MUSIC
45
“None of us ever learned to play the violin, but I used to
play the guitar – just chords – when my father played. He
never took lessons, either, but he played quite well, and he
played all the time.”
Bussey moved back to Fort Pierce in 1981, when her
husband, Bob, retired from his job as a project manager for
NASA’s control center in Houston, Texas.
“The astronauts were our neighbors,” Bussey says. “Neil
Armstrong and Ed White lived next door to each other across
the street from us …” Bob died in 1985.
Baker and her husband, Claude, came to Florida from
Ohio to work with Baker’s sister-in-law at the Road Runner
Travel Resort in Fort Pierce. He left a job in plant management
and she as a field supervisor for AMVETS. “We both
wanted something less demanding and in a better climate,”
Baker says.
She tries to play her Bohemian violin daily. “I play mostly
hymns now, and sometimes I play for Sunday services at
Road Runner,” she says.
Bussey had her father’s violin restored in 1998, and plans
one day to give it to a granddaughter who is studying violin.
“Eventually,” she says. “If she keeps it up and she’s serious
about it.”
She has no
idea how old
the violin
is, or who
made it.
“It’s been in
my family
now for
more than
a hundred
years, and
it wasn’t
new when
my father
bought it.
But the
man who
restored it
said it was
a wonderful
violin
… one of
the nicest
he’d ever
seen.”
Inside the
instrument
is
a slip of paper that notes it is a copy of a Stradivarius, the
world-famous Italian violins made in the 1600s and 1700s,
some of which now sell for millions. Her pawnshop copy
could be worth little more than what her father paid for it,
despite its fine tone and sensuous qualities. But to Bussey, it
is priceless.
Both women know the role the old violin will play at the
end of their new friendship.
“I want you to play my father’s violin at my funeral,”
Bussey says, “but I’m going to live to be a hundred and twenty,
so don’t worry about it.” Replies Baker: “I’d be honored.’’
Lorena Bussey has that promise in writing.