Piano’s Flattened Notes Underscore Requiem Bash

As wakes go, the one for J. C. Young was rather unusual. But then, so was J. C.

Back in his better days, at Ted’s Saloon, he’d muse about a lot of things, like the weird math theorems he picked up in college, or his theory about how mayonnaise was somehow deadly, or what it would sound like to drop a piano from an airplane.

“He used to say there are a lot of pianos around that aren’t getting played. Why not just drop one of them out of an airplane, thin ‘em out,” said Len Nordeman, one of Young’s foremost partners in party.

Young, who was killed three years ago at age 44, left $15,000 from an estate of almost $1 million for a party. So in a Requiem for a party animal, Nordeman, dressed in tuxedo and top hat, stood in an open field near the Sonoma Airport on Saturday with a few hundred of Young’s closest friends (a notable no-show was his mutt, Eric Spudesky Useless, a.k.a., Spot) and solemnly counted down as a helicopter drew the $150 L. C. Little & Sons upright to a height of about 200 feet and released the cable.

As recitals go, it was short. But over a donated wireless microphone, amplified by speakers loaned by the Grateful Dead, the crowd could hear a low flat roar, backed up by the whir of the helicopter blades.

“Was it worth it? Absolutely. I’m going to go out and get another piano, one that’s even bigger,” Nordeman declared as the crowd surged toward the musical remains in the hope of walking away with a key or wire as a souvenir.

“I didn’t hear it,” said Jorge Estapa, another friend from Ted’s who watched the drop. “But if he did, it’s OK.”

To those who knew him, it came as no surprise that in his handwritten will, Young bequeathed $15,000 to three close friends to “share and to use to give a party for themselves and as many of my friends as they can find that desire to attend, using the money for location, food, drink, decoration, entertainment, transportation and any other costs they find necessary to this end, without audit.”

There were no instructions for a piano drop. But Nordeman figured that no farewell would be complete without it.

For all his friends, Young had at least one enemy. His beaten body was discovered on April 15, 1985, in his black Cadillac at the bottom of a 300-foot cliff near Stinson Beach, north of San Francisco.

“That really is up in the air, the motive,” said Sgt. Ron Spurrell of the Marin County Major Crimes Task Force. “Our feeling is that Mr. Young was involved in drugs. Whether that was the motive, we can’t respond. It could have been a number of things.”

‘Sense of Mystery’

“J. C. was a mysterious person,” said Hank Torgrimson, a friend of more than 20 years. “He’d cultivate a sense of mystery. . . . He wanted to have a private life that I didn’t know about.”

Given the circumstances surrounding his death, some friends thought it best to skip the party. “There was a lot of anguish involved with the fact that he was killed,” said Torgrimson, a partner in Young’s small chain of foam-furniture stores.

Young was, his friends say, rather different. He would ride his 1948 Indian motorcycle into Ted’s, a fern bar that has no ferns. On occasion, he’d organize parades, using as floats a 1953 Cadillac that had been custom cut into a pickup truck and a hearse, and ride through San Anselmo, a Marin County burg that is more of a boutique than a town.

Stuff of Legend

A private pilot, Young once flew to the desert to watch a space shuttle landing, only to miss it because he got an uncontrollable urge for blueberry pancakes. His flights to places such as Anchorage or Mexico were the stuff of legend around Ted’s. He also was a sailor, amateur musician who would belt out tunes at almost any time and had a master’s degree in mathematics.

“He was good at just about everything he did,” said Torgrimson, who met Young while Young was going to the University of Washington in Seattle. “He was an achiever, an Eagle Scout, a sailor, skipper on sailboat, a merchant seaman, a musician. He was the kind of person who’d push a piano out of an airplane. . . . He was a beautiful man and I miss him a lot.”