Eddie Van Halen was in a pawn shop on Colorado Boulevard when a woman came in to sell her late husband’s guitar. The shop owner offered $40. Eddie was 6 ft away. He walked to the front. What happened next meant the guitar never left the family. March 1983 Pasadena, California Colorado Pawn, Tuesday morning 9:15 A woman in a gray coat carries a brown hard-shell guitar case through the door.
She sets it on the counter. She unlatches it with hands that are not quite steady. The shop owner looks at the guitar for 30 seconds. “$40.” he says. In the back of the shop, a man in a plain gray jacket sets down the amplifier part he has been examining. He walks to the front. Here is the story. Helen Kowalski is 61 years old.
She’s been a widow for 4 months. Her husband, Frank, died in November 1982 of a heart attack in their kitchen on Mentor Avenue. He was making coffee. She heard the cup hit the floor. The case on the counter is original brown hard-shell with orange plush lining. Frank bought it 6 weeks after he bought the guitar.
The guitar first on the bus from Glendale, wrapped in a blanket because he couldn’t afford the case yet. He saved the extra money and went back. He had been carrying the case by the same handle for 24 years. Long enough that the leather is worn in the center in the exact shape of his grip. The shop owner is a man named Gary. Mid-40s, 11 years in the second-hand business. He’s not a guitarist.
He knows what moves and what doesn’t. He looks at the guitar for 30 seconds and arrives at $40 and does not think about it further. “It was his for 24 years.” Helen says. “He bought it from Glendale in 1958.” Gary looks at the guitar. “The market on these is soft.” he says. Frank Kowalski came to California from Krakow in 1951 with $40 and the address of a cousin in Glendale written on a folded piece of paper in his shirt pocket.
He found work as a machinist in a tool and die shop in Burbank within 3 weeks because a machinist’s hands speak a language that needs no translation. And Frank’s hands were the hands of someone who had been working metal since he was 14 years old in a city that had been rebuilt from rubble after the war and that needed machinists more than it needed almost anything else.
He learned English from his co-workers and from the radio and from the paperback novels he read one a week every week for 30 years. He became a skilled machinist and a serious amateur guitarist. He had started playing guitar in Krakow at 16 from American records that came through black market channels, music that arrived in Poland in pieces and was assembled by young men who wanted it badly enough to learn from incomplete sources, who slowed the records down and lifted the needle and put it back again and again until they had the note. He played in a small band in a basement on Florianska Street on Saturday nights for whoever showed up. Then he came to California and the band was gone, but the guitar was not. In Glendale in 1958, 7 years after arriving, he walked into a music store and bought a 1957 Gibson ES-335 in sunburst finish for $280.
Nearly 2 months of his machinist’s salary. He carried it home on the bus wrapped in a blanket because he could not yet afford the case. He went back 6 weeks later when he had saved enough and bought the original brown hard shell with the orange plush lining. He polished the latches every few months.
He replaced the handle once in 1971 when the original wore through. He kept the replaced handle in a small box in the closet because he was not sure he should have changed it. He played it every evening after dinner in the living room with the door pulled to when Helen wanted quiet and open when she didn’t, which was most evenings.
He never played it for anyone outside the family. Helen had heard it from the kitchen and from the bedroom for 24 years. She had never learned the names of the songs. She knew them by sound and by what they meant about how his day had gone. The slower ones when he was tired or thinking, the faster ones when something had resolved itself and he was playing for the pleasure of it.
The guitar had sat in its case in the bedroom closet since the morning in November when Helen had put it there because she could not look at it on its stand anymore. The stand had stayed in the living room for 3 weeks after Frank died. Then one morning she carried it to the garage. She had thought about what to do with the guitar for 4 months.
She could not keep it in the house where the silence it left behind was its own presence. She did not know anyone who played guitar. She knew where the pawn shop was. Helen puts her hand on the edge of the case. Her hand is the hand of a woman who has been holding things together for 4 months. Excuse me. The voice comes from the back of the shop.
Eddie Van Halen had been at Colorado Pawn for 20 minutes. He came to shops like this the way he had always come to shops like this on the chance that something useful was in a bin somewhere. The habit of a man who had built his first guitar from components found in places like this. He had been looking through a box of amplifier parts.
He had heard everything from 6 ft away. He walked to the counter. He looked at the guitar. He looked at Helen. He looked at Gary. “What year is that 335?” he said. “57, maybe 58.” Gary said. Eddie looked at Helen. “May I?” She looked at him. He was wearing a plain gray jacket and a baseball cap and had the look of someone who knew what he was asking.
“Yes,” she said. He lifted the guitar from the case. He held it the way he held all instruments, not performing the holding, just holding it the way you hold something you intend to understand. He turned it over to look at the back. He ran his thumb across the frets from first to 12th, feeling for the wear pattern.
He pressed lightly on the neck joint. He held it up and sighted down the neck from the headstock. He played one chord, a simple open chord. He let it ring. Then one note, held. He listened to it decay, not as a check on a list, but actually listening the way he listened to instruments, as if the note itself had something to say.
It decayed slowly. The sustain of a well-made instrument that had been played consistently for 24 years, the wood responsive in the way that wood becomes when it has been vibrating for a long time. The electronics were original. The pickups were correct for 1957 or 1958 production. He could hear the difference.
He set it back in the case, carefully, the way you set back something that deserves to be set back carefully. He looked at Gary. “This guitar is worth between $800 and $1,200,” he said. He said it the way he said things, not aggressively, just accurately. A 1958 ES-335 in this condition with the original case to the right buyer.
Gary looked at Eddie. The morning light in the shop was doing something to the face under the baseball cap. Gary was beginning to understand who he was looking at. Eddie turned to Helen. “I’ll give you 200 today,” he said, “cash.” “That’s not what it’s worth. If you want the real number, I know a dealer in Hollywood who handles vintage Gibsons, but I wanted you to know the $40 was wrong.
” Helen looked at the guitar. She looked at the man in the gray jacket. “Do you play?” she said. “Yes.” “Will you play it?” He looked at her for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I will.” Helen had heard the guitar from the kitchen for 24 years and from the bedroom when she was trying to sleep and Frank was still up playing with the door pulled to.
She had never learned the names of the songs. She didn’t need to. She knew them by sound and by what they meant about how his day had gone. “All right,” she said, “200.” Eddie paid Gary $6 for the amplifier part. He counted four $50 bills onto the glass counter and gave them to Helen. He picked up the case.
He carried it to his car. He sat in the parking lot for a moment before starting the engine. He had come to Colorado Pawn for a $6 transformer. He was sitting in the lot with a 1958 Gibson ES-335 worth considerably more than he had paid for it. He thought about what Helen’s hand had looked like on the edge of the case.
The steadiness of it, the specific steadiness of someone holding themselves together rather than someone who is naturally steady. He started the engine. He drove west on Colorado and turned south on Mentor Avenue reading house numbers until he found the one Helen had written on a piece of paper from her purse.
She had written it without him asking as if she had understood without yet knowing why that he might need it. A single-story house. A lemon tree in the front yard that was going to be dropping fruit in a few weeks. A kitchen window with a yellow curtain. The curtain half pulled to one side. The way a curtain is left when the person who is accustomed to adjusting it is no longer there to do it.
He parked at the curb. He carried the case to the front door. He stood on the porch for a moment. He knocked. Helen opened the door. She was still in her coat. She had not yet taken it off as if leaving it on kept the morning provisional. Kept the thing that had just happened from being fully done. She looked at him.
She looked at the case. Her expression moved through several things in quick succession. Surprise, then a held breath, then something that was not quite hope, but was adjacent to it and equally fragile. He held out the case. “I can’t take your money,” she said. “It’s not a gift,” he said. “It’s a question.” He set the case on the porch between them.
“Do you have somewhere you could put this where you’d see it every day?” Helen was quiet. She thought about the bedroom closet. She thought about the living room stand that was in the garage. She thought about how long the living room had been wrong without the stand in it, how the room had a gap in it that she had been navigating around for 4 months.
“The living room,” she said. “Then put it there.” He looked at her. “You don’t have to play it. You don’t have to do anything with it, but don’t sell it to a pawn shop for $40.” He looked at her steadily. “Your husband played this every evening for 24 years. That’s in the wood. That’s not something Gary on Colorado Boulevard gets to have for $40.
” He handed her the $200 back. He set the case inside the front door. He touched the brim of his cap. He turned and walked back to his car. Helen stood in her doorway and watched him go. She stood there for a while after the car was gone. Drop your city or state in the comments. I want to see how far this reaches. Helen kept the guitar.
She put it in the living room in April on a new stand from a music store on Lake Avenue. She looked at it every day. Some days it hurt. Some days it didn’t. Both were all right. In 1986, her daughter Karen began taking guitar lessons. She was 24 and had never played. She used Frank’s 335. Her teacher, a man named David Park, told her in the third month that the guitar was exceptional and asked where she had gotten it.
She said it had been her father’s. David looked at the serial number. “Your father chose very well,” he said. “This is a 1958 ES-335.” He said it the way you say something when you want the person to understand the full weight of it. Karen Kowalski played her father’s guitar for 30 years at backyard parties in Pasadena in the late ’80s, working through songs the way Frank had worked through songs in Krakow, slowing the record down, lifting the needle, starting again, finding the note by ear rather than by instruction.
At her own daughter’s wedding in 2001, standing in a garden in La Canada with the California sun on the sunburst finish of an instrument that had been in her family for 43 years, playing a version of something she had written herself, the chord voicings slightly unconventional in the way of someone who came to music by feel rather than theory.
At a small memorial concert for Frank at a Pasadena community center in 2002, 20 years after he died, 30 people came. Helen sat in the front row with her hands in her lap. Karen played a song she had worked out by ear from a record she found at a used shop on Foothill Boulevard. When she finished, Helen was the only person in the room who fully understood why Karen had played that particular song.
She didn’t explain it to anyone. Helen Kowalski died in 2011 at 89. In her will, she left the guitar to Karen. Inside the case, tucked under the neck where Frank had always kept his picks, was a handwritten note on a folded piece of paper. It said, “Your father carried this home on a bus from Glendale in 1958 wrapped in a blanket.
A kind man brought it back in 1983 when I almost let it go. Don’t sell it.” Karen Kowalski still has it. In 2019, Karen’s daughter, Emma, then 31, was sorting through a box of her grandmother Helen’s papers. In the box was an envelope she had not seen before. Inside the envelope was a folded piece of paper and on the paper was a name and a note in Helen’s handwriting.
The name was Eddie Van Halen. The note said, “He gave the money back. He said 24 years is in the wood.” “I looked him up. I wanted to write to him. I never did. I don’t know why. Maybe because I didn’t know what to say. Maybe because some things don’t need a letter. He knows what he did.” Below the note, Helen had written the date, March 1983.
Emma held the paper for a long time. Eddie Van Halen had died the previous year, in October 2020, in Los Angeles. She had not known the story. Karen had not known about the note. She put the paper back in the envelope. She put the envelope back in the box. She went to the living room where the 335 was on its stand in the afternoon light, the same stand Helen had bought from a music store on Lake Avenue in April 1983.
Worn at the feet now from 40 years on the same floor. She played it for a while. She is not a guitarist. She knows three chords. She played them anyway. The case is still the original brown hard shell with the orange plush lining. The latches are polished smooth. The handle is worn in the center where Frank’s hand held it and then no one’s hand held it and then Karen’s hand held it and now sometimes Emma’s.
The guitar has been played every evening, not always, but most evenings. The way Frank learned in Krakow that a thing worth doing is worth doing every day, whether anyone is listening or not.
