The $5 Piano

This wasn't posted online, so here's the story in its entirety. Thanks to John for passing it along.

By Marc Davis

Virginian Pilot

This is a significant detail. Almost every song ever written eventually wanders past, or through, middle C. It is right in the middle of the keyboard. It is the first key every beginner plays because it is the start of the very first do-re-mi scale, in C-major.

Avoiding middle C is not easy. To do so, David plays many songs one octave higher or lower. That's OK. David, who is 15, is teaching himself to play the piano, and one octave is as good as the next. The second most important thing to know about the piano in David Villa's living room is this: It cost $5. How it got to David Villa's house, and why it cost only $5, is a long, winding tale. The most important thing to know about the piano in David Villa's living room is this: middle C sticks. The story starts at Independence Middle School in Virginia Beach. Probably.

Once upon a time, years ago, there was a piano in the band room at Independence. It was a nuisance. Kids kept pounding on it when they should have been practicing oompahs on the tuba. So the band director, Leon Edwards, banished it from his room.

Next, the piano landed in the chorus room. It was redundant. There were already two other pianos in the chorus room, so it wasn't used much. Eventually, the chorus teacher, Ellen Holland, shipped two of the pianos to other schools.

And there, the trail grows cold. No one remembers which schools got which pianos, and there are no records. In fact, there is no rock-solid proof that any of these pianos is the one in David Villa's house. But it seems likely. On the back of Villa's piano, in black marker, someone scrawled "IJHS" – Independence Junior High School, the school's original name. Edwards and Holland don't remember getting rid of any other pianos.

In any event, years passed. The piano got old. It became beaten up and out of tune. It was neglected. Finally, it wound up in a huge, concrete warehouse off Witchduck Road, where fate intervened.

The first thing you notice when you walk into the warehouse is a photo of cows in a pasture. The picture takes up almost an entire wall. It is 10 feet long, 4 feet tall and it is framed. It is a piece of junk – albeit a very large, curious piece of junk – salvaged from the old Bayside Elementary when it was torn down in 1941.

This is where old school junk goes to die. The warehouse is an organized jumble of desks, chairs, cafeteria equipment, uniforms, computers, musical instruments, you name it.

For years, Beach school workers did nothing with the leftovers. They simply took them to the landfill and wiped their hands. No more pencils, no more books.

Then, someone suggested selling the stuff. Once a year, workers gathered all the leftovers and schlepped them to a large open lot near Oceana Naval Air Station. The public bought some stuff; the rest was trashed.

The city made about $14,000. It was better than nothing, but not much better, and probably not worth all the schlepping.

Then someone suggested selling the junk online.

This turned out to be a wonderful idea. The experiment began four years ago. Beach schools sell their leftovers at a Web site called publicsurplus.com. More than 400 government agencies and school systems use the site. Every month, there are thousands of auctions. Some are quite odd.

For example, in May the Maricopa County Stadium District in Phoenix sold seats from Chase Field for $200 a pair. Harris County in Texas sold 10 concrete traffic barriers for $1,500. Langlade County in Wisconsin sold a men's 14-karat gold diamond ring for $112.50.

And the Virginia Beach City Public Schools sold three mellophones – a cross between a tuba, a French horn and a trumpet – for a total of $825.

Many sales are much less expensive. For example, in recent weeks the Beach schools sold a black fiberglass chair for $5, a five-drawer file cabinet for $15.50, a food warmer for $61 and a wet saw for $104.50.

At the other extreme, the school system also sold a cargo van for $5,050 and several old school buses for between $480 and $4,500 each.

At any given time, the Beach school system usually has a couple of dozen auctions going.

"We try not to glut the market," said Roland Thornton, the school division's director of supply services. "People who look at the auction site play it like you play the market."

The strategy has paid off big-time. This school year, Beach schools have raised nearly $300,000 from online auctions – enough to pay six teachers for a year.

"It's a lot of money for junk," Thornton said.

Some of the buyers are day-care centers and churches. Many are ordinary citizens. Roland knows a former shop teacher who enjoys bidding up items just to see the price rise. Sometimes he gets stuck with things he doesn't want.

Roland and a colleague, Denise Moore, are constantly tinkering with the strategy. Once, they noticed that a few old pianos were selling for $5 each, while a group of 10 pianos sold all together for $1,225 to a music dealer in North Carolina.

So they tried to package three old pianos together in a single lot, with a minimum price of $10. Nobody nibbled. Then they separated the pianos into three single sales. Two sold for $5 each, but the third didn't attract any bids.

"Is it worth $5?" Roland wondered aloud. "Well, it's worth $5 for us not to take it to the landfill."

In March, the city sold the $5 piano from Independence Middle School. The man who bought it is not your ordinary guy.

Leonard Johns is a man obsessed.

Five years ago, he discovered publicsurplus.com. His first purchase there was a 1991 Chevrolet Corsica for $57.80. The car came from the city of Chesapeake with 111,000 miles on it, and it's still running.

Then he bought a computer desk. An audio-visual cart. A cafeteria table. Some school lockers. Another car. All told, he has made about 40 purchases from the Web site.

Johns checks the Web site three times a day, looking for bargains. He is a 58-year-old

X-ray technologist at Riverside Regional Medical Center in Newport News. He lives in an old neighborhood near the Power Plant in Hampton.

His online purchases are scattered throughout his home.

In the sunroom, there is a 12-foot folding cafeteria table that holds "a feeding" every Sunday for as many as 20 people. On one side of the table, some unlikely school-boy graffiti is inscribed: "Good Luck Denbigh High." On closer inspection, it appears the word "good" was added later, and the word "luck" did not originally say "luck."

Johns bought the table a year ago for $3. At the same time, he also bought four others, for $3 each, and gave them to his church.

In his yard sits a picnic table from the Yorktown Fire Department that cost $10. He has a Hewlett-Packard printer from Poquoson, purchased for $1. He also has a 61-key electric keyboard from Newport News that cost $5. It works just fine, except that high G is broken.

Many of his online purchases are in a cluttered detached garage behind the house. The most unusual is a set of six burnt-orange school lockers from Newport News that cost $10 total. Each locker still has a sticker with a student's name: Gennie Gaskins and Charlotte Gleba , for example.

"I store all my junk in here," Johns said.

Also in the garage is Johns' most accidental purchase. It is a large circular table from Newport News. Johns' opening bid was $20. It turned out to be the only bid. Johns thought he was bidding on a single lot of 27 tables, but really it was Lot N o. 27 consisting of a single table. Had there been 26 additional tables, he would have donated them to his church.

"This is a wonderful Web site," Johns said. "It's an untapped resource that a lot of people aren't aware of."

On March 4, Johns bid $5 for a Baldwin upright piano. It wasn't for himself. Johns is an elder at the Calvary Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Newport News, and he thought the piano would be a terrific gift for a young man who was a new member. The teen had recently moved with his mother and brother from California, and Johns knew he loved music.

There were no other bidders.

A few days later, Johns drove his 1986 Ford pickup truck to the warehouse and picked up the piano. Then he delivered it to the house in Portsmouth.

David Villa stands out in a crowd. He is 6-foot-6 and sports one of the tallest Afros since Sly Stone played Woodstock. It adds 2 or 3 inches to his height. His musical tastes are equally unusual. He listens to absolutely anything – classical, opera, rock, gospel, even some country music.

The new-old Baldwin is a good match. Like David, it is a little quirky. It has no bench, so David sits on a plastic crate. Also, it is horribly out of tune. Middle D sounds like something from another galaxy. But that's fixable.

David's mother, Karen Villa, said it would cost $85 for a tuner, which she can't afford just now. She's a single mother with two sons, living in Cavalier Manor using Section 8 vouchers, and working as an entry clerk for a local lawyer. The piano tuner can wait.

Anyway, the pedals work just fine. Still, it is obviously an old piano. It looks worn and, of course, some keys stick. It is covered with nicks and scuffs and scratches. It arrived with no knobs on the keyboard cover, so Karen Villa attached new ones. Also, the legs are uneven, so she put them on casters. To pretty it up, she placed five green plants and a blue lamp atop the piano, and that makes the whole room look cozier.

But most important, it's a piano – a real piano, not an electric keyboard. David has one of those, too, in his bedroom. Above the keys he has taped the names of the notes, to help him remember.

He goes back and forth between the piano and the keyboard. He likes the keyboard because all the notes sound right and the keys don't stick. But the electric keyboard is narrow and the sound is kind of tinny.

"I would prefer the piano," he said. "I don't know why. It's just … a piano."

David is a beginner with a good musical ear. He can't read music, but he can pick out melodies. His favorite is Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." First, he watched a friend play it, then he mimicked his friend's fingering. When he got to a part where he couldn't remember the fingering, he figured it out himself.

Now, he plays "Moonlight Sonata" over and over and over. He used to play it all the time at school, whenever he would see a piano, but it got on everyone's nerves, so he stopped.

Lately, David is trying to teach himself to read music. He keeps a hymnal on the piano and he likes to pick out the tunes, especially "Amazing Grace" and "To God Be the Glory" and "Soon and Very Soon." He also is teaching himself songs by Coldplay. Eventually, he wants to learn chords to go with the melodies.

David is finishing his freshman year at Nansemond River High School in Suffolk. He likes math but he's not sure he likes Virginia yet. He misses California. Eventually, he hopes to study marine biology in college – maybe in California, maybe at Old Dominion University. It's too early to tell.

Meanwhile, he is thrilled with the $5 piano and grateful to Leonard Johns for giving it to him.

"I never had a piano in my life," David said. "I'm planning to play it my whole life, if I live 7 million years."

At that rate, it's possible the old Baldwin will still be around.