Them old men, you just didn’t buck them, no kind of way.

The work ethic that he learned from his father on the family farm paid off for LaFayette Nunley. He owns a piano repair business in North Hollywood, and he says he loves the work. Nunley and his wife, Doris, live in Sepulveda.

We lived on a farm in east Texas. We sharecropped. You might work sun to sun and your profits were little. When I was about 13, we got a government loan and bought our own farm, which was 140 acres. Whatever you made was yours. It cost us about $4,000. My daddy paid for it in about four years. We raised our own peaches, our own plums, our own corn. It was a beautiful life for a kid.

My parents had 13 kids. By the time one left, another took over. I stayed home a year longer than I wanted to because my father got hurt. By me being the oldest son at home, I had to take over and plow the mules and raise a good crop.

I told my dad one Saturday morning when I got up, “Dad, I want to get off early.”

“What you mean, get off early? You’re not going to get off early. I’m going to work you all day and into the night.” I was about 18 then, and I didn’t go for it. I told him, “No way.” He said, “Well, I’m going to whip you to death or I’m going to shoot you to death, so you’re either going to work or take one of the other two.”

My older brother was home from Korea, and he told me, “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days shall be longer.” I wound up doing what Daddy said. Them old men, you just didn’t buck them, no kind of way.

I think it’s hard for a person to come up not knowing what work is. Working comes easy for me because I didn’t know anything else to do but work. Coming up on the farm that’s all you did. When we had days off, on Sunday, we had to get up and feed all the horses and cattle. When it rained, you get in there and shuck corn and shell peanuts. When it was too cold to work, you had to kill your hogs and cut them up and put them in the smoke house.

You didn’t have time to get into trouble. But I had fun on the farm. I rode horses every day. On weekends, I rode bronco bucking horses and cows.

All I wanted was a break in life. My first break was a job in L.A. as a mill man mixing rubber, making $2.50 an hour. I worked seven days a week and overtime for eight years. I got my brother on, but I told him this wasn’t a job for him. “Do something better than I’m doing.”

He got a job working in pianos. Then he set up his own shop, and he needed help. Since I worked nights, during the day I would help him repair pianos. Then I quit the rubber company, and we went into partnership; I bought in.

When I watched my brothers repairing pianos and saw how they worked with the wood and made the grain show, I loved it. When I was a kid we used to cut wood for winter. When we sawed down a tree and split wood, I could see the different grain in wood. You could tell about how old it was by the circles.

As time moved along and I had kids, our company was too small to support two or three families. So after I learned enough, I decided to go out on my own. A lot I learned on my own by spending time and practice. Books will carry you so far, but if you put your mind into it, you can create more. Like coming up with the computer chips--somebody had to sit down and do it. There weren’t any books to learn from. So you’ve got to sit down and experiment yourself.

I’ve got a job coming up, and every so often in my bed at night I think about how I’m going to do it. When that piano comes in, I’ll have it figured out. At night, sometimes I’ll go to the shop and work with the color samples, wood fillers. I’m by myself, no telephone calls. You have to be there alone and just keep working with it.

Wood is beautiful. You can cut down a tree and each limb, the further up you get, the grain is different. When I refinish a piano, it probably came from the same tree, but some parts of it you have to treat different. Rub it in different, rub the filler, the oil and all that. I love wood. When I do a piano the grain is standing out, looking beautiful. I love my work. That’s the bottom line.