Though the family would change its name to the easier-to-pronounce Ford in the 1950s, Hungary and its musical heritage remained in the soul. And while Ford would study psychology at Long Island University and Stony Brook University, he would return to the business he had known since childhood.
“My father would say, ‘If he can walk, put a hammer in his hand,’” Ford says with hearty laughter.
In the 1960s, Ford’s father started Ford Piano Supply, which invented, manufactured and marketed many of the tools still used in the industry today. Such innovation and entrepreneurship are other family traditions. Fekete, as Ford calls his grandfather, once doubled the floor space in the Jacob Doll factory, where he worked in the 1950s, by installing old trolley tracks on the 35-foot-high ceilings from which the workers could hang pianos.
Ford himself is building a 4,000-square-foot concert hall adjacent to his business on Peekskill’s South Division Street. It’s yet another way for Ford Piano to connect with a community it’s been part of since the 1980s, a place that boasts the Paramount Center for the Arts, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art and an artists’ district that has made Peekskill a suburban SoHo.
No doubt, though, the concert hall – which will open next year – will also showcase a few Ford-tough pianos, instruments ready to last another half a century.
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