Dorothy Myers' 15 minutes of fame lasted 134 hours.

That's how long it took the unassuming homemaker to pound her competition and ultimately prevail in a piano-playing endurance contest at the Long Island Fair in 1965.

Family photo (ENLARGE)

In 1965, Dorothy Myers took part in a piano-playing competition and won for playing 134 hours.

Cameras flashed and reporters scribbled as the amateur pianist kept at it, taking breaks only for snacks and other necessities. She reeled off everything from Chopin to Hoagy Carmichael, as her opponents — all professional musicians — fell one by one.

"Our whole family just stood there watching her incredulously," said her daughter, Lynn Scott Myers of Decatur.

It was all a publicity stunt for Kawai pianos, but in the end, Mrs. Myers walked away with $1,000 and an entry in the 1965 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records as "the longest continuous female piano player."

Her daughter suspects the contest was thrown in her mother's favor.

"There was my mother up there smiling in her little flower-print dress, and people were enthralled," she said. "But this Japanese piano company wanted an amateur to win because they wanted to appeal to the general population."

Not that Mrs. Myers would have cared. To her, the whole thing was a lark.

Dorothy Hudson Myers, 88, of Cartersville died of heart failure July 18 at Budd Terrace at Wesley Woods. The body was cremated. Memorial plans will be announced. R.T. Patterson Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.

Once the commotion — including an appearance on the TV game show "What's My Line?" — died down, Mrs. Myers went back to being the relatively quiet person she'd always been, an arts fanatic who wrote poetry, composed one-act plays and painted landscapes, still-lifes and portraits.

After she moved with her family to Cartersville in 1967, the Brooklyn, N.Y., native helped found The Palette Club, a group of painters who met every Wednesday, often at her studio.

They'd bring sandwiches, talk politics and encourage each other as they painted.

"She was such a good friend, things will not be the same again," said one of its members, Betty Pierce, of Cartersville.

After they'd taken a long car trip together, she told Mrs. Myers, "you are the most interesting person I've ever known."

"I never got bored that whole drive," Mrs. Pierce said. "She kept me entertained the entire time."

Mrs. Myers had little use for housework and cooking. When her husband, the late Clayton Scott Myers, was out of town, she let her children eat corn flakes and play poker at the kitchen table while she practiced the harp.

She encouraged them to learn musical instruments and to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio every Saturday.

She read novels by Norman Mailer, John Cheever, Philip Roth and other contemporary authors and wrote them letters to comment on their work. Usually, they wrote back.

And when she read bedtime stories — from Greek myths to Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince" — she'd get so overwhelmed by the poignancy of the tales, she'd burst into tears along with her children.

She harbored a deep well of sympathy for people of all races and classes, yet she possessed a finely tuned sense of the ridiculous.

When one of her paintings was stolen from an exhibit at a Cartersville bank, "she was delighted," her daughter said. "To think that someone had actually taken her painting and it was hanging somewhere in their house, she thought that was terrific."

Survivors other than her daughter include two sons, Stewart Wilson Myers of Bayville, N.Y., and Edwin Dorsey Myers of Atlanta; a sister, Phyllis Hudson Fairchild, of Pueblo, Colo.; five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.