That’s the way I learned to read music, to decipher that mysterious shorthand of dots with tails – the notes looked a bit like wiggly pollywogs – that even Mozart had used to encrypt his magical melodies.

Professor Von Hoff taught that doggerel to me more than seventy years ago now when, as a lad of 8, I started to take piano lessons at his home in Bergenfield. The first letter of each of those words stood for one of the lines on the musical staff – E G B D F – and the spaces between, Professor Von Hoff explained in his guttural Germany accent, spelled out the word "FACE." Put them all together and you’ve got the scale. Funny how things like that stay with you; like the way I can still spell Mississippi by singing a little ditty I memorized in school.

Of course, I was no Mozart. My mother was really the talented one in our family. She could paint – we have several of her still-lifes hanging in gilded antique frames in our home – and even though she never had a lesson, she could sit down at the piano and play "by ear." It was something I could never do, a gift no piano teacher can bestow.

Mom had bought our piano, an old, slightly out-of-tune upright, for $10 at a used furniture store on Washington Avenue. It stood in what we called the "Sun Parlor," a small room that was really an enclosed porch, and mom was determined that I learn to play it. And so, once a week I would trudge to Professor Von Hoff’s house at the other end of town, looking like a sissy in my knickers and carrying my music in a black briefcase.

Actually, though, it wasn’t that unusual for a small boy or girl to take music lessons back then. Despite the Great Depression, or maybe because of it, the arts seemed important in people’s life. Even in elementary school we had an orchestra and a chorus and a music appreciation course in which we listened to phonograph records of classical music and learned to recognize the difference between the sound of a French horn and a bassoon, a violin and cello.

Professor Von Hoff – I never called him anything but Professor and I don’t recall ever hearing his first name – got fifty cents for each lesson. He was a strict taskmaster, a Teutonic tutor who insisted that you master the fundamentals. Just hitting the right note wasn’t good enough. You had to hit it with the right finger and hold your hands with the fingers curved gracefully. He also had a metronome that stood on a nearby table ticking off the cadence and he’d stamp one foot on the floor and tap a baton on the side of the piano for added emphasis.

"Nein, Nein!" he’d growl if you didn’t hold a half note long enough or dawdled on a quarter note and if – heaven forbid! – you hit the wrong key he wasn’t above rapping you on the back of your hand with the baton. Adults could get away with things like that without being accused of child abuse when I was a kid and if you went home and complained that you’d been mistreated by a teacher you didn’t get much sympathy. Once I recall telling my dad that Professor Von Hoff was hitting me on the knuckles with his baton and my dad said maybe if I played the right notes he’d stop hitting me.

Mom did her part to insure that Professor Von Hoff’s efforts weren’t in vain by making sure that I practiced at least an hour a day; fingering the scales, learning the chords and gradually graduating from such classics as the "Happy Hunter" to Debussy’s "Claire de Lune."

"Ah, gee, mom, do I have to?" I’d moan as the daily hour dragged on but she’d always say, "Some day you’ll be glad you learned to play the piano."

By time I became a teenager it was obvious that no one would ever refer to me as a "pianist" but I became a fair-to-middliing "piano player" who could sit down at the piano at a party and pick out the popular tunes of the day while others clustered around to sing-a-long over my shoulder.

But I don’t play the piano much anymore. My fingers don’t work as well as they once did and one of them is so misshapen from arthritis that it invariably hits the wrong key. Still, I occasionally manage to muddle through a rusty rendition of "Star Dust" and even if the voices I hear singing over my shoulder are only fading echoes from the past, I’m glad I learned to play. Mom was right. Moms usually are.