Nursing homes aren’t usually grim, but for some they can be: Nursing home residents are typically at the ends of their lives, dealing with conditions too severe for their families to handle alone. Isolated from their loved ones and the outside world, it’s easy for some residents to become catatonic, as Walter Lutz discovered in the Columbia Basin Care Facility’s lunchroom one afternoon in 2008 while visiting his dying mother. And so, a couple years later, Lutz carried an accordion up to the nurses’ station at Columbia Basin and asked permission to play live music for the residents.

From the archives of The Dalles Chronicle