OZARK PROFILE - DENELE CAMPBELL REFLECTS ON AN ECLECTIC LIFE SPRINKLED
WITH MUSIC AND ACTIVISM

Dozens of people filled the university fine arts hall Friday night for
the final concert of the summer jazz series.

They may have been familiar with the local rhythm section and guest
musicians, but few, if any, knew about another person who helped put
on the show.

Denele Campbell was in the concert hall that morning and the previous
day, replacing a string and finetuning the 9-foot Steinway grand piano.

Tuning is a gig Campbell's had since having her second child in 1977.
Throughout the years she has tuned pianos for the University of
Arkansas, the public school system and several churches, large and
small.

The job has taken her on a whirlwind tour of houses, auditoriums and
concert halls, tending to all variations of the instruments.

Campbell classically trained for eight years on the instrument but
rarely takes time to hammer out tunes these days while making her
rounds. "I'm one of those wayanxious piano players who can't play if
someone's watching," she said.

But in her earlier days... "I'd r un my Bach out on those 9-foot
Steinways. It was magical," she confessed.

Campbell was born in Rogers but spent much of her later childhood and
teenage years in Miami, Okla., where her father was a band director.

Many of his traits were passed to Campbell, who was both an all-state
vocalist and all-state oboeist in high school. She preferred the
former but accepted a scholarship for the latter.

The choice ended up being short term, as Campbell later retired from
music once at the University of Arkansas. An English degree was the
only way to whet her desire to write.

Equipped with a diploma, Campbell set out to teach in the local school
system. The endeavor lasted a year. "I just discovered I really hated
teaching," she said. "One of the things I really enjoy about the piano
job is I'm in a person's home for about an hour, and then I'm off to
another place."

Her travels this past Friday included a visit to the university's fine
arts building to ensure a new string would maintain its pitch. She
then strolled into an adjacent building and up a flight of stairs to a
rehearsal room. She closed the door, opened her bag and set out her
tools.

The upright Kawai appeared a little more worn than the regal Steinway,
but Campbell tended to it with the same careful touch after revealing
its strings behind the front panel.

The tuning process began with her setting an A note at 440 beats per
second, then working with fourth and fifth intervals and finally major
thirds to tune a single octave. Once that step was complete, she
checked unison notes until the 88 keys hit their designated pitches.

Campbell has a story for nearly every peg she adjusts at a particular
job.

After one turn she may think back to 1970-71 and her brief life in
California, when she married a U.S. Air Force veteran and worked in a
federal correction facility. That job showed her up close what
happened to draft dodgers, drug offenders, lawbreakers in east L. A.
and Native Americans who committed crimes on reservations.

A couple of chords and shifts later Campbell might recall her return
to Northwest Arkansas and the hard times that fell upon her and her
husband after purchasing a Conoco station in West Fork just before the
Arab oil embargo in 1973.

By the time she's playing octaves, her mind may have wandered back to
her crumbled marriage and later her 1974 union.

They moved to Florida for a short time but returned and moved onto his
parent's farmland in West Fork to start a family.

Campbell set aside music and writing for her newest goal. "I threw
myself into being the best possible mom I could be," she said.

When Campbell said the best, that meant supporting and loving were
joined by canning, freezing and making preserves.

She began growing and harvesting all the family's food and milked
goats on a daily basis. The idea was to avoid filling her children
with preservatives and foods sprayed with pesticides.

Her children since have grown and gone their separate ways. The
oldest, Deste, lives in California, while the youngest, Kadi, is
completing her understudies at the university in Fayetteville.

But the middle child, Jeb, appears to have received some of his
grandfather's traits as well. He now works with Campbell and plans to
take over Pitts Piano Service, the business Campbell started with her
father.

Twenty-seven years of tuning pianos is enough for Campbell, she said.
The various jobs have led to conversations with all types -- rich and
poor, old and young. Owning a piano was the only thing they all had in
common.

She found time in 1997 to put her stories into essay form and release
"Notes of a Piano Tuner," which highlighted her piano tuning
experiences in the Ozarks.

In one chapter, Campbell takes the reader with her to a small church
in Morrow, where she was called to fix some muted keys. She arrived a
few days later only to learn the keys were working again.

Campbell decided to open the piano to get a better look. She could see
what she thought was tissues, so she stuck a wire tool into the bowels
of the instrument only to discover a snake had woven its way into the
piano and shed its skin. "The guy I was talking to told me he probably
wasn't going to tell the lady who played the piano that a snake had
been that close to her," Campbell said with a grin.

Winding down the career will allow Campbell to devote more time to the
Arkansas Alliance for Medical Marijuana and its mission to see
legislation passed in the state.

The group currently is collecting the 64,456 signatures needed by Aug.
26 to place proposed Act 1 on the November ballot.

Moments of activism have been interspersed throughout Campbell's life.
She was involved in civil rights and minority issues while in college
and in the 1980s was part of the local chapter of the National
Organization for Women.

She later assisted in an effort to place a incinerator proposal on the
Fayetteville ballot, a measure the voters rejected.

That experience led to a five-year stint as an columnist. She tried to
localize environmental concerns in an attempt to educate the people in
Northwest Arkansas of the dangers facing them.

Campbell ended the column in 1993 and swore off her activist ways.
Then came her encounter with the state's drug policy, which she thinks
causes more harm than the drugs. "People with addictions need
treatment, but we're spending more money building prisons than
schools," she said. "When you spend money that way you're going to get
what you're paying for. You're going to be filling the prisons."

Campbell began the campaign after her close friend was diagnosed with
cancer and began chemotherapy treatment. The treatment left her
nauseated and in pain. It eventually reached a point that she began
using marijuana to alleviate the symptoms.

A doctor presented her a signed note, instructing her to give it to a
police officer if she was ever caught, Campbell said. The note was
never needed, but an officer later told her it wouldn't have prevented
her from being arrested, she said.

After seeing her sick friend benefit from marijuana use, Campbell set
out to have a law passed that would allow a doctor's note to work.

She created the Arkansas Alliance for Medical Marijuana in 1999 and
expected a bill to be approved within two years. The organization's
still trying five years later. "I think we've got a real good chance
right now," Campbell said. "We must make a public statement in a way
to make it safer for people to come out in favor of this."

Most voters support the proposal privately but feel they can't do so
publicly without being ostracized, she said.

Other than the alliance and pianos, Campbell keeps busy with
Rivendell, a proposed commercial and residential development at the
corner of Center Street and Gregg Avenue.

She hopes to open a tea shop once construction is complete and train a
staff that will allow her to once again spend most of her time on the
hillside farm in West Fork. "A t first I'll be a handson owner,"
Campbell said. "Then my ultimate goal is to not come into town at all,
but to write, to sit in my woodland home and write."

And if boredom sets in, she can always dust off the piano and pump
organ in the house -- that is, if no one's listening.