The Giaime Family Accordion Repair Business: A Legacy
Company History, est. 1934-1987
Few people today remember the heyday of accordion repair. Fewer still remember Giaime & Sons, the family business that kept the squeezebox-playing community of the greater Midwest in working order for over fifty years. This is their story. My family's story. A story of bellows, reeds, and eventual obsolescence.
The Founding (1934)
The story begins, as many immigrant stories do, with failure.
My great-grandfather Enzio Giaime arrived in America in 1902 with nothing but a wheel of aged parmesan cheese and a burning hatred of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (The cheese did not survive the journey. The hatred lasted his entire life.) He settled in the Midwest, where a distant cousin had written of opportunity and cheap land.
His first venture—an Italian-American haberdashery—failed spectacularly. The problem was simple: Enzio only sold hats sized for his own unusually large head, and he refused to stock smaller sizes on principle. "A proper hat fits a proper head," he would say. "I cannot help it if American heads are inadequate."
By 1933, the haberdashery had closed. Enzio was sixty years old and, by his own admission, "out of ideas."
Then, on a Sunday in March 1934, a neighbor named Stanislaw Kowalski knocked on Enzio's door carrying a piano accordion that had developed what Stanislaw called "the death rattle." The bellows leaked, three bass buttons were stuck, and something inside made a sound like a dying cat whenever you tried to play an E-flat.
Enzio had never repaired an accordion before. But he had nothing else to do, and Stanislaw offered him two dollars and a bottle of homemade vodka.
Three days later, the accordion worked perfectly. Word spread through the polka halls and church basements. Within a month, Enzio had more repair requests than he could handle.
Giaime & Sons was born. (The "Sons" would come later.)
The Growth Years (1940-1970)
My grandfather Arturo joined the business in 1940, followed by his brother Vincenzo in 1943. The name finally made sense.
By 1950, Giaime & Sons was the premier accordion repair shop in a 100-mile radius. They serviced everything: cheap student models bought from the Sears catalog, professional-grade Hohners and Giuliettis, ancient church instruments that had survived two world wars and several basement floods.
The shop occupied a converted garage behind Enzio's house. The motto, hand-painted on a sign above the door, read: "If It Squeezes, We Please." This sign is now in my possession. I keep it in my own garage, next to the lawn mower, as a reminder of what was.
The division of labor was clear: Arturo was the technician—meticulous, patient, capable of disassembling and reassembling a 120-bass accordion blindfolded. (He actually did this once, at a county fair, for charity. He won second place.) Vincenzo handled customer relations, which mostly meant nodding sympathetically while customers described how their accordions had become "possessed" or "haunted."
(Almost always just a stuck reed. Occasionally a mouse nest in the bellows. Once, memorably, a small colony of wasps that had built a hive inside the bass mechanism. Vincenzo handled that one personally, with a can of Raid and a series of Italian curses that, according to family legend, made the priest across the street close his window.)
The Specialties
Giaime & Sons developed several specialties over the decades:
The Kowalski Fix: Named after that first customer, this referred to any accordion that made unexplained noises. Nine times out of ten, it was debris in the bellows. The tenth time, you started checking for mouse damage.
The Wedding Emergency: A same-day rush service for accordions that broke down before weekend polka gigs. Premium pricing applied. Vincenzo would tell customers it was because of "specialized parts" but actually they just worked through lunch.
The Restoration: For vintage instruments that needed complete overhaul. These jobs could take months and cost more than the accordion was worth, but there was always someone willing to pay to resurrect their grandfather's instrument.
The Decline (1970-1987)
The 1970s were not kind to the accordion.
Rock and roll had already wounded it in the 1960s. Nobody wanted to polka when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. But synthesizers delivered the killing blow. Why hire a polka band for your wedding when you could hire one guy with a Moog keyboard who could simulate an entire orchestra?
By 1975, repair requests had dropped by half. By 1980, Giaime & Sons was barely breaking even. My father, who had been groomed from childhood to take over the business, watched helplessly as the appointments dwindled from dozens per month to a handful per year.
Enzio had passed in 1968. Arturo retired in 1979, his hands too arthritic to work the delicate mechanisms. Vincenzo moved to Florida in 1982, chasing warm weather and escaping the slowly dying shop.
That left my father. Alone. With a garage full of specialized tools, decades of knowledge, and almost no one who needed it.
The End (1987)
The final regular customer was Stanislaw Kowalski Jr., son of that first customer, who brought in his father's accordion every year for maintenance. When he passed away in the summer of 1987, aged 79, the last thread connecting Giaime & Sons to a viable market snapped.
On a warm September evening, my father carried the last accordion in the shop—a battered Soprani that had been awaiting repair for three years, its owner having moved away and forgotten about it—to the backyard.
I was fourteen. I watched from the kitchen window.
He doused it in lighter fluid. He put on Depeche Mode's "Music for the Masses" on the boombox he'd set up on the porch. He struck a match.
As the accordion burned, its reeds popping in the heat like tiny screams, my father stood with his hands in his pockets, face illuminated by flames, expression unreadable.
He didn't look sad. He looked relieved. An era was over. The Giaimes were free.
He never touched an accordion again. Neither have I. We don't talk about accordions at family gatherings. The old shop sign sits in my garage, facing the wall.
Sometimes I think I should sell it. I never do.
Epilogue
If you've read this far, you might be wondering why I've written several thousand words about a defunct accordion repair shop.
The honest answer is that I think about it more than I probably should. There's something meaningful about being the end of a line—the last generation of something. My great-grandfather built a business from failure and desperation. Three generations made it work. And then the world changed, and it didn't work anymore, and that was that.
No grand drama. No single mistake. Just obsolescence, slow and inevitable, like a bellows that finally can't hold air anymore.
Anyway. That's the accordion story. Thanks for reading.
Alexander Giaime does not repair accordions and requests that you please stop asking.