Hennessy, a retail institution, thrives in waning days

Hennessy and Sons hardly looks like it’s on its deathbed.
The musical instrument store at Broadway Shopping Center has been “crazy busy” since the going-out-of-business sale began in May, owner Frank Hennessey said, and they’ve been selling more used pianos than usual.

In a pattern established over decades, Hennessy takes time from tuning a 1952 Chickering piano to chat with customers browsing the floor or play a few scales on the rose-colored 1886 Steinway that the business restored.
But June 30 is the day the music dies at Hennessy and Sons. After 35 years doing business in the community, Hennessy is closing the retail store and distribution center. He cites a reduction in his revolving lines of credit and “doom and gloom” predictions for small businesses in the media since the beginning of the recession.
“You just look at it and say, ‘I’ve had enough,’” he said.
Hennessy said he made the decision in March to close the business, which distributes products to 30 counties in Missouri, after General Electric purchased the three credit providers that provide the business with revolving lines of credit. The company that provided Hennessy and Sons with floor-plan financing cut the company off entirely, which reduced its total line of credit from $485,000 to $175,000.
“Almost everything purchased for stock you had to pay for up front,” Hennessy said.
Although the business deals primarily with pianos, which includes tuning, restoring and rebuilding the instruments, Hennessy and Sons also sells musical equipment, songbooks and a few guitars. Pianos on the floor range from around $1,000 to $174,000, the price for a 9-foot Yamaha concert grand piano.
Hennessy said he’s been in music retail his “entire life.”

He got his start as a salesman at Hauer Music in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967, but he wasn’t hired at the business right away. He tried to get a job there 10 years earlier as a saxophone teacher, shortly after he got his music degree from the Air Force, but the employer turned him down and told Hennessy that parents of saxophone students would be concerned about the fact that he stutters.
When he got a call from the owner in 1967 and a job offer as a salesman in the store’s piano department, Hennessy was surprised.
Hennessy said he told the owner the only thing he knew about being a salesman at that point was how to spell the word. Hennessy, who was working at the University of Dayton as a music technician, was offered the job because of his expertise.
“I have all the smooth talkers I need,” Hennessy said the owner told him. “The problem is when they open their mouths, they don’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about.”

Hennessy said after he began to work at Hauer, he moved pianos out the door so fast that the carpet in the store’s approximately 600-square-foot showroom “never got warm.”
In 1972, he moved to St. Louis, where he sold pianos at Hamilton Music. He moved to Columbia in 1975 and opened Hennessy and Sons at Crossroads West Shopping Center at the corner of Stadium Boulevard and West Broadway.
The business moved to the Biscayne Mall in 1980 and came to its current location in the shopping center at the intersection of West Broadway and Clinkscales Road in 1989.
Hennessy said a major change he has noticed in the way music retailers do business is location. Years ago, he said, shopping malls were the preferred locales for distributors because of the volume of customers they could bring in.
However, he said strip malls such as the one his business currently inhabits is a “great retail location” because it’s more likely that customers will enter the business with the intention to make a purchase.
“They come for a reason,” Hennessy said.
Kate Basi, a Columbia resident and former music director at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic church on Bernadette Drive, is a longtime customer of Hennessy’s. She said Hennessy sold the church a 6-foot Yamaha concert grand piano, as well as songbooks for music students there. She said she also purchased an upright piano for her home from Hennessy.
Basi said Hennessy’s business side was “rolled together” with his personality, which made him a trustworthy salesman.
“He’s always been a really good person to tell it like it is,” Basi said.
Basi said there is a sense of community among Hennessy’s customers, and when she goes to the store, she feels as if she can “catch up” with people she knows.
“We’re sorry to see him go,” Basi said of Hennessy.
Hennessy, 77, said he’d continue to do restorations and tunings as long as his health will allow. He said tuning pianos is physically taxing, especially on the tendons in his wrists, as it requires him to press keys and torque a tuning hammer up to 5,000 times while tuning one piano.
Hennessy said he regrets closing the business and that longtime customers have walked in the door with tears in their eyes. But he said he can depart with his “head held high.”
“I didn’t forget how to run a business.”