Time is not Dan Gullett’s strong suit.
It’s 8 p.m. on a Friday and he’s stripping piano keys with a box cutter, a job he should have finished much earlier. The keys are brown and yellow. Old and dirty. When he finishes, he pastes on a fresh set of white key tops.
After three hours, he has five keys finished. Only 47 more to go. The keys, part of a 1920s-era upright, must be completed by the morning. He’ll have to pull an all-nighter to get them done.
“I’m a procrastinator,” Gullett says.
Taking your time is a perk of Gullett’s job.
It’s the story of his life, of how he found his calling.
As a young man, he moved from job to job, assuming identities from cop to clown. Only now, at age 60, has he inherited the title he should have had all along: Piano Man, a name traded among St. Petersburg businesses for forty-some years.
Tonight’s job, replacing key tops, is the first time Gullett has attempted a repair of this scale. He sees it as an opportunity to learn something new.
“Everything you do, you do for the first time at some point,” he says.
He walks through the back of his shop and takes off his shoes. He brushes back his hair. The skin around his eyes is thick, as if closed.
“My job is boring,” he says. “The interesting part of my life ended about 30 years ago when I stopped switching jobs.”
***
Gullett has no children, or the milestones they bring. He can’t tick off the years with first steps, graduation ceremonies or grandchildren�s birthdays.
“I’m 60 but I don’t have anything to base it on,” he said. “I never watched anything grow up.”
How does a man who considers himself bereft of milestones measure his years? For Gullett, the answer is in careers — both attempted and failed. He readily remembers the path he took to where he is now, however unlikely.
He began playing piano at 5 and grew so adept at the instrument that by the time he reached high school he taught private lessons. He prepared himself for what he thought would be a lifetime of performing music. But as he pursued a music degree at Florida State University, he had second thoughts.
“I realized my only choices were either to be a church or high school band director,” he said. Neither appealed to him. He dropped out of college and joined the Navy during the Vietnam War.
“I didn’t think of it as quitting, but it was,” he said. “I just wasn’t making the grades.”
Gullett spent most of his six-year military career on an aircraft carrier, traveling through Europe. In 1973, he was discharged and immediately returned to playing music. He performed Burt Bacharach and Frank Sinatra songs in a bar while studying criminology at the University of South Florida.
That’s where he noticed a flier. He remembers it saying: Help Wanted: Part Time Clown (Ronald McDonald)
The famous name in parenthesis caught his attention. He wasn’t hard up for work, he says, just intrigued by the opportunity. He wouldn’t be performing as just any clown, but as the mascot for one of the most popular fast-food restaurants in the country.
He couldn’t resist.
Judy, his wife, remembers Gullett rushing over to her house after hearing he had gotten the job. He shaved his beard and moustache that day in order to wear the face paint. She was not surprised by his new job.
“People who play music love to ham it up,” she said. “They like the attention.”
For $50 an appearance, he donned full Ronald garb — yellow pants, red wig, white face paint — and passed out burger coupons to children. He grew so comfortable with the job, he said, that he drove to appearances in full costume.
“The shoes were big,” he said. “But you could actually drive in them.”
One of his first performances was a grand opening in Brandon. He handed a balloon to a barefoot little boy.
He�s probably going to remember this balloon forever, Gullett thought. “That’s how I thought of the job. It was an honor.”
Gullett was busy. He studied criminology at USF, worked part-time as Ronald McDonald during the day and as a late-night musician in a bar.
He deplored the bar. The smell of alcohol and smoke filled his music books, his clothes and anything else he carried into the bar. In 1974, he enrolled in the police academy in St. Petersburg, a decision that was almost as easy for him to make as his decision to be Ronald.
His criminology classes weren’t his inspiration; it was ’50s-era cop shows like “Dragnet.”
His cop career was not as exciting as a television show. He remembers directing traffic in the rain, breaking up domestic disputes. He also remembers falling asleep in his car during a midnight patrol, getting his car stuck in sand and running out of gas — missteps that led to his forced resignation within his first year.
He didn’t see that coming. “When they called me,” he said. “I honestly thought they were going to ask me to be Ronald for a city event.”
He didn’t know he would lose his job as Ronald, too — when he took a job as manager of a McDonald’s. The company forced him to stop performing, he said, because it would conflict with his shifts at the restaurant.
“I was proud and honored to be a policeman, to be Ronald McDonald,” he said. “I was crushed.”
Time had caught up with him. He was about to get married and needed a steady job. A profession. No more part-time appearances as Ronald, no more time for trying out careers.
Dan Gullet speaks now from his store on Gulfport Boulevard, where he refinishes the keys late into the night. Dan the Piano Man is emblazoned in bright orange letters on the storefront window.
The name Piano Man, traded among business owners since the 1960s, is an institution in the St. Petersburg area. USF permanently named the building on 701 3rd St. S the Piano Man Building, after the business it used to house — the first to bear the Piano Man name. Gullett is the third to hold the mantel.
He’s a busy man, but now he works his own schedule, surrounded by upright and grand pianos. Saturday, 2 a.m., finds him still hunched over the piano keys. Only 26 to go.
***
By 1975, Gullett’s rarely played piano. A string of jobs took up his time: manager of McDonald’s, probation officer’s aide, taxi driver. After his forced resignation from the police department, his wife Judy said, they began having serious talks about what he should do.
She knew he wasn’t cut out to be a police officer.
“He didn’t have that macho man instinct that most of them have. He was too gentle to be a policeman,” she said.
Judy urged him to take what he enjoyed, playing piano, and turn it into a job. It was the career he had right under his nose.
“I don’t think he quite realized that. To me it was natural,” she said. “When you think you want to try something you owe it to yourself to try even if you fail.”
After he married Judy in 1977, Gullett began selling organs and pianos. He slowly built a clientele, customers who visited the store. Soon, jobs he took on the side turned into full-time work. He began moving pianos, as well as converting them with a device that allowed them to play by themselves.
“It was just a matter of doing things better than others,” he said.
Gullett never saw himself as the Piano Man. But just last year, after working with the instruments for 30 years, he finally opened a storefront. He now performs all his work under the name Dan the Piano Man.
Today he operates from a storefront on Gulfport Boulevard. His license plate reads FINGERS. His ring tone is Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” He’s embraced the role he never saw for himself, and he’s still taking his time.
It’s 2 a.m. and he’s still not finished with the keys. He only has half the set done and, because he has a deadline, he drives over to the customer — a Veterans of Foreign Wars post on Central Avenue — and installs the loose keys, just to let the post know he is still working.
He heads back to his shop to finish the rest. It’s 8 a.m. when he returns with the finished second set.
“This is unusual because I have a deadline,” he says. “Deadlines are against my modus operandi.”
