ATHOL — Donald Ainsworth is “pretty much retired.”
He’ll still repair a friend’s piano if asked and he continues to play pipe organ at the Starrett Memorial United Methodist Church. However, he’s greatly scaled back his piano technician work. But give the guy a break — he’s 90 years old, after all.
Ainsworth has for roughly seven decades lived a life that revolves around black and white keys. After getting out of the U.S. Navy in 1945, he attended the now-defunct Faust School of Tuning in Boston and moved home to work for Erroll P. Crowl, a longtime Athol pianist and piano tuner who at one point maintained the pianos at Northfield Mount Hermon School. Crowl died in 1990, but Ainsworth continued with the work at NMH.
“Those were wonderful years up there. I enjoyed that every much. They were very nice to me up there,” he says. Besides the work with NMH, Ainsworth says he has also tuned pianos for the Pioneer Valley Symphony, Jane Fiske of Fitchburg State University and former Greenfield High School Music Director Paul Calcari.
He has also been associated with Music-Towne in Worcester and Buteau House of Leominster.
Ainsworth says he started to learn piano in the eighth grade and has always been interested in mechanics. He continued taking piano lesson after he returned from military service, got married and started working for the Torrington Co. in Orange. He eventually studied pipe organ under Alan Walker at Central Congregational Church in Worcester.
This bode well for Ainsworth, who in 1950 starting playing for a Methodist church in Orange before moving on to Barre Congregational Church and then a Baptist church in Athol before winding up at Starrett Memorial at 40 Island St., while also playing for a Universalist church in Orange.
“I just enjoy it,” Ainsworth says while sitting in a private room on the second floor of the Athol Public Library.
The Rev. Mary Owen says she started at the church in August 2016 and met Ainsworth at her first Sunday religious service.
“He’s popular not just with parishioners — he’s known all over this area, Greenfield and Leominster,” she says. “He’s quite remarkable, he really is. I’m proud to have him as our organist.”
Owen says music is meant to serve as a time of reflection during Christian services and Ainsworth knows how to touch each parishioner’s heart through his music.
“It just brings a richness that is just so beautiful,” she says. “He can play just such a variety of music. You don’t have to give him a lot of notice and he’s playing what you asked him to play. He’s a talented man.”
Ainsworth was raised Episcopalian and says he is still not officially Methodist. But that doesn’t stop him from mastering Starrett Memorial’s 1901 Steere pipe organ, an instrument that was manufactured in Springfield.
“That’s a nice organ,” he says.
Ainsworth says he got involved with the Piano Technicians’ Guild years ago and was eventually secretary and president of the Boston chapter. He is now a member of the western Massachusetts chapter. He said he has attended countless conventions and seminars hosted by the guild.
“Those were great learning experiences because they had all kinds of technical classes in those conventions and whatnot,” he says. “It’s almost been a continual learning process through the years since I started learning.”