Captain Of The Ship: Enver Bander Mans The Rim-Bending Helm

It’s 6:45 a recent Friday morning, and there’s a big guy sitting in a Toyota Highlander in the parking lot of the Steinway & Sons factory in Astoria. His name is Enver Bander, but the guys on the shop floor call him "Mango." He doesn’t mind the nickname; in fact, by some accounts, he came up with it himself. He gets to the factory every day about this time. The shift whistle won’t sound for another twenty-five minutes, but Mango arrives early by design. If he doesn’t leave his house in Palisades Park early and make it over the George Washington Bridge before the brutal traffic builds, he’s sunk. But he enjoys these few extra minutes every morning. He uses them to collect himself, to get his head on for the day. Once he’s inside the factory, where seven to ten gigantic "books" of hard-rock maple are waiting to be pressed into the iconic shape of the Steinway & Sons grand piano, lead rim bender Enver Bander will have plenty on his mind.

Enver is tall, well over six feet, with a bristly head of salt-and-pepper hair that was once a thick slate-black. He wears oversized glasses both to improve his vision and to protect his eyes on the factory floor. As a lead rim bender, his position involves calling the plays on one of the most meticulously choreographed segments in the year-long construction of a Steinway & Sons piano. Consider the task ahead of him today: together with a team of four other men, Enver will repeat the same process for nine hours. He will carry a foot-wide "book" of 17-ply glued hard rock maple across the floor of the factory basement (the dungeon, Steinway workers call it), where the venerable rim press awaits. Here the men will belly the wobbling book up against the press. For the first few minutes, it will be a wrestling match, but eventually the strips of wood will be bullied into place along the press, where post-like clamps will hold the rim steady. Then, for long moments, there will be no sound save for the spinning whir of T-wrenches and the creaks and moans of tensing wood against steel. Enver and his team will win.

It’s an ungainly, physical job. At one end, the rim has to be bent into an almost 90-degree angle. Enver and the guys use body weight and brute force to shape the wood, and there’s a great deal of hand-guided precision at play. Because it has to be done right. The rim will soon house a 340-pound iron plate, not to mention all the other sounding and structural parts of the piano, so it needs to be solid and structurally flawless. And the shaping has to be done quick. There’s glue drying on these strips of wood.

And through all of this, there is Enver, moving solidly and purposefully, relying on a carefully honed system of non-verbal communication to lead the rim-bending orchestra through its complicated movements of pressing and tightening. Once the rim is bent, it will spend the next twenty-four hours drying on the press before going on to its next destination—the rim conditioning room, where it will spend months before being wheeled back into the factory for the next part of its transformation into a grand piano.

"Enver is the captain of the ship," said Lorenzo Espinal, foreman of the Rim Bending Department. "He directs the show." Espinal is more than glad to have Enver at the helm as a point man. "On Mondays I give him the rims for the week—we talk about what’s going to be produced, and he guides the guys in the basement," he said. "It’s flawless. They move in perfect concert. And the thing that always gets me is that once the process begins, there’s no talking, no verbal communication, because they have to know instinctively what they have to do. They watch Mango—he leads the process, and everybody watches him."

Enver is coming up on a twenty-year anniversary at Steinway, and during that time he’s become known as a generous and encouraging steward to younger craftsmen.

"He’s taught me a lot of what I know now," said Luis Polanco, another member of the rim-bending team. An easygoing guy with roots in El Salvador, Polanco was a rookie in the rim department when he first met Enver some fifteen years ago. "We work as a team," he said. "It’s a group of four or five of us, depending on what type of rim we are making, and Mango’s always there—he makes us laugh, makes our job feel easier. We’re bending six or seven rims a day, and every one of them is a challenge. He keeps us all together, helps us make something we’re proud of."

Despite his reputation as a jokester, one-on-one Enver is actually a soft-spoken guy. He’s deferential about his key role on the rim-bending team. "We’re a family," he said simply. "We look out for each other."

A native of Montenegro, Enver lived and worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina until the ravages of war changed the course of his life forever. During the Bosnian War, his father and brother disappeared, and his wife and four children were evacuated as refugees, forcing a separation that lasted for several years until Enver was reunited with his family in the United States in 1995. He quickly found work at Steinway & Sons and has been using his skill and precision to bend the rims of concert grands ever since. A proud father of four, he’s quick to turn the conversation to his grown kids and their accomplishments: "Two M.D.s, one nurse practitioner, one bank manager. They’re doing good. Doing good."

Enver shares his locker space with six other guys. It’s an unassuming life: a regular commute and a physically-demanding job, weekends spent visiting with his kids and grandkids. When it’s time for lunch, he brown-bags it in the break room with the others, usually cutting up and sharing jokes with the team. He’s happy where he is, happy to be part of the Steinway tradition, working with his hands to shape instruments that are an iconic part of American history. "I have to be strong," he said simply, when asked how long he thinks he’ll be bending rims. "I hope I can do it as long as I stay strong." He laughed. "And beyond that, I guess I can teach it to the other guys. I’m comfortable with this job. I love it."

CAN’T MISS: Peek inside the Steinway & Sons factory to watch Mango and the rim-bending team at work: