More Than A Feeling: Gino Romano Bids Farewell After Fifty-One Years At Steinway.
On a cold November evening in 1965, a young man was moving around the third floor in Building 39 of the august Steinway & Sons piano factory near New York’s East River, just at the northern perimeter of Queens. This was the lacquer department, a place of nitrocellulose fumes, cotton fibers, cascading mineral oil, and spirit solvents. The kid was a local—had grown up in nearby Astoria, just a stone’s throw from the historic piano factory, and had attended PS-7 and Long Island City High School. Now he was just past the anniversary of his first year’s employment as a materials handler with Steinway, and he knew the evening drill by now: put away tools, tidy tarps, check supplies for the next day, start to think about dinner. Outside, a full moon shimmered across Steinway Creek and out toward the waters of Bowery Bay.
In an instant, the entire factory was plunged into darkness. From a nearby restroom, a woman’s scream. And then all was blackness. The kid, whose name was Gino Romano, figured it out quickly: an electrical blackout, a big one. Someone shouted assurances to the lady in the restroom. People groped their way into small bunches. And Gino undertook an adventuresome egress from the building that would imprint itself on his consciousness for the next five decades. Hand over hand, he felt his way out of the pitch-black lacquer department, down the stairs, and out of the dark, seemingly-impenetrable honeycomb of the old factory.
Fifty years later, Gino finds himself in a similar position. This fall, he’ll retire from a long career as a Steinway & Sons craftsman, a career which has seen him rise through the ranks of a number of different departments to his most recent position, a three-part role of lumber yard foreman, stockroom foreman, and safety trainer. He’s watching the approach of his final day at work with pride, pragmatism, and a number of plans for the future. And on that day, once again, he’ll take himself out of the factory by touch—though this time, it will be shaking the hands of the men and women who have been, for the majority of Gino’s life, his peers and companions in the historic process of making the world’s finest pianos.
Hand-Made Memories
Gino is accustomed to the tactile. After all, like every craftsman in the Steinway factory, he does everything by hand. In the 2007 feature film Note by Note, a documentary chronicling the construction of a single Steinway grand piano, Gino is one of two men featured about midway through the film; the two are clothed in lab coats and running their hands along a nearly-finished grand piano case before it moves on to the next stage of construction. At the time of filming, Gino was the foreman in the case-making department, overseeing the construction of the piano’s cabinetry. The Steinway piano’s case is a big deal: it’s the element that houses nearly all of the Steinway piano’s 12,000 parts and the most visible, recognizable part of the instrument. Gino takes its construction very seriously.
“What I do down here affects another department upstairs,” he explains in the film. “If all my tolerances are correct, all their parts will now fit correctly, without any problems.”
Gino’s stubborn attention to detail soon creates a charming bristle in the film as he watches the other man inspect the case. Gino is not about to let a flawed case leave his area, but the inspector points out a tiny divot in the wood. “I see a little bit of a knife mark right there,” he says.
“It’ll get cleaned up later,” Gino says flatly.
“Yeah. It doesn’t feel like there’s any problem with it,” the inspector concedes. He seems to be moving past the flaw.
“It still will get cleaned up later, regardless,” Gino insists. He watches carefully, a bit possessively, perhaps, as the man completes his inspection. “Well, it looks real tight. It looks real good,” the inspector concludes.
“Yup,” Gino says. He nods, then looks again at the piano, and the goal is obvious in his face. Perfection. Nothing else will do.
A Long Way with Steinway
There are a handful of employees who’ve made it past the fifty-year mark with Steinway & Sons, but not many. Gino started making Steinway pianos in the mid-sixties. He’s watched all the world-changing developments of the last five decades—changes in technology, culture, industry—through the windows of the great rambling piano factory. In fact, one of the only things that hasn’t changed during Gino’s tenure is the process by which Steinway produces pianos, with every piece crafted by hand in the same manner established by the Steinway family in 1853.
“I’ve known Gino for forty-two years,” said Prenta Ljucovic, Steinway’s only female case-maker. “We initially worked in the lacquer department together, and through the years, we moved about a bit in the factory, but we worked together in case-making for a very long time. It’s hard to believe he’s retiring. What are we going to do without Gino? We call him ‘the lawyer,’” she says, laughing. “I’m from Croatia, and many of my co-workers are from other countries. English is not everyone’s first language. So we go to Gino for help, for advice. He’s a very gentle man, a great person to deal with. We’re really going to miss him.”
Gino will miss Steinway as well, he admits. But he doesn’t linger on the past. Gino’s a pragmatist. He’s nostalgic about leaving the factory, but not overly so. The small number of Steinway & Sons employees who hit the fifty-year mark are given a special gift to commemorate their service. Wally Boot, for example, was presented with a custom Steinway & Sons leather jacket. But Gino? “He wanted a laptop,” said Andy Horbachevsky, Steinway’s Vice President of Manufacturing. “He’s not terribly hung up in looking backward. He wanted something useful. So we did the best we could to make it nostalgic. We got him a laptop and managed to get him a customized bag for it with the Steinway logo.” Horbachevsky laughs. “That’s Gino. He’s about doing—about tools and producing and getting the job done.”
Good thing. Because there’s a job or two waiting for Gino at home, post-retirement. “Are you married?” he demands, when asked what he’ll be doing to fill his time after retirement. “What do you think I’ll be doing?” He grins and starts to enumerate the projects his wife has lined up for him. After fifty-plus years mastering so many different elements of piano construction, Gino has amassed an impressive skill set as a craftsman, and his family intends to tap into his talents. “Well, my oldest son is re-doing his basement, so I’ll probably be working there a lot. And my wife has all sorts of plans to re-do the house. I’ll probably refurbish all my furniture when I’m home. You know, a mechanic never takes care of his own car, but he takes care of everybody else’s. I’m not going to be able to escape anymore.”
It won’t be all work, of course. There’s traveling on deck, and Gino’s wife Laura has made plans for him to get out onto the golf course, and then there are the grandkids to spend time with: two boys, aged five and four months. Plenty to do, plenty to enjoy. It’s hard to imagine, though, that Gino Romano will ever really stop building things. After fifty-one years constructing pianos, the need to produce is too ingrained.
It’s also hard to imagine, pragmatic though he may be, that he’ll ever forget his days at the Steinway & Sons factory—from the day he felt his way through the darkness to the day he gripped his new laptop bag, on his way out the door.
CAN’T MISS: Catch a glimpse of Gino Romano in this trailer for the 2007 feature documentary Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037. (Hint: Gino appears at :53, talking about walnut and mahogany.)
