Charles Chase, 89; Poet and Instrument Expert Ran Folk Music Center in Claremont

Charles Chase, whose fascination with musical instruments from around the world led him to open the Folk Music Center, an institution in downtown Claremont for close to 50 years, has died. He was 89.

A poet as well as an expert on folk instruments, Chase died of a stroke May 21 at the Mountain View Alzheimer’s Center in Claremont, according to his daughter, Ellen Chase.

His eclectic approach made for a center that included a music store, repair shop, performance stage and school as well as a museum that contained several hundred antique instruments, many of them donations from loyal customers.

Chase allowed customers to play all the instruments in the center: the antique Tibetan temple horns, American banjos, Polynesian conch shells and African tongue drums as well as new guitars, banjos and drums.

“My grandfather loved sharing the music,” said Ben Harper, a popular singer-songwriter who worked at the center repairing instruments until his performance career took off. “Without my grandfather, I don’t think I’d be doing what I do.”

Chase led a weekly program for schoolchildren for more than 20 years, demonstrating how to play the instruments and pointing out on a globe what country they came.

Chase was a kindred spirit of folk singers such as Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who mixed social causes with music. Chase looked a bit like a folk singer himself with his full beard -- a soft, gray mist that covered his collar in his later years.

Beyond that, he spent most of his adult life fighting for issues dear to his heart, particularly any that affected the environment or the rights of underdogs.

“Mr. Chase had his own individual philosophy about how things should be run,” said Larry Jackson, a guitar teacher and instrument repairman at the center for 13 years. “[He] was a thorn in a lot of sides. But it was never about him. He stood up for other people. Racism was a pet peeve.”

Raised on a farm in New Hampshire, Chase graduated from the University of New Hampshire at Durham and went to work as a schoolteacher. He started writing poems as a college student in 1948 -- the first was about a lynching in Alabama that Chase had read about.

His subject matter had mellowed by the time he set up a “poet post” outside his Folk Music Center to display works by local authors. One of his more recent poems begins, “Walking on the way to work/I stopped to listen/ to the wind.” He did walk there every day, arriving about 5 a.m. to write poetry before the shop opened.

Chase married his wife, Dorothy, in 1938 and they had four daughters before they moved to California in 1957. He taught at Baldwin Park High School and opened the folk music store with his wife in 1958. She gave instructions in guitar, dulcimer and banjo. He repaired instruments.

Six years after they opened the business, Chase quit teaching and made the music center his full-time job. Since then, three generations of family members have worked there.

Ben Harper recently bought the center so his grandparents could afford to retire. Ellen Harper and her son Joel now run the shop.

Part country boy, part idealist, Chase ran his business as if every customer were a pillar of virtue. Not only did he let customers play any instrument for as long as they wanted, he allowed them to take home costly guitars and banjos on the strength of a down payment and a promise of monthly installments to come.

Artists, musicians and international students from the nearby Claremont Colleges found their way to the shop.

“People used to line up to talk to my grandpa,” Joel Harper told The Times. Many of them were poets.

But sometimes, Harper said, it wasn’t easy to hear what his grandfather’s visitors were saying.

“When the pressure is on, college kids come in here and bang on some drums for a while or play a guitar,” Harper said of a typical day at the folk music center. “Then they’ll get up and say, ‘Gotta go; I’ve got a test to take.’ ”

Until recent years, Chase left the back door of the center unlocked to make it easier for friends to get to his office. That had to stop when he began dozing off while the back door was open. For the sake of the Tibetan singing bowls, Hawaiian ocean drums, South American panpipes and expensive new stringed instruments, Joel Harper began securing the door.

“I feel bad about it,” Harper said, “but the world is a different place than it was in my grandfather’s day.”

Chase is survived by his wife and four children, along with 10 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.