Many of us met Armstrong Sperry in a school library, in the pages of Call It Courage, winner of the 1941 Newbery Medal. Writer, artist, and South Seas voyager, he promised himself as a boy that he would one day see Bora Bora. He also owned a Steinway, and his 1917 Model O is now in our Boulder-area gallery.

For years, a 1913 Steinway Model M lived in a family home in Evergreen, Colorado, and whenever the great American baritone Sherrill Milnes was in town, he would stop by and sit down to play. From an Illinois dairy farm to the world’s great opera stages, here is the story of the singer and the piano now being restored in our shop.

Inside one grand piano in our collection, written on the cast-iron harp, is a signature: Josef Lhévinne, Denver, February 12, 1907. Weeks after playing for Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, the young Russian virtuoso was crossing America by train on a Steinway tour of more than a hundred concerts. Here is the story of that winter and that piano.

On October 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York Harbor, and the city threw its first ticker-tape parade. That same year, a Hazelton Bros. grand was born with a hand-painted harp. On Liberty’s 140th anniversary, we look back at a nation learning to sing, and at the 1886 “Liberty” grand in our shop.