My apologies for the copy/paste. No matter what your political opinions may be - this is a story of true devotion to music - and needs to be read.

Semper Fi
Steve

Memories tickle the 'first pianist'
ALS steals abilities, but not his storiesBy Darragh Johnson

Updated: 1:42 a.m. ET March 29, 2004

That Charlie Corrado -- he could play, and play, and play.

Jerome Kern? George Gershwin? Absolutely. Stevie Wonder? Of course. "Bésame Mucho," for the visiting Mexican president? With gusto. He could do quiet, then spirited. And he could stay invisible -- just what the Marine Band's White House protocol requires -- except when President Bill Clinton suddenly was on the piano bench next to him, singing along.

When President Nixon wanted a pianist in San Clemente, Calif., Master Gunnery Sgt. Corrado got the call: "Get to the airport in an hour." When miserable weather canceled the second inaugural parade for President Ronald Reagan, Corrado was dispatched to the White House to play at the indoor celebration.

And when Clinton needed music in the middle of the 1996 blizzard, when many roads weren't plowed and Corrado's unassuming cul-de-sac in Potomac was a mess of snow, the National Guard sent a Humvee. Corrado's wife took pictures, and perplexed neighbors wandered outside to watch the trim man with the short black hair climb aboard with his uniform -- still the same size as it was in July 1958, when he joined the military.

"The president wants music," Martha Corrado remembers saying to the onlookers, who never had known exactly what the humble man near the end of the street did for a living.

His wife tells the stories now because Charlie Corrado, 64, no longer can. The words freeze in his mouth, then gurgle clumsily when he tries to enunciate. Slightly awkwardly, he leans in the front room of their Potomac home, supporting his half-paralyzed body against his black baby-grand piano.

Over the past two years, Corrado slowly has been imprisoned by Lou Gehrig's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a fatal, neurological progression that leaves the brain intact but shuts down the rest of the body. About 30,000 Americans suffer from it, and an average of 15 more a day receive a diagnosis of ALS.

Corrado can't play the piano anymore . He can walk, but needs his wife's help on the one step down to their family room, where his special "lift and recline" chair sits in front of the TV. He no longer eats, this man who for decades passed up the White House buffets of shrimp and chocolate creams and instead, as his wife has marveled, "came home for stupid leftovers." A tube feeds him eight cans of nourishment a day.

'Pick up the beat'
"There he is," Martha Corrado says now, in a round Boston accent. In their front room, walls of historic photos tell his story, and she is the soundtrack. She points to the frame by the door and there, to the left of President John F. Kennedy, is her husband, the dapper, dark-haired Marine in the red coat -- the 23-year-old son of an Italian immigrant who was supposed to be an auto mechanic like his dad.

He'd grown up playing the accordion -- "What Italian family doesn't have an accordion?" Martha asks -- the only one of his three siblings who "took to" the instrument. By the time Corrado turned 13, he and three friends had formed "The Four Beats," a rock-and-roll group that played weddings while wearing red satin shirts that had musical notes sewn on the sleeves. They even did a number on "The Arthur Godfrey Show" in New York.

After working in his father's Texaco garage the year he graduated from Hyde Park High in Boston, Corrado enlisted in the Marines, went to basic training on Parris Island, served in Okinawa and then -- because Kennedy loved polkas but the Marine Band had no accordionist -- was invited to try out for "The President's Own." Since the days of Jefferson, the band has had the premier responsibility of playing for the White House.

So there he is, playing accordion for Kennedy's last birthday before the president was assassinated. And there he is -- Martha Corrado moves her hand -- playing at John-John's third birthday, just days after Kennedy's funeral, while the little boy in blue shorts holds tight to two maracas.

And there he is, with President Lyndon B. Johnson. Martha Corrado tells the story of the occasion when Johnson's social secretary asked Corrado and his Marine Corps band members to "pick up the beat," and happily, they obliged, zipping through the chords ever faster. Only later did they learn that the 36th president had hoped to cut the songs shorter, Martha Corrado says, "so he could dance with more ladies."

Listening by the piano, Corrado stomps his foot twice and throws back his head, grinning his laughter.

He played the Cordovox, too -- an electric accordion -- and when Lynda Bird and Lucy Baines Johnson got married, he performed for each of their big days. He played for Tricia Nixon's wedding, too. By the 1970s, he had recognized that the accordion was going out of style, so he bought a piano and spent his days teaching himself to play.

45 years in the Marine Corps
And when Queen Elizabeth II came to a State Dinner at the White House and President Gerald Ford stood up to dance with her, it was Corrado and the band that infamously struck up "The Lady Is a Tramp," thinking only of a rollicking tune, not its undiplomatic lyrics. Martha Corrado tells the story almost in a whisper. Corrado watches, his smile widening, and he stomps his foot again, twice.

And then, suddenly serious, he wants something. Martha Corrado stares, pausing. "What?" she asks finally.

"Sit down," he says, but the words are garbled. His wife can't understand. He repeats: "Sit down. Sit down!"

Springing forward, her arms outstretched, Martha Corrado realizes that he has been standing for 45 minutes. With her forearms under his armpits, she steers him into the yellow-and-green striped chair in the corner of their memory room.

"I keep forgetting he's sick," she says, straightening up. "I start talking about this, and it's like our lives are starting all over again."

When President Bush was inaugurated in the White House in 2001, his father noticed Corrado at the piano and cheered: "Charlie! Are you still here?"

He isn't anymore. After playing White House dinners, receptions and informal events several times a week for the last 41 years, a record unmatched by anyone in the Marine Band . . . and after 45 years in the Marine Corps, another record for an enlisted man . . . and after playing for 10 U.S. presidents, from Eisenhower to Bush . . . and after playing for 13 Marine Corps Commandants . . . and after playing for Prince Charles and Princess Diana, for the president of Japan, for Laura Bush's surprise 55th birthday party, and for Tip O'Neill, Bob Hope, Duke Ellington, Roger Clemens, the Washington Redskins and Jim Nabors . . . Corrado retired on May 14, 2002.

He hated leaving. But he knew, a few months after he could no longer carry his accordion up the stairs in the White House, and when his fingers missed the chord changes, it was time.

"He never was going to retire," Martha Corrado says. "Literally. Not till they kicked him out."

"He was never absent from, or late to, a Marine Band assignment in over 40 years of service. This is an incredible record," says Col. Tim Foley, the Marine Band director who has known him since 1968, when Corrado "was a fixture at the White House, even back then."

'Charlie's magic'
He was dutiful and dedicated, the Marine Band's equivalent of baseball's original "Iron Man," Lou Gehrig, said Corrado's volunteer nurse, Joan Deye, of the ALS Association's District, Maryland and Virginia chapter.

And like Gehrig, an insistent pain in Corrado's shoulder was the first sign that something was wrong. For months, this man whose arms and hands were his lifeblood -- his life -- slept with his upper body wrapped around his pillow. In the spring of 2002, he received the diagnosis.

He was afraid to say anything. He didn't want it to be true. He forbade his wife to mention it to a soul, so she, a Catholic school computer teacher, would wait for her husband to leave the house, and then she would call the ALS Association anonymously.

They knew that soon his body would start breaking down, like a car whose parts are still in prime condition, but whose gas -- the neurological message system from the brain to the muscles -- is broken. At some point soon, they knew, he would have a mind trapped in a body that couldn't talk, couldn't move, and would never play again.

In the family room now, in his Lift & Recline chair, Corrado is watching the DVD of his retirement ceremony. The Marine Band -- called "The President's Own," but on this occasion, really, they were his -- starts playing, and Corrado's left foot taps to the beat.

Next to him, on the couch, his wife opens Hillary Rodham Clinton's coffee-table book, "Invitation to the White House," and starts to read:

"I remember a special night," Clinton has written, "when MGySgt. Charles Corrado was playing show tunes on the piano. Bill and I were listening and singing downstairs with our guests. Chelsea and her friends were dancing in and out of the rooms. Charlie's magic filled the entire White House."

Martha Corrado looks up and says, buoyantly, "Page 149."

She closes the book, then leans forward and starts telling a story about the colonel who directed the Marine's Drum and Bugle Corps and who retired unexpectedly a few years ago -- a sudden shift that made Corrado the oldest-serving Marine and necessitated his hurriedly taking over at the Marine Corps Ball. For years, the reason for his absence was a mystery.

"Do you know what he had?" Martha Corrado asks now, referring to Corrado's predecessor and lowering her voice to a whisper. "ALS."

As she speaks, the only sounds in the house are those three syllables and a man starting to cry .

© 2004 The Washington Post Company