While he is well known for his piano repair work, Loren Larson also plays the tuba in four different bands and an orchestra.

Loren Larson, of Elmore, has been known by several names over the years.

“My full name is actually Curtis Loren Larson,” he explains. “Many people know me as Loren, and some know me by the nickname Luke, which is what my father used to call me.”

Another name he is known by is “The Piano Man,” and that might be the one he is fairly famous for.

Larson has been tuning and refurbishing pianos, especially player pianos, for many decades. Music in general has been a main focus of his entire life, but pianos have been his passion and his avocation.

After graduating from Scarville, Iowa, High School in 1949, Larson went to Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

“I had a double major in English and music,” Larson says. “After graduation I started teaching in Buffalo Center, Iowa. After one year of teaching, I went to the University of Iowa in Iowa City to get my masters in music degree.”

After that, he returned to Buffalo Center where he taught for the next 35 years. It is also where he met his wife, Lucille, who was also a teacher there. Lucille Larson had graduated from Ledyard, Iowa, High School and Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa.

They were married in 1957 and will soon have been married for 65 years. They have one son, Lee.

In 1978 they moved to Elmore, into the house Lucille’s parents had built years before. In 1989, Loren retired.

“I had learned to be a piano tuner from a man in Fairmont, in the 1960s and had done that on Saturdays,” Larson explains. “I continued to do it after I retired, but I never made much money doing it. I also helped my brother-in-law farm.”

But, he needed to do something else, and that something else was to restore pianos, especially player pianos, some of which were used in the old “Nickelodeon” silent movie theaters to accompany the films.

The nickelodeon pianos had other instruments, such as drums and cymbals, inside and operated with an electric motor and pump. They sometimes required a nickel to be put in for them to operate.

“I learned some of the skills for refurbishing the pianos at the Music Museum Store in Blue Earth, the Three Sisters buildings,” Larson says. “I rebuilt some pianos and player pianos there.”

He learned repairing the sound boards, restringing the keys, replacing the hammers and restoring the outside wood.

Larson also learned how to do stain glass windows, so that he could rebuild the player pianos that had the back-lit stained glass window inserts in the top and bottom of the pianos.

Larson built his own piano repair shop at two different locations. One is located in a garage in Elmore, near his home there, and another is located at the cabin on East Battle Lake, near Henning, Minnesota, which is where the Larsons spend most of the summer.

There are tools and four or five pianos in each of the two shops. There is another piano in their Elmore home, and a grand piano in their winter home in Arizona.

But, Larson is quick to add he does not have a piano repair shop in Arizona.

In fact, he says, he has pretty much quit doing the repair and refurbish work on the pianos. After 40 years and dozens of pianos, it was time to quit.

That, and the fact that he recently turned 90 years old, although he is a very fit, healthy and active 90.

Another issue is that repairing the sometimes 100-year old (or even older) player pianos is becoming a lost art.

“The two places I used to be able to get parts for the pianos are both no longer in business,” Larson says. “Maybe because there are not many people around who fix them anymore.”

Pianos themselves are fast disappearing, he adds. Where once there were 200-plus piano manufacturers in the U.S., there are now only about a half dozen, he adds.

While no longer restoring pianos, Larson still keeps plenty busy.

During the winters in Arizona he is in three different bands and one orchestra. He plays the tuba in the bands, not the piano. He also plays the tuba in a band near their summer cabin.

Larson learned the tuba while he was in high school, and never stopped playing it.

“He has his big tuba in Arizona, his medium-sized tuba here in Elmore and his smaller tuba in Henning,” his wife, Lucille, explains. “So there is one wherever we are.”

Larson also loves to play the harmonica, something he learned to do when he was five years old, and plays it all winter in Arizona with a harmonica club.

So what happened to all the pianos Larson restored over the years? There were about a dozen nickelodeons and he has lost track of how many pianos he has worked on – but it is certainly dozens and dozens.

Well, quite a few of them he donated to churches, friends, businesses and even a few that were going to be used at tourist attractions in South Dakota.

Although restored player pianos and nickelodeons have a value, Larson says he never spent those thousands of hours working on them because of the money or even for the fame for being known as the “Piano Man.”

He did it out of love for music and the beautiful instruments that can make that music.

“It’s the satisfaction of seeing something come back to life,” he says. “It is keeping these old player pianos alive and playing music.”

While he is no longer working on them, Larson likes nothing better than to go out to his workshop and flip the switch and listen to one of the pianos play some jazzy old-time music.

“It always perks me up no matter what,” he says with a big smile. “And puts me into a good mood.”