In Tune With Music : Piano Has Been Key to Fulfillment in a Life Filled With Hurdles

It’s a heady experience for any pianist to solo at Washington’s Kennedy Center, to sit in the spotlight and risk it all on one performance, with no one to share the blame for a missed note.

For Tim Baley of Anaheim, performing a piano solo at the Kennedy Center in June was all the more remarkable. This is a man who was once told by a doctor that he should be institutionalized for the rest of his life because of his mental retardation, a man who plays by memory because he can’t read music fast enough, a man who for the first decade of his life had trouble getting his arms to work right and still sometimes has a “flutter” in his left hand.

But when he sits at the piano, reaches into his memory and extends those long, solid fingers over the keys, his physical and mental shortcomings fade into the background.

In the living room of the Anaheim condominium that is home with his parents, Baley plays what he calls his “patriotic medley”: “This Land Is Your Land,” “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” “America the Beautiful,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “This Is My Country” and “God Bless America.” Afterward he grins widely as his listeners applaud.

Baley, 37, has played piano twice on the White House lawn and once at the Pentagon. He has given recitals abroad, from Poland to New Zealand. And in June, there he was at the Kennedy Center.

The occasion was the first International Very Special Arts Festival, which featured 1,000 performers in 231 events held at 27 sites around the nation’s capital. Very Special Arts, an educational affiliate of the Kennedy Center, was founded in 1974 by Jean Kennedy Smith to provide opportunities in the arts to what the group calls the “mentally and physically challenged.”

Baley was one of three representatives from California at the concert, and the only one from Orange County.

“I had a great time there,” Baley said. “I saw . . . George Bush . . . Kenny Rogers and Crystal Gayle.”

But if there was joy upon arrival in Washington, there has been a lot of heartbreak along the way for Baley and his parents, Rosemary and Jerry.

Rosemary Baley was in labor for 48 hours before delivering her son, who suffered various illnesses as an infant. By the time he was to enter elementary school in Grand Junction, Colo., Baley was so hyperactive that school officials suggested he be tested.

“We were told that the lower left lobe of his brain had suffered severe damage, apparently caused from the forceps at delivery,” Rosemary Baley wrote in a book she privately published 10 years ago. A doctor said her son would never be able to read or write and should be institutionalized.

For the next few years, he took special education courses while living at home, as he has done for most of his life. But in 1966, at age 14, he entered a newly opened hospital in Denver for brain-damaged and emotionally disturbed children. There, Rosemary Baley said, doctors reversed an earlier diagnosis by other physicians and told her that her son had cerebral palsy, a central nervous system disorder caused by brain damage. Baley spent two years in the hospital.

Like other cerebral palsy sufferers, he had trouble controlling some of his physical movements. For years, he was unable to bring his fingers together, let alone make two hands fly over a piano keyboard.

But the parents had noted over the years that their son was noticeably calmed by music. Both parents sing and Jerry Baley has taught music at several Christian colleges. Now retired, the Baleys travel with Tim to the recitals he gives by invitation.

Tim Baley said he became interested in the piano at age 14.

“I was in a special hospital in Denver,” he said. “They had a piano in there and I kept going over to the piano every so often. And there was a lady there, one of the staff members, who had an ear for music. . . . She started me (playing), and that’s where I started to blossom.”

But Baley said he “didn’t really start playing” the piano at a higher level until 1971, when the family moved to Boise, Ida., and he entered another special education school. After playing piano at the school, teachers said he was so good that they sent him next door to play at a physical rehabilitation center--the start of what proved to be years of concerts at churches, senior citizen gatherings and special events in this country and abroad. He has had piano lessons from several professional teachers, including his father, and he eventually overcame the inability to bring his fingers together.

Over the years he has learned to read and write as well. In recent years he has even designed the Christmas cards his family sends. He said he is too slow reading music to play piano from a score; instead he listens to a tape of a performance, memorizes it and practices over and over to make the song his.

But as his performing career has picked up speed over the years, the special problems of a mentally impaired man have remained, according to his parents.

As a teen-ager in Colorado, Baley enjoyed swimming nightly at a pool in the condominium complex where his family lived, his mother said. But one night a neighbor who frequently used the pool ordered him to get out and never to use it again while he swam. Her son was crushed, Rosemary Baley said.

Another time, while living in El Paso, Baley bicycled across the border into Mexico. He became thirsty and asked a gas station employee if a $5 bill was enough for a soda. The man said yes, gave him the soda and took the $5 without giving him any change, leaving Baley penniless. “He has no concept of money and never will,” Rosemary Baley said.

Yet, in spite of all the setbacks, there have been acts of kindness. The Baleys tell of church members who have helped care for their son over the years, of teachers qualified to give musical instruction to the handicapped who worked with him.

Then there was Baley’s meeting with his hero, Liberace. In 1982, the television show “Fantasy” arranged for the Baleys to drive the motor home in which they tour the country, giving concerts, to Las Vegas, to visit the Liberace museum. To Baley’s surprise, he was invited to sit at Liberace’s piano and play a tune.

A videotape shows Liberace entering the room, walking past startled tourists and surprising Baley by sitting with him at the piano and playing a duet.

The Baleys’ concert trips are financed by donations, or by honorariums from those hosting the concert, by listeners dropping an offering in a box and by sales of cassette recordings of Baley’s concerts.

Baley said he looks forward to traveling and “very much” to performing. “I don’t get nervous or anything,” he said. “I always enjoyed playing in front of thousands of people.”