Albert 'Ted' Gerike, 83, Philly's house pianist

Ted Gerike was "one of the classiest people I've ever known," said Michael Tearson, longtime host of Philadelphia radio rock programs.

A couple of times a month, Tearson recalled, "I would go into the Society Hill Hotel just because he was tickling the ivories."

And that was often. Mr. Gerike played piano there from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays, from 1980 to 2002.

"It was Tin Pan Alley and jazz that he would breathe life into," Tearson said, material that didn't fit into his own programs on WMMR-FM and then on WXPN-FM.

"He made the Society Hill Hotel a really good place to hang out," Tearson said.

"He was a real piece of the fabric of Philadelphia."

On Aug. 7, Albert Theodore Gerike, 83, known as Ted, a former Haddonfield resident known as the house pianist at the Society Hill Hotel and the Warwick Hotel, both in Philadelphia, died of cardiac arrest at Methodist Hospital in Philadelphia.

After his years at the Society Hill Hotel, he played regularly at the Warwick from 2005 to 2014, when he retired, his daughter Lisa McLaughlin said.

Mr. Gerike graduated from Haddonfield Memorial High School in 1950 and then played drums with an Army unit in Japan.

Into the 1970s, said his daughter, he played with visiting national names, "at all the clubs - like the Latin Casino - all the places that are no longer here."

Mr. Gerike moved from his Haddonfield home in 1972 and, she said, for a time lived above the South Street performance space Grendel's Lair, where, among the street's personalities, "he was a fixture."

From the 1980s to 2014, she said, he lived in a Rittenhouse Square hotel and, especially when he hung out in the park there, "everybody in Philadelphia seemed to know him."

In a 2002 Inquirer interview, Mr. Gerike explained that "I always put the music at the edge of the conversation" for his audience. "I never wanted people to totally listen to me.

"If they put me on stage at the Academy of Music and everybody was quiet, I'd freak out."

In a 1999 Inquirer interview, Mr. Gerike found it difficult to explain his longtime gig at the Society Hill Hotel, at Third and Chestnut Streets.

"It's a mystery to me," he told the interviewer.

"It's hard enough to find a job that lasts that long, let alone a place that stays in business that long."

The hotel closed his keyboard a few weeks before he turned 70.

Besides daughter Lisa, Mr. Gerike is survived by sons Theo, Stephen, Luke, and Jonah Gerike; daughter Georgia Robbins Gerike; eight grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

Mr. Gerike is survived by his former wives, Bette Gerike and Marie Baldwin. He was predeceased by former wife Louanne Robbins.

Services were private.

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