David Heiller
I don’t know Dennis
Hansen well, but I know him better now, after he fixed my guitar. I bought the guitar for $3 in
1979, at a garage sale in Belgrade, Minnesota. It was a smaller size than normal. Someone told me it was a parlor guitar, made for women around the turn of the,
century.
 |
| David playing a different old guitar, his beloved Gibson J45. (Alas, I cannot find a photo of him with the parlor guitar.) |
The original bridge was missing. That’s the part
that the strings are attached to at the bottom of the guitar. Someone had
replaced it with a metal bridge, screwed into the tail end of the guitar. The
face for front side) of the guitar was cracked. Some of the support pieces had
come unglued on the inside.
Slight depressions had been worn into the fret
board, from people playing the same chords over and over. That appealed to me.
The guitar had been played a lot. It was well-loved.
I wondered who had played it. Maybe some farmer
sitting in his kitchen on a cold winter morning, singing to his wife. Maybe a
mother singing to her kids at bed time. I thought if the guitar could talk, it
would have some good stories to tell.
But then it had been set aside and forgotten,
and eventually ended up at a garage
sale in a broken down condition.
That happens with old things, from guitars to
people. So I bought it, and put nylon strings on it, and played it. It sounded
good, a soft, clear, simple sound.
I bought a steel
string guitar in 1980, and the
old guitar ended up in my garage. But I never forgot about it. Three months ago
I dug it out. I thought maybe my son or daughter could play it. It’s just the
right size for a starter. But it
was in worse shape than ever. The face was split in several places, and many of
the support pieces inside were loose.
So I took it to Askov to see if my favorite handyman,
Red Hansen, could fix it. He and I and Dennis Hansen of Sandstone were playing music
for our open house, and when I asked Red if he wanted to fix it, Dennis stepped
forward and said he’d give it a try.
Dennis brought it back last Tuesday, February
21. It’s hard to describe the job he did. He took the cracked face off, and
made a new one out of basswood. He planed and sanded it all by hand, until it
was smooth as paper, and glued it perfectly into place, so that it looks better
than the old one ever did.
He glued support pieces inside. He made a new
walnut nut, which is the little wooden piece that the strings cross over just before they are
fastened to the tuning pegs. He stripped off the old varnish, and revealed
beautifully-grained rosewood on
the sides and back. He scrounged a wooden bridge and three bridge pins from a
friend, and carved three other bridge pins by hand.
He made a bridge piece out of a plastic brown
rain gutter. They say necessity is the mother invention. He adjusted it so the
action οn the strings is just right. He
even put new strings the guitar.
Dennis didn’t brag about all this. He’s not a
man of many words. I had to ask him about everything he did, and then he told
me a smile that is almost always present on his bearded face. There was a hint
of pride too. He knew he had done a good job, like you do in any true labor of love.
He wouldn’t have had to work that hard. It wasn’t
even his guitar, and he sure wasn’t doing it for the money. I think he saw the beauty in the old guitar, and
wanted to bring it out for others like me to see and hear.
Now when I look at it and play it, I think of
the beauty of Dennis Hansen. Α part of him will always be in the guitar. It’s
another story the guitar will tell every time it is played, and one I’m proud
to pass along.
The guitar now sits in the corner of our living room. It’s alive again, and it
has a place in our lives again. I like to play it in the morning, old ballads and love songs, especially if my wife
is listening. It sounds as soft and
clear as ever.
I hear my daughter
strumming it right now. That’s a good end to this column, along with, “Thank
you, Dennis.”
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