LIFE: I am the curator of the Lehndorff family’s photographs. I’ve been scanning and trying to organize them. We were a pretty musical bunch, the Lehndorffs. Dad came over from Austria in 1938 with his cello. We had a string quartet that used to meet at our house in Fitchburg, MA. My dad loved it although he was the first to admit he wasn’t very good. Personally I thought the thing needed frets to make it playable but that’s me. We always had a piano and occasionally two. My brother Paul was supposed to become the best musician of all of us. He learned the piano very early with my mother’s help. He loved to hammer away on really complicated pieces by Chopin and Liszt. For a while, he played classical bass. I think all of us took piano tried violin lessons — again I needed frets to proceed. I asked my teacher if I could play like Joe Venuti. My brother John played the French Horn for a while, too.
My sister Barbara played the piano and sang in glee clubs. She started playing guitar when she was in college in the 60s. Folk music was huge in Boston and Cambridge. During those days you could go from one coffeehouse to another and hear Tom Rush, Joan Baez or Dave Van Ronk. Barb started teaching me simple chords and how to read the little chord diagrams. I learned Michael Row the Boat Ashore and the Gypsy Rover. Then I started to figure out how to read tablature and would listen to the same Peter, Paul and Mary songs over and over and over trying to learn the guitar part. It was a fun time and I’ll always be grateful for the introduction to the guitar.