Jan 2, 2018 3 min read

PITTSBURGH – The Allegheny Elks Club is jumping Wednesday nights when young people sporting tattoos and piercings join nursing home residents in keeping tempo with live banjo music.

Students from University of Pittsburgh also help to fill the club for Pittsburgh Banjo Club’s rehearsal nights, where a Washington man is seated front and center on the stage.

“It’s music that young kids don’t like,” said Dick Moninger, 81, a retired machinist from Washington who taught himself to play the banjo four decades ago. “Now they’re starting to like us.”

As many as 200 people are known to turn out at this club on Pittsburgh’s North Side to watch the club rehearse while backed up by a bass, a couple of trumpets and an occasional tuba. A singer also joins in now and then, performing songs that became popular a century ago but are rarely heard nowadays on the radio.

Hipsters here drink from inexpensive 16-ounce cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and craft snobs sip pricier India pale ales at the bar. Most of the seats at the six rows of tables are reserved in advance.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Moninger said as he prepared to take his seat on the stage a month ago.

There are people in the audience from age 16 to 93, said Michael Trosan, the Elks Club bartender.

“It is unique,” he said, noting the audience also is made up of people from every walk of life, from chief executive officers to network television filmmakers.

The short-lived ABC comedy series “Downward Dog” even used the club as a backdrop, Trosan said.

“It’s a Pittsburgh Brigadoon,” Trosan said, referring to a term that describes a place where time has stood still, far from reality.

The style of the banquet hall and bar harkens to the 1940s and 1950s, giving the appearance of a classic Yinzer wedding hall.

“It’s a microcosim of Pittsburgh,” Trosan said. “It’s honest, good fun,” he said as the band played “Shine On Harvest Moon,” a Tin Pan Alley pop standard from the early 1900s.

The band strives to preserve the music from the banjo era of the 1920s and 1930s with such songs as “Bill Bailey” and “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” written in 1902 and 1905, respectively, Moninger said.

The lyrics are easily understood.

The band was founded in 1988 by Frank Rossi after he retired and moved from Long Island to Pittsburgh and placed an advertisement in a newspaper seeking banjo players.

Moninger said he joined the club four years ago. He also performs with Norm Azinger in the much smaller Pittsburgh All Stars, a group that has played at the Rooney mansion and Heinz Memorial Chapel.

He is not a banjo picker. He only plays chord melodies on the banjo, an instrument that came to North America with the slave culture.

“You never play a sad song on a banjo,” Moninger said.

He said the love and support he receives from his wife, Barb, and family and friends are what keep him strumming on the old banjo.