Eddie Van Halen watched a bank officer padlock a music store on Colorado Boulevard in 1982. The owner had 17 days left on his notice. His son was behind the counter when the lock went on. Eddie was testing guitars in the back room. Then, he walked to the front. November 1982, Pasadena, California, a music store on Colorado Boulevard.
The bank officer arrives at 2:00. The notice of foreclosure is dated 3 weeks prior. Ray Montoya loses the store his father opened in 1951. His son, Danny, watches from behind the counter with a price tag gun still in his hand. 31 years, Ray has run those shelves alone. Gone in 4 minutes. In the back room, a man in a plain gray jacket stops playing a guitar.
Nobody recognizes him yet. Here is the story. Montoya Music sits at the western end of Colorado Boulevard between a dry cleaner and a shoe repair shop in a narrow storefront with a plate glass window that Ray’s father installed in 1957 when business was good enough to justify it. Two display racks of guitars by the window, a glass case of accessories and strings running the length of the left wall, a small repair bench in the back corner where Ray has set necks and refretted instruments for 31 years, a hand-painted sign above the door, Montoya Music established 1951. A photograph on the wall behind the counter, Ray’s father, Victor Montoya, standing in front of the store in 1953 with a guitar in each hand, squinting into the California sun. Ray Montoya is 54 years old. He has the hands of a man who has held instruments every day since he was a boy. The slightly flattened fingertips of a lifelong player, calluses on the left
hand that have been there so long they feel like part of the skin rather than something layered on top of it. His father came from Chihuahua in 1946 with $40 and a Sears catalog guitar and found work as a day laborer in the orchards east of Pasadena. He taught himself English from the radio and music from church and saved for 5 years to open the store.
Victor Montoya died of a stroke in 1971. Ray took over the next morning. He had been working the counter since he was 12. Ray kept the store alive through the decade when the guitar market collapsed after the folk boom faded and the rock stores moved into the malls with their corporate budgets and their mass-produced inventory.
He survived by doing what the chains could not do, which was know every customer by name and fix what they brought in. He could set the action on a Gibson by feel in 7 minutes. He could identify a pickup problem by sound before he opened the control cavity. Musicians came from as far as Arcadia and Monrovia because they knew that Ray Montoya would look at what they brought in, tell them the truth about it, and charge them what the work actually cost.
He had a waiting list for repairs that ran 3 weeks in busy months. He had customers who had been coming since Victor was alive and who had started bringing their children. In 31 years, he had sent exactly one instrument back to a customer saying he could not fix it. It was a vintage resonator with water damage so severe the top had separated from the sides and he still remembered the customer’s name and the look on the man’s face when Ray handed it back.
In 1980, a guitar superstore opened on Foothill Boulevard 3 miles east of Montoya Music. It had 12,000 square feet of floor space, 42 employees, and a financing program that Ray could not match with a store that ran on cash and personal relationships. In 1981, Ray’s sales dropped 31%. In the first 6 months of 1982.
They dropped another 19. In August, he missed his first loan payment to First Federal Savings of Pasadena. In September, he missed the second. In October, a letter arrived on bank letterhead. Final notice. Cure or vacate within 30 days. He could not cure. He did not vacate. On a Tuesday morning in November 1982, a bank officer named Gerald Pratt drove from the First Federal branch on Lake Avenue to Colorado Boulevard in a gray sedan.
A court-appointed representative followed in a separate vehicle with the padlock and the foreclosure order on the seat beside him. They parked at the curb in front of Montoya Music at 2:00 in the afternoon. Gerald Pratt stepped out. He did not introduce himself. He walked through the front door of the store past a teenage boy who was hanging price tags on a rack of guitar straps and went directly to the counter.
He set a folder on the glass case. He opened it. He read from a typed page in the voice of a man who has read from typed pages before and has learned to make the reading efficient. Notice of foreclosure. Montoya Music, 847 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena, California. All retail operations cease at 2:05 p.m.
on this date. The property and all inventory revert to First Federal Savings of Pasadena pending liquidation and sale. Danny Montoya came out from behind the counter. He was 22 years old. He had been working in the store since he was eight, stocking strings and sweeping floors before he was tall enough to reach the top shelf and had been full-time since he graduated from Pasadena City College 3 years ago with an associate’s degree in music technology.
His father had wanted him to transfer to Cal State. Danny had said no. The store needed him. And he had said it in the tone of someone who was already decided and is informing rather than asking. Ray had not argued. He knew the tone because he had used it himself in 1971, the morning after Victor’s stroke, when he had called into his other job and said he was not coming back.
Now, Danny stood beside his father with the price tag gun in his hand and said nothing. The court representative came through the door. He was carrying a padlock on a steel chain, a heavy black iron lock, the kind that communicates finality without requiring any additional statement. He stopped at the doorway.
He looked at Ray. He looked at the lock in his own hand. He shifted it from one hand to the other. Ray set both hands flat on the glass case. The case was dusty at the edges in the way that cases in small music stores accumulate dust, not from neglect, but from the particular kind of attention that goes entirely into the instruments and leaves nothing for the surfaces around them.
There was a coffee cup near his right elbow. The coffee had gone cold an hour ago. “17 days,” Ray said. “The notice gives 30 days. We’ve had the store open for 13. Give me 17 more.” Gerald Pratt closed the folder. The court representative appeared at the door with the padlock. Pratt looked at Ray. “The case is filed.
The date is today. We’re not in a position to extend.” He turned and walked toward the door. In the back room of Montoya Music, behind the repair bench and a rack of guitar cases, a man in a plain gray jacket and dark jeans had been testing instruments for the past 40 minutes. He had come in at 1:20 without announcing himself, nodded to Ray at the counter, said he wanted to spend some time with the acoustics in the back.
Ray had said, “Of course, take whatever time you need,” and had shown him to the back room where the better instruments were racked along the wall and the repair bench sat in the corner with its tools laid out in the order Ray’s father had established in 1951, and that Ray had maintained without variation for 31 years.
He had not recognized the man immediately. The plain gray jacket, the baseball cap pulled low, the way he moved through the store, unhurried, comfortable, touching the instruments with the easy familiarity of someone for whom a guitar is not a purchase or a novelty, but simply an extension of what they already know.
He looked like a working musician, which in a store on Colorado Boulevard in 1982, was not an unusual thing to look like. Ray had recognized him 10 minutes later when the man set down the cap to look more closely at the grain pattern on a dreadnought acoustic, and Ray had seen his face in the clear light of the back room lamp, and had understood in the specific way that recognition arrives when you have seen a face on television and record covers and the sides of tour buses, exactly who was testing instruments 12 feet from his repair bench. He had said nothing. He did not make a production of it. He went back to his work at the counter and let the man play, which was the right thing to do, and which was, he would think later, the thing his father would have done. Now, the man in the gray jacket stood at the entrance to the back room, at the edge of the repair bench, and watched Gerald Pratt walk toward the front door. He had heard everything. The back room at Montoya Music was separated from the front by a half wall
and 4 feet of open air. He had stopped playing when the bank officer began to read. He had stood at the edge of the repair bench for the full 4 minutes. He watched Pratt reach the door. He walked to the front of the store. Mr. Pratt. Pratt stopped at the door with his hand on the frame. He turned.
He looked at the man in the gray jacket with the expression of someone who has been interrupted in the middle of a task that is already finished and cannot be unfinished. The man in the gray jacket did not look at Pratt. He looked at Ray first. He looked at the photograph on the wall, Victor Montoya in 1953, two guitars, California Sun.
He looked at Danny standing beside the strap rack. Then he looked at Pratt. What’s the number? Pratt’s expression shifted into something more careful. I’m sorry? The man looked at Ray. What’s the number to bring the loan current? Ray looked at him. His hands were still flat on the case.
There was a coffee cup near his right elbow. The coffee had gone cold an hour ago. Sir, I appreciate This is a bank matter. You don’t need to. What’s the number? Ray looked at Danny. Danny looked at Ray. A long second passed in which neither of them moved. $11,400, Ray said. 11-4 covers the three missed payments and the bank’s legal costs for the filing.
He said the number the way a man says a number that has been living in his chest for 3 months like a stone. The man in the gray jacket reached into his jacket pocket. He took out a checkbook. He set it on the glass case beside Ray’s hands. He took a pen from his shirt pocket. He wrote the date, November 16th, 1982.
He wrote the amount, $11,400 even. He wrote the name of the payee, First Federal Savings of Pasadena. He tore the check from the book. He held it out to Gerald Pratt. Pratt looked at the check. He looked at the man holding it. And then the recognition arrived. The slow recalibrating arrival of a face connecting to a name that everyone in California knew in November 1982, when the 1984 album was 6 weeks from release and the name Van Halen was on every rock station between Bakersfield and San Diego.
He took the check. The court representative at the door looked at Pratt. Pratt looked at the check. He looked at Ray. “I’ll need to call the branch.” Pratt said. “Call them.” the man said. “I’ll wait.” Pratt used the phone on the counter, Ray’s phone, the one that had sat there since 1963. He spoke for 4 minutes.
He said yes several times. He said the name on the check once, quietly. And the person on the other end of the line was quiet for a moment before responding. He hung up. He looked at the court representative. He looked at Ray. “The branch will process this today.” Pratt said. “You’ll receive a receipt by mail within 5 business days confirming the account is current.
” Ray Montoya’s hands were shaking. He folded them together on top of the case. The court representative at the door put the padlock back in the bag he’d carried it in. He and Pratt walked out to the gray sedan. They drove east on Colorado Boulevard in the direction of Lake Avenue. Danny Montoya was standing beside the guitar strap rack with the price tag gun still in his hand.
He looked at his father. He looked at the man in the gray jacket. “Pop.” Ray did not turn his head. “Pop, who is that?” The man in the gray jacket was writing something in a small notebook he had taken from his jacket pocket. He tore the page out. He set it on the glass case. “That’s my number.” he said.
“When you can pay it back, call me.” “No schedule, no interest, just pay it back.” Ray looked at the page, then at the man. “Mr. Van Halen.” The name landed the way names land when they have been known a long time from a distance and suddenly applied to a person standing 4 feet away. “I cannot accept this.” “It’s a loan.” the man said.
“Not a gift.” He picked up his checkbook from the case. He put it back in his jacket pocket. He picked up the baseball cap from the repair bench where he’d left it and put it on. Then, he stopped at at door. He turned back. “Your father,” he said, “Victor Montoya.” He nodded toward the photograph on the wall, Victor in 1953 squinting into the sun with a guitar in each hand.
“My father used to bring me here,” the man said, “Jan Van Halen. He’d come in on Saturdays. He said your father knew more about guitars than anyone in the San Gabriel Valley. He said Victor Montoya could hear what was wrong with an instrument before he picked it up.” He touched the brim of his cap. “He had good ears.
” He walked out. Drop your city or state in the comments. I want to see how far this story travels. Ray Montoya called the number on the page 6 months later. He had saved $800, 3 months of careful work, better numbers since the foreclosure story had moved quietly through the community and brought customers back to Colorado Boulevard.
He said he wanted to begin paying it back. The man who answered, not Eddie Van Halen, but someone who worked for him, said they would pass the message along. He paid it back in installments over 4 years. The last check was for $600. It was mailed in January 1987. In March of 1987, an envelope arrived at Montoya Music from a business address in Los Angeles.
Inside was every check Ray had sent, returned uncashed, paper clipped together with a typed note on plain paper. The note said, “Ray, your father taught my father to hear. That’s worth more than $11,000. Keep the store open. EV.” Ray Montoya ran Montoya Music until 2003. He retired at 75.
Danny took over and ran the store for another 9 years before closing in 2012 when the Colorado Boulevard lease tripled and the market had moved entirely online. Before closing, Danny donated three items to the Pasadena Museum of History on Walnut Street. The first is the original hand-painted sign from above the door, Montoya Music established 1951.
The second is the photograph of Victor Montoya in 1953 in a new frame Danny had made for it. The third is the typed note, seven words on plain paper, keep the store open, E. V. The display sits in a glass case near the museum’s east entrance. The morning light comes through the window and lights the sign and the photograph and the note for about 30 minutes each day before moving on.
A small placard beside the case reads, donated by Daniel V. Montoya in memory of his grandfather, Victor Montoya, 1918 to 1971 and his father, Raymond Montoya, 1928 to 2009 and a musician who came in to test guitars on a Tuesday afternoon and stayed a little longer than he planned.
