Accordions are like cats.”

Dale Starchman

Dale Starchman labors in a small shop attached to his home at 709 W. Jackson.

Computers he’s refurbished are displayed on two benches, along with an occasional clock or  sewing machine needing some TLC to keep on ticking and stitching.

Those are the business’ bread and butter.

And then there are the accordions.

Restoring worn out or neglected accordions, well, that is Starchman’s passion. Or obsession.

Starchman is a lifelong musician, a pianist who toured with an evangelical team.

He was born in Seattle, but grew up not far from Joplin in southwest Missouri.

One tour in particular altered his life forever.

The team came to the Revival Center in Lexington where he met his future wife, Donna.

“Her mom played the piano there so I fell in love with her first,” he jokes.

Actually Donna is an accomplished musician, playing guitar and drums. And what happened was this - “We saw each other and that was it,”

He married her when she was 16 and they will celebrate their 49th anniversary later this year.

Starchman tuned pianos for years until he discovered accordion restoration.

The oft-maligned instrument – Donna is no fan of the sound – enjoyed its heyday from the 1940s to 1960s.

As interest in accordions dropped in the decades that followed, the instruments were forgotten and neglected.

Starchman was 17 when he bought his first accordion from a pawn shop.

He began tinkering with the occasional accordion, his right hand at home on its piano-like keys.

With his left hand, he mastered the chord buttons.

Over several years, he would get an accordion, play it for a time and then send it to the mission field.

“Accordions are like cats,” he said. “You start with one and ...

“All sound different, feel different.”

When one wouldn’t play, he  carefully took it apart and fixed it.

Piano tuners are relatively easy to come across. Masters of accordion repair/restoration not so much.

It wasn’t long before Starchman was getting calls from music stores in Oklahoma City.

He began searching out neglected accordions, buying, repairing, restoring and rehoming them.

When COVID-19 shut down the country, Starchman’s accordion hobby-turned-business “went through the roof.”

One music store in Oklahoma City for which Starchman repairs accordions told him they sold more accordions in the past few months than in four years prior.

People were locked in and bored. Surprising numbers took up the accordion.

“I actually sold two to one lady in one day,” he recalled.

The woman’s husband had given her money for Christmas and she came to Starchman’s shop to buy herself an accordion.

She found two that she really liked, so she bought the second as a birthday present to herself.

“It’s a surprise to me which customer will buy which accordion,” he continued.

Take the case of the tiny elderly woman who pastors a church at Shawnee.

It wasn’t her first accordion and she picked out the largest one Starchman had.

When he protested that the instrument was too large for her small frame and surely she wouldn’t be able to stand and play it, she fixed him with a determined gaze.

“Then I shall sit,” she informed him, paying for her pick.

Starchman said there are several different types of accordions. All the ones he works on are piano accordions.

Customers shopping for a new instrument or a knowledgeable accordion restorer come from as far away as south Texas and Arkansas.

During the golden age of accordions, the instruments cost thousands of dollars.

“Mine sell for $400 to $700,” Starchman said.

The accordion is finding appeal in an ever-widening sea of musical styled - Tejano, Cajun, country, rock and jazz, to name a few.

In the past, Starchman, who has degrees in music, taught piano and organ, as well as first grade and middle school music.

He’s sold several accordions to “people who didn’t play but wanted to learn.”

Encouraging someone new to play an accordion is “magic.”

There are free lessons to be found online and Starchman has printouts of the keys and chord buttons for his customers.

“Some people are amazing,” he said.

Whereas the piano is technically a percussion instrument, the accordion is a reed instrument. Only not just one or even a dozen reeds.

It takes a separate reed for every note.

In fact, it is the bellows and all those reeds that make an accordion an accordion.

They are the instrument’s heart and soul and its anatomy is as complex as it gets.

Starchman hasn’t counted, but is confident the word from one of his music store customers is spot on. There are more than 2,000 parts to an accordion.

He’s taught himself to fabricate some parts, to repair others or replace with like parts salvaged from some instruments beyond repair.

He picks up two accordions at a time and often buys used accordions from Goodwill in Seattle.

Many accordions are deliberately out of tune. The result is a gypsy sound that many prefer.

“The accordion can make very beautiful music or really terrible noise,” he said.