Seabeck resident Warren B. Lewis can’t pass up a piano.
“I have to sit down and play it,”  Lewis said, with a laugh.
A lounge lizard he is not.
Lewis, a Korean War veteran, has been playing paid piano gigs since 1979. His music education began much earlier than that.
“I learned it at my mother’s knee,” he said. “I took no lessons. I kept working on it, pounding out songs until they sounded good to me and sounded good to others.” 
Lewis’s first paying job, in 1979, was at a lounge called  The Lake Shore on Kitsap Lake. 
“It’s no longer there,” Lewis said. “It burned down several years ago.”
Lewis is a third generation Kitsap County resident. He graduated from Central Kitsap High School in 1952  and went to work at the Navy yard.
Lewis enlisted in the Navy in Bremerton in November 1952. He was 18. He enlisted with two other  buddies, guys he had known since junior high. The three of them were working together in the Navy yard and, at the time, they  wanted to try the Navy lifestyle. 
“There was an enlistment office near the ferry dock,” he said. 
From there Lewis was sent to boot camp in San Diego.
“We thought we would stick together, but they (the Navy) sent us off in different directions right after boot camp,” he said.
One friend, Jim, was sent to Hawaii. Warren was sent to Guam.
“The third guy, Greg, well, we never heard from him again,” Lewis said. 
On the troop ship from San Francisco to Hawaii during the Korean War, Lewis recalled a piano that was fastened to the wall on the ship.
“I played that (one) a lot,” he said.
While stationed in Guam, Lewis recalled “pounding out some songs.” 
Lewis spent five years in the Navy. His experiences took him from Guam to Port Hueneme, near Oxnard, California, where he attended the Navy Builder’s Trade School. He was stationed in the Philippines and then sent to Adak, Alaska.
“I went from 98 percent humidity in the Philippines, to Adak,” he said. “ In five months I saw the sunshine once.”
He took the opportunity  of an early  discharge when he was accepted to Olympic College (at the time it was known as Olympic Junior College). Lewis studied commercial and fine arts, earning a spot on the Dean’s List several times. Lewis spent 30 years working in the printing business – specifically the pre-press division.
While working his primary day job, Lewis remained a regular entertainer at such venues as the Whiskey Creek Steakhouse in Keyport. He played there at least two nights a week for more than 15 years. Lewis also regularly played at local nursing homes gratis with a guitarist. For the past 25 years, Lewis has played at the Kitsap Golf and Country Club in Chico for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Easter and Valentine’s Day.
“I love to play anything Sinatra or Tony Bennett,” Lewis said. “I like any of those oldies, but goodies.”
Lewis belonged to the Musician’s Union in Seattle for 35 years. He let his membership lapse after realizing the jobs his union membership garnered didn’t justify the annual dues. He charges to play, as he said, “Whatever the market will bear.”
When he played at The Lake Shore in 1978, he made “over double the minimum wage” at the time. That was a lucrative hobby, he said.
Lewis recalls that over the years his lounge piano playing has paid for at least one new pickup truck.
Lewis alternated between describing his piano playing as work and as a hobby. When it required diplomacy it was work. Onlookers would frequently interrupt his playing in the middle of a song with a specific request. Sometimes people would request a song he had just finished playing. If he was given a song request that he didn’t know, he utilized a phrase to keep the peace. 
“I don’t know that song, but this one might be something along those lines,” he would say.
“There was a guy at the Whiskey Creek Steakhouse who would always request the song ‘Yellow Rose of Texas,’ ” Lewis said. What was unique about this particular request was the fact that it was a song primarily for guitars and banjos and Lewis played the piano.
Lewis has a few other hobbies that have proved valuable. For example, he built his home in Seabeck with his wife and their three sons. Growing up in Crosby, five miles from Seabeck on his grandfather’s homestead, Lewis said, “The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.” 
In the 1960s Lewis purchased property in Seabeck. More than 10 years later he began the process of building a home. The home looks down on the Seabeck Marina and is described by Lewis as, “Northwest radical – there’s lots of open space, a large, long sloping roof and lots and lots of glass.”
Lewis also enjoys fixing his own cars, cutting and splitting his own firewood and fishing. He has been an active member of the VFW Bremerton Post 239 for 25 years. He served as the Commander from 1996-1997 and now serves as the adjunctant.
Lewis has been married to his wife, Shairon,  since August 7, 1959, after meeting her at a 1930-style dance hall in Bremerton called Perl’s on Arsenal Way.