talents from singer Gordon Lightfoot to Henry Steinway of the New York piano-making family.
Raised in Toronto in a musical family, his father, Paul Hahn Sr., was 60 when his son was born. His father was a cellist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra who had decided to go into the piano business. Young Paul went to Brown Junior Public School on Avenue Road in Toronto. By the time he was 10, the Second World War was raging and he found he always played the Luftwaffe pilot in schoolyard games. "And of course, I always lost," he recalled years later.
He was a poor student and preferred hockey to books but did learn to play the violin moderately well. He could always fake it on the piano, albeit with short, showoff bursts in the showroom.
The family's summers were spent on an island in Lake Balsam, north of Peterborough, Ont. Family legend had it that the land was given to one of his mother's ancestors, Harry Delamare, as a reward for fighting in the Fenian raids that followed the U.S. Civil War.
At 13, Paul was sent to boarding school at Lakefield, Ont. Again, he wasn't a star student and left in the last year of high school without having graduated. He worked for a summer picking tobacco and used the money to buy his first car, a Model A Ford. After that, he was always an automobile nut. For a time, he worked on the assembly line at the Massey-Harris tractor factory on the edge of downtown Toronto.
It was probably inevitable that he would work at his father's shop. While he wasn't a musician like his father, he was a good salesman who loved the world of music and musicians. Over the years, he built a strong loyalty among his customers.
"I bought my first grand piano, a Steinway, from Paul Hahn when I was a young producer. It was $40,000, the second-biggest purchase of my life," said Bob Ezrin, who went on to fame producing such recordings as The Wall by Pink Floyd. "Hahn pianos was a place musicians would drop in. I liked Paul and we stayed friends. He was a salty guy, the kind you wanted to go drinking and fishing with."
For many years, the Hahn piano store was located at Yonge and Bloor, backing onto Britnell Books, another Toronto institution. After almost running over owner Roy Britnell with his car in the lane behind the stores, Mr. Hahn apologized and the two men became friends.
"He was like a second father to me, and he gave me business advice I lived with it all my life," Mr. Hahn once said.
The advice was duly passed on to his daughter Alex. "The advice was avoid going into debt, own the building you work from and always rent the upstairs to a hairdresser," said Ms. Hahn, who took over her father's business in 1997, owns the building and rents the upper floor to a hairdresser. "They do well, no matter how bad the economy."
In 1952, the Paul Hahn store was expropriated to make way for the Toronto subway. Britnell's survived for a few more decades, although the building is now occupied by a Starbucks. The piano store moved to two other locations before settling in at its current location on Yonge Street, a block north of the Rosedale subway station.
It was around then that Mr. Hahn took over the business full-time. He was gregarious and eccentric man all his life and he enjoyed a party and having a good time. It was not unusual to find the likes of concert pianist Andre Watts playing a piano in the window of the store at 4 a.m.
On one occasion, Mr. Hahn had to deliver an upright piano from his shop to a client several blocks away. It was a rush. They couldn't find a truck, so they put the piano on a dolly and towed it several blocks through midtown Toronto behind Mr. Hahn's Austin-Healey sports car. The piano arrived in one piece.
In its early years, the store was the Toronto agent for Steinway pianos, but lost that franchise to Eaton's because the department store had national coverage. Years later, Mr. Hahn said that was a good thing because it got the company out of the business of selling new pianos.
"It's odd, but if we had stuck with new Steinways, we would have gone broke. The Japanese came in and sold pianos for $1,400 with Heintzman at $2,800 and the Steinway at $3,000," Mr. Hahn said. He also said he was happy he never branched out into manufacturing the instruments.
Hahn does continue to restore and tune older Steinways, however. Paul Hahn always kept in touch with Henry Steinway and often visited him in New York - sometimes just to make a social call and other times to consider pianos he might want to buy.
"I knew his father, of course, and he taught the son how to work with pianos," Mr. Steinway said last month. "Paul Hahn was very knowledgeable about pianos and was an expert mechanic. The trick with good used pianos is to know how to do it right. So many people mess them up.
"He was also a good salesman and I enjoyed having lunch with him here in New York," added Mr. Steinway, who died Sept 18.
One by one, piano makers and piano stores went out of business, but Mr. Hahn prospered. He expanded his store, digging out a second basement for his workshops and adding a third floor on the building. Tuning and restoring pianos was a better business than making or selling new ones.
In 1997, he finally retired. Although he lived across the street from the store, he seldom visited, leaving his daughter to run the business as she saw fit. However, that was not to say that he lost interest. "Every Saturday morning at 9:30, he would call the store to make sure I was at work," she said.
Mr. Hahn was a fixture in the neighbourhood, and could often be seen having a smoke while walking Tarry, his Bouvier dog, in nearby Ramsden Park. He spent a lot of time at his cottage at the French River, near Sudbury, and at another rustic property he owned on the north shore of Lake Superior, near Terrace Bay.