As a grandson of S.E. and Katie Hostetter, I am grateful to the Brunk family for acknowledging past hurts pertaining to unreasonable piano prohibitions (“One generation’s discord, another’s harmony,” March 3). In 1915, in order to return to a Mennonite community to raise their large family, my Hostetter grandparents moved from Louisiana to Denbigh (now Newport News), Va., where George R. Brunk was the Warwick River Mennonite Church leader. In Louisiana, Grandpa had purchased an expensive piano for my mother’s older sister Emma, a budding pianist. In Virginia, when Bishop Brunk ordered him to get rid of the piano, Grandpa complied, blunting Aunt Emma’s musical gift. Decades later, in the 1970s, impaired with Alzheimer’s disease, Emma could still play the piano, to the applause of other residents at Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community.

Richard Martin Jr., Evanston, Ill.