Shoreline’s music man

Shoreline resident Bob Hill played the piano for the first time when he was 5 years old.

“I really listened to music a lot and I heard it a lot at home,” Hill said. “From the late 1920s I was aware of popular music.”

Since that time, music has been a part of him and he has shared it with family, friends and neighbors.

He’s a familiar face at Ricky’s Bar and Grill on Northwest Richmond Beach Road during the Monday Jazz Nights. If a band is ever in need of someone behind the key board, he’ll fill in. But it’s more likely that someone knows who he is and is happy to have him join.

Things have just worked out like that for Hill, 84. His reputation as a skilled musician has often proceeded him.

The early years

While attending Queen Anne High School, Hill and some friends formed a 12-piece band and he began writing pieces for the different instruments. Eventually a popular musician named Arlo Wells heard about his band, Bob Hill’s Noteworthy’s, and asked if he could join. Hill said he received his “big break” when Wells was called to Yakima to do some military recruiting.

“I got a call from him saying ‘Bob, I have a gig for you,’” Hill said. “He got me started.”

But playing piano at a tavern in Yakima “on the wrong side of the tracks” six nights a week didn’t last too long and after arriving back home in Seattle in 1943, he had an offer he just couldn’t refuse.

“I was working with a band playing swing shifts on Shady Beach, the east part of Lake Union,” he said.

There was only one problem, Hill said. At the time, the draft was aiming straight for him.

“My eye doctor told me, ‘they’ll never take you,’ so I applied for voluntary induction with the idea they would get it (and) decide they couldn’t use me,” he said.

As his luck would have it at the time, Hill was accepted into the Army Air Corps for limited service. Although his vision kept him from some positions, he learned his musical talents were easily applied to Morse code. After basic training in Fresno, Calif., Hill began technical school in Scottfield, Ill. And he took his bell trombone wherever he went.

When his eyes again kept him from making officer candidate school, he found another band position to fill his days with music and was eventually assigned to a teaching position within the band.

“It was a chance to stay up on my horn,” he said. “Our duties were to rehearse the men eight hours a day to play whatever dates needed.”

The girl he married

He was at a USO dance at Truax Field in Madison, Wis. when he first met, Welma, his wife of more than 62 years.

“I said to myself that is it, that is the girl I am going to marry,” Hill said.

But Welma, 85, said she didn’t know he existed. She was too busy dancing with the GIs.

Hill was persistent however, and the couple began meeting during intermissions and writing or typing love letters to one another when Hill was stationed elsewhere.

“They’re in a cedar box and I saved all his (letters),” Welma said. “There are just stacks of love letters.”

Although Welma wrote her letters by hand, Hill said his work allowed him access to a typewriter and he would write letter by letter to Welma that way.

“Every night I wrote an arrangement and copied it off for a twelve piece (band) then I wrote a letter to Welma and went to bed,” he said.

Eventually, Hill said he became part of the 672nd Army Air Force Band.

“When they had needs for a military band they got us,” he said.

When the couple married in August 1945 they traveled back to Seattle. Home again, Hill became reacquainted with members of his band from high school and he went to work arranging music while Welma went to work downtown for the Office of Price Administration.

“I sat in that basement smoking one cigarette after another,” Hill said. “I like to think that most of those cigarettes burned up in the ashtray while I was putting notes on paper. I can’t imagine how that wonderful woman put up with all that smoking. It had to have been just terrible.”

Six nights a week

Hill applied to the University of Washington in 1946 and learned the GI Bill wouldn’t benefit him because he was self employed as a musician. He paid for school and made a living by picking up as many gigs as he possibly could in ballrooms and bars throughout Seattle including what was once Parker’s on Aurora, the Trianon Ballroom in Seattle and at the West Seattle Athletic Club located on a ferry boat.

“I did various things to keep going, really the only way I could support myself was to play six nights a week,” Hill said.

At one point in 1949, a club owner offered him a six month contract to play piano in a dance hall lodge near Anchorage, AK.

The tips were good, Hill said. He can remember 14 shot glasses lined up along his piano from people who would buy him drinks while he played. He never finished them all but drank one or two after a performance.

“I had one of best steaks I’ve ever had in my life the night we arrived there by plane and for the first time in my life I encountered Roquefort dressing,” Hill said.

Although he didn’t graduate with a music degree, Hill graduated with a electrical engineering degree in 1956. Upon completion of his master’s in engineering, he began work at Boeing in 1958. The couple adopted two children, Bert and Eileen, and moved into a house in the Richmond Beach neighborhood in December 1964.

Still making music

Since his retirement from Boeing in 1985 Hill continues to make music. He and his friend and fellow musician Tammy Burdett play once a month at the Park Ridge Skilled Nursing Center on Northeast 145th Street. Monday nights beginning at 7:30 p.m. are, of course, reserved for jazz at Ricky’s Bar and Grill.

After friends learned Hill was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a special night was planned at Ricky’s Bar and Grill. On Feb. 5 those who know him filled the bar for a tribute to his career as a musician. Banners thanked Hill for sharing his musical talent and Ricky’s surprised the couple by providing a cake.

“Bob is great. He and his wife are a part of Jazz nights,” Doug Reid said while taking a break from playing his saxophone that night.

Another friend of the couple agreed.

“Bob and Welma are just the sweetest people,” Debra Gary said.

As the couple approaches their 63rd wedding anniversary this August, it is obvious to anyone who spends some time with them that they are still very much in love.

“Bob is quite a romantic guy,” Welma said. “I joke and say the secret to a happy marriage is separate bathrooms … it’s the ability to compromise, laugh with one another and say ‘I love you’ often.”