He spoke Finnish, tried and failed and tried again to kick his addiction to alcohol, and always wore a fedora when his fingers tickled the ivories.
He died of a heart attack on July 29 at age 57 in Belt, leaving behind a wife of barely a year, leaving behind two children, leaving behind four brothers and sisters, leaving behind his parents, leaving the woods, leaving the Highwood Bar quiet where once his music played.
And he did. Name a song, Piano Jack would play it. He played polkas and waltzes and classics and the blues for years at the Highwood Bar on Friday nights, for 10 years at the Black Diamond Supper Club in Great Falls, and anywhere there was a piano and a need for it to be played.
Raised in the Bitterroot, Piano Jack began his music lessons early, at age 5, at the urging of his mother, herself a pianist.
“His mother stood behind him and said, ‘Practice, practice, practice,’ ” said Lee Ann. “And how that played out in the long run is that he could play anything.”
As his life progressed, he would come to need his piano.
“If he didn’t play, he was not happy,” said Lee Ann.
“He had to play to be happy.”
Right after graduating from Stevensville High School, Piano Jack went off to college to Pacific Lutheran University near Seattle. There, he learned to play the piano better, and there also he earned a degree in marine biology.
But it was the woods that called him. Piano Jack logged in Oregon, worked a pipeline in North Dakota and a mine in Utah, all the while playing the piano.
In later years, he cut wood near Belt, where the family had moved and bought a ranch.
He entertained whenever he was asked, and he was asked a lot. He played for the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, for supper clubs, for hotels, for pubs and taverns all over northern Montana.
“He loved to make people happy,” said his sister, Susan Amanda Young. “He was an entertainer. He loved to please an audience.”
Piano Jack also found music in the bubbling of a river. One creature that will not miss Piano Jack’s presence on Earth is fish. Piano Jack could fish like you wouldn’t believe, said Lee Ann.
“Fishing, fishing, fishing, everything was fishing,” she said. “He wanted to be a fish.
He’d lay in the bathtub and get comfortable, pretending to be a fish. I sometimes wondered if he was a fish.”
He could pluck them out of the river with his bare hands.
“He once said that when he died, he wanted to be fish food,” said Young. “He showed my how to fish with my hands. He’d just reach in and throw the fish on the shore.”
Piano Jack loved nature. He was a member of the Audubon Society and the Mountain Bluebird Trails, for which he monitored bluebirds in the Highwood Mountains for nearly a decade.
Young remembers her brother as a sensitive soul, who once befriended a little doe on the ranch and wrote a book about her. It was an ode to his Bambi.
He knew the outdoors, its creatures and its fauna.
“We walked every inch of his folks’ ranch,” said Lee Ann. “All the trees and the plants and the birds, he could tell me everything about them. He knew so much. He was a wealth of information.”
Piano Jack drank. It was a war with alcohol for much of his adult life, a war in which he won many decisive battles. On and off he drank, sober for a couple years, drunk, then sober for four more, then drunk, and finally, at the end, sober for good.
“His drinking got big, and then he went to AA,” said Lee Ann. That’s where the couple, in fact, met. “The most he made it was for four or five years, then he would fall off again.”
Though they met 10 years ago, they didn’t get married until Piano Jack had licked the problem for good.
More than 300 people attended Piano Jack’s memorial service in Belt.
There, Piano Jack’s own music n one of his three recordings n played at his funeral.
His fingers are quiet, his ax stowed away.
“My husband,” said Lee Ann. “The logger piano player.”
Reach Jamie Kelly at 523-5254 or at jkelly@missoulian.com.
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