"OUR CHRISTMAS MIRACLE"

                                           PAINTING OF MORRIS HUTCHINS RUGER
                                               by FRANCIS CALDWELL CIRCA 1936

For a number of years, I tuned the piano for Robert Morris Ruger of Haddon Heights, New Jersey.  Mr. Ruger was a true Renaissance man.  Besides being a gifted musician and popular piano teacher, Ruger was a noted mathematician who worked for Boeing on the Apollo project as well as a boxer and Boston Marathon runner. Near the piano hung a painting of his father, Morris Hutchins Ruger at his own piano smoking his trade mark pipe.  Morris Ruger, a Julliard graduate, was a renowned pianist, but, is most noted as a composer of orchestral works, string and woodwind ensembles, choral concerts and operas.  His opera  GETTYSBURG, which featured an all American cast, premiered in 1938 at the Hollywood Bowl to unprecedented critical acclaim. Due to the fact that the opera premier was broadcast Nationally, newspapers across the Country proclaimed: " Brilliant! Riveting! A Triumph!" Morris Ruger was on the faculty of San Bernardino College and died in California, in 1974 at age 72.  While involved with President Roosevelt's "New Deal" Federal Music Project, which kept people in The Arts working during the Depression, Ruger became friends with a noted California artist, Francis Atlee "Frank" Caldwell.  Caldwell, who died  at age 85 in 1996 was about 25 years old when he painted the picture of Ruger who was about 34 at the time.  Today, if you are willing to settle for one in a series of five hundred prints of a Caldwell painting, it will set you back about five hundred bucks. An original Caldwell painting is usually a museum piece except for several that are owned by Ruger family members.

My client, Robert Morris Ruger, moved from New Jersey to Washington State in his retirement years to be closer to his family.  Of course, he took the Caldwell painting with him.  When he died in 2010 in at age 83, he willed the painting to his oldest grandson,  Jason Ruger, who was serving in the U.S. Army in Texas.  In the process of settling up the estate, Robert's son shipped the painting from Seattle to Texas, but, due to grief and confusion, forgot to purchase shipping insurance. To make matters worse, the shipper delivered the painting to a wrong address that was six blocks away from where Jason lived.  Since the item was not insured no signature was required. The painting was left on the porch of an apartment house.  The shipper provided Jason with the mistaken address, but, denied any other responsibility.  No one at the wrong address admitted to seeing the package.  The Ruger family was heartsick.  Some speculated that since the package looked similar in size and shape to a big screen TV, a thief simply spotted it unattended on the porch and absconded with it.  This theory proved to be largely correct.

Jason Ruger made up fliers which featured a description and photograph of the lost painting and posted them in store windows and on utility poles for many blocks around. He wisely did not advertise that the painting was rare or valuable.  The summer and fall passed with the painting still missing.  The Ruger family had almost given up hope when, shortly before Christmas, Jason received a phone call from a women who had found the painting.  She was the landlady of an apartment house situated across the street from the address where the painting was mistakenly delivered.  A couple who rented from her fell behind in their rent and moved out in the middle of the night .  While cleaning out the apartment the landlady found the painting stashed in a closet.  Fortunately, she had saved one of Jason's fliers and contacted him.  She declined Jason's offer of a reward.  The painting had been mishandled by the thieves and had to be restored at a cost of $1500.00, but, it is now happily back in the hands of the Ruger family who refers to the entire incident as "our Christmas miracle

SPECIAL THANKS to Cynthia Steinberg, Robert Ruger's daughter, for relating the preceding story to me and aiding in my research. Cynthia and her husband David have been tuning clients for many years and their son carries on the family tradition of great piano playing.