The President of the Board of the Oysterville Restoration Foundation at the present time is Colin Staub. He has been a part-time Oysterville resident for all of his 34 years. He has worked in the oysters during the summers, spends as much time as possible at his family’s second home here in Oysterville, even bicycling now and again from his home in Portland, and has performed at Vespers on numerous occasions — he is a mandolin player of some note.
For a few years now, when he’s in Oysterville, Colin has been playing the piano in the church — sometimes ragtime, but more recently, some of the hymns from the old Methodist hymnals we used to use for Vespers. (Though he began on the violin as a young boy and now is teaching himself the piano, he still considers the mandolin his primary instrument.) Yesterday, he wrote me this note: There are a dozen or so pianos set up in public places around Portland right now, and I’ve been making the rounds to play them all. I was playing “How Great Thou Art” and “The Old Rugged Cross,” the versions I learned in the Oysterville Church hymnal, downtown the other day, and a guy came up and started singing along. He was visiting from Atlanta and said he didn’t anticipate hearing gospel music in downtown Portland. The hymnals are coming in handy!
There was one in particular that sticks in my mind, where I sat down to play a few boogie-woogie songs and noticed a woman sitting nearby who was crying and clearly not having a good day. By the end of the first song I noticed she was tapping her feet, although still crying. A couple songs later she came over to the piano and asked if I could teach her a couple chords, and we ended up having an impromptu piano lesson and talked about what she was going through. She said it was the best unexpected thing to happen to her all day, and I thought it really illustrated the power of public music.