Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 131, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 December 1909 — DENVER MAN CLAIMS PIANO CHAMPIONSHIP. [ARTICLE]

DENVER MAN CLAIMS PIANO CHAMPIONSHIP.

Dan Goldsmith Claims to Have Played 60 Hours Continuously at Denver, Colo., In 1908. The Denver, Colo., Post, of Dec. 12th, publishes thp appended article that will wrest the piano playing endurance championship from our young townsman, Perry Horton, if correct. Apparently Goldsmith was in a state of hypnotism when he made the last record. Perry does not care to undertake competition under those conditions. He believes that he can hold out for 40 hours, which would be 2 hours and 30 minutes longer than his last performance. The article from Denver is as follows:

In the Medical College of the University of Louisville, Ky., is a student, Roy B. Harding, known to his dear old college chums as “Sleepy Paperwski,” who Claims the world’s championship for continuous piano playing by virtue of a musical Marathon of thirty-six hours and thirty-six minutes that he recently accomplished. It is a cruel thing to wrest the laurels from one who firmly believes he has won them, whether he is a continuous piano player or merely an Arctic explorer, but Harding’s performance lacks a trifle of some twen-ty-four hours of being the world’s record. On Dec. 17, 1908, Dan Goldsmith, one of a vaudeville team known as Goldsmith and Beckham, and glorying in the weird title of “Ragtime Maniacs,” played for sixty hours without a break, at the Idle Hour theater, at Sixteenth and Larimer streets. He went after his own previous recorcTbOorty-eight hours, which he had made on November 23, of the same year. Crowds witnessed both performances, which Goldsmith accomplished on a diet of lemonade and cheese sandwiches, fed to him by solicitous friends. The program consisted of everything in the musical line, from the humblest rag-time to transcripts from grand opera; during the last of the sixty-hour “run” Goldsmith was in a kind of trance, and when the last key had been thumped it was necessary to load him into a cab and drive him to a Turkish bath to revive him; history does not state the fate of the piano itself. So, although Harding undoubtedly claims the championship in all good faith, he hasn’t even come within hailing distance of the record made here in December.