Frugal Piano Tuner Wills $500,000 to Help Pay Off U.S. Debt

Wallace Magnani lived so frugally that he refused to fix the plumbing in his majestic 70-year-old home and wore tattered, grubby clothes.

But he was magnanimous in death, leaving $500,000--the bulk of his estate--to help reduce the federal debt.

“He felt the federal government saved his life during the Depression when he was in need,” said Robert J. Owen, Magnani’s executor. “He wanted to give something back.”

With the national debt already around $4.9 trillion, Magnani’s gift won’t go far. But it’s nice anyway, said Pete Hollenbach, spokesman for the federal Bureau of Public Debt.

“It isn’t the size of the gift that matters,” he said.

Living Americans have donated $53 million to help reduce the national debt since 1961, Hollenbach said. Fewer than a dozen have put Uncle Sam in their will.

Many, like Magnani, are Depression survivors or immigrants who want to repay their country, Hollenbach said.

Magnani, who died in October at age 88, was the son of an Italian American violinist and grew up in New York. He was valedictorian of the 1926 graduating class at Flushing High School.

By the time he graduated in 1930 with a piano degree from what is now the Juilliard School, Magnani was so broke that he couldn’t pay his final $40 tuition bill, the school said. He repaid the debt in 1977--$290 plus interest, he calculated--and sent the school a thank-you note.

His gratitude to the federal government stemmed from similar dire straits. A friend, Gordon Strickland, said New Deal money once kept Magnani from becoming homeless.

He also was thankful that the government took him into the U.S. Army--even in the middle of World War II. He was drafted in 1942 and discharged in 1945.

“He told me that when he went into the military, he didn’t have 20 cents in his pocket and he was hungry,” Strickland said. “He said they gave him a ham sandwich, and he started to cry.”

Although Magnani had dreamed of being a concert pianist, he made his living for many years as a piano tuner, living in Hollywood for at least 25 years, Owen said.

In recent years, Magnani cut an odd figure, a crotchety man in tattered clothes that he rarely washed because he owned no washing machine.

Friends said he spent his days at a 1910 baby grand piano, beautifully playing the most difficult compositions--works by Chopin and Franz Liszt’s transcriptions of Paganini.

With a 40-year-old parrot and a collection of stray cats, he lived in a magnificent home, built in 1926, but left it untended, with shredded curtains in the windows.

His will directed that the home be sold. He had no survivors.