Poem from Granddad

This is something my uncle found and e-mailed us all about when I was home on break. My grandfather (my dad's father - he was the one who owned the Steinway I now own) had a lot of careers during his lifetime. I THINK what he really wanted to do was write. (Supposedly my uncle now has the journals he kept, and is editing/smoothing them and will eventually provide us copies. I really hope he does; there's so much about my granddad that I don't know, and so many stories he had that I didn't pay attention to when I was a kid).

At any rate - he wrote a poem (n.b: PDF file) that was eventually published in Music Trade Review. I'm not sure about "Steger" - there is/was a piano company named Steger which is probably where the name comes from (We also had a well-known professor of piano on my campus named Ruth Steger, but I think she was not that nationally-known, and also came after the time the poem was written). So I assume it's the brand of piano he's referring to.

Two other interesting things: he signs himself as "Cyril" (which was actually his middle name, but I guess most people did know him as "Cy" when I remembered him). And this was written at the tail end of WWI, when he was in the U.S. Aviation Service, which was a fore-runner of the Army Air Corps. (One of the things I really want to learn about was his time in that group; I vaguely knew as a kid that he had been a "pilot during the War" but of course I had no sense of the history of it, and how long ago it was. (He never actually saw combat; my understanding is that he was more like a test-pilot and was based in Texas and Oklahoma - which is another reason why I want to learn about his times in the Aviation Service; back when he was alive to tell his stories, I had no inkling that I would someday live in Oklahoma; I probably only vaguely knew where Oklahoma WAS. (he died when I was 8.)

I find this kind of thing fascinating: finding out stuff about your relatives that you never knew about them before. (And it interests me - I used to occasionally write poetry, had a piece or two published in my high school's literary magazine, but I never tried submitting anything anywhere else. And it's been years since I tried writing any. (And I was never that good with fitting things into a metrical framework; I mostly wrote "free verse," which could be seen as the refuge of the less-disciplined.)

My family is a bit chronologically "odd" - yes, I'm in my 40s but my grandfather was a young man during WWI. My parents had me comparatively "late" (at least, for the late 1960s) - they had been married for 10 years at the time I was born. And I think both my parents were later-in-life children for their parents (Well, my dad and ALL his brothers were later-in-life children; I think his dad was a good bit over 30 when my dad was born, and my dad is the oldest). So recent generations of my family "overlap" a longer period of time....I have friends my age whose grandparents fought in WWII, not WWI (as my granddad did, as a great-uncle I never knew did). And I also have to admit that it weirds me out to contemplate how different my life would have been if my parents had decided, "The heck with worrying about financial stability, let's have a kid NOW" and I had been born in 1961 or so, instead of 1969...