Nunc dimittis: The Children's Chime Tower

An explosion of creativity

We have learned to tell time according to the pandemic, separating the “before and after” times as many of us have settled into vaccinated life and relaxed our mask-wearing regimens. I did not take to the air until a quick trip to Houston in February, but I had a couple other trips this year before Wendy and I went to Greece and Italy in May. Our daughter lived in Athens for five years, and her husband is Greek, so we have deep connections with family there, and our trip was planned around the “destination christening” of our youngest grandchild. That family of four (there is a five-year-old sister) lives in Brooklyn, but his parents were eager to follow the Greek tradition of christening, which is scaled a lot like a wedding with a big catered party, so off we went.

After the family festival, we flew from Athens to Tuscany, landing in Bologna and taking a train to Florence. It was my first time in Italy, and I was excited to see the Renaissance art I had studied so eagerly in college and to learn whether all I have heard about food in Italy is true. It is. In preparation for the trip, I read Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King, a vibrant history of the building of the great Duomo in Florence, the competitions to determine the architect, and the extraordinary feat of the construction of the immense dome, which is still the largest in the world nearly 600 years after its completion.

Construction of the nave of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower) was begun in 1296 and completed in 1380, a timespan that included fifty years of slow progress due to lack of funding and a ten-year hiatus because of the Black Death. As the nave was nearing completion, there was no concept of how to build a dome whose base would be 180 feet off the ground and whose diameter would be nearly 150 feet. It seems a little funny to have built such a huge structure without knowing how to complete it, but during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, architects were experimenting with the limits of structure, resulting in events like the collapse in 1284 of part of the cathedral at Beauvais in France, which was so tall and had such huge windows that the flying buttresses could not support the structure.

Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1436), a goldsmith, sculptor, and architect, entered a competition along with goldsmith and sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) for the design of the dome. Ghiberti had earlier beaten Brunelleschi in a competition for the design of the huge bronze doors of the baptistry that shares the piazza with the cathedral. You can imagine there was no love lost between those two. Brunelleschi’s plan for the dome would involve no centering scaffold, which had never been done before, and included the invention of equipment that would hoist stones weighing up to two tons to the extreme height of the dome, 375 feet up. The main hoisting crane was powered by oxen walking on a circular treadmill installed in the crossing of the cathedral. Imagine the hay bale and shovel maintenance of that machine! 

The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (Museum of the Works of the Cathedral), just across the narrow street behind the apse of the cathedral, houses Lorenzo Ghiberti’s original bronze baptistry doors, protected from the elements and replaced by brilliant replicas at the baptistry. Each door includes twenty-eight reliefs depicting scenes from the Old Testament; each door is fifteen feet tall and weighs thirty tons. It must have been quite a challenge for fifteenth-century craftsmen to hang those doors on freely swinging hinges. There is also a display of hoisting tackle used during the construction of the dome, much like the gear used on Organ Clearing House job sites. 

I recommend King’s Brunelleschi’s Dome, a fascinating read that provides vivid images of life in fourteenth-century Florence and insight into some of the brilliant minds of the Renaissance. King’s descriptions of the roads and spaces around the Duomo evoke the smells of the thirteenth-century city and are a fun prelude to walking on the same streets today. Those streets are defined by 600-year-old buildings and were not designed for modern traffic. Delivery and garbage trucks are in miniature scale, taxis are ubiquitous, and flocks of tourists cling to the edges in single file as the vehicles squeeze by.

Adjacent to the Duomo is the campanile designed and built by Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1267–1337). Many of his paintings grace churches in Florence, particularly in Santa Croce (Holy Cross), which contains a dazzling display of Renaissance art. The campanile, whose construction started in 1334, almost 700 years ago, is almost fifty feet square and nearly 280 feet tall. It houses seven bells, the largest of which is about eighty inches in diameter.

The exterior of the campanile is decorated with dozens of relief panels about eighteen inches across, some diamond-shaped and some hexagonal. The collection depicts the planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the moon), theological and cardinal virtues, liberal arts (music, geometry, rhetoric, etc.), and the seven sacraments. Human history is depicted, along with the mechanical and creative arts (music, blacksmith, building, medicine, agriculture, etc.). These spectacular pieces were started by Andrea Pisano (1290–1348) in 1347 and completed by his workshop after his death. Like the baptistry doors, the original pieces have been removed to the museum to protect them from the elements and replaced outside on the building with replicas.

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Thirty-nine years after the death of Brunelleschi, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475–1564) was born in Caprese, about seventy-two miles from Florence. I have studied, thought, and written about Michelangelo’s genius and the spectacular art he produced, but finally visiting Florence where so much of his work is preserved was the thrill of a lifetime. David is breathtaking. I had the same feeling when I saw Van Gogh’s Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art in New York or stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon for the first time. I had heard and read so much about it and seen countless photographs, but nothing prepares you for standing in its presence in real time. Michelangelo captured the entire human condition in that piece of stone. He proved to us that people in the early-sixteenth century were just like us, not counting the last half century of Cheetos and French fries.

Michelangelo created this seventeen-foot-tall statue between 1501 and 1504 at the age of twenty-six. The exhibit hall that David dominates also includes several unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo that offer a glimpse into how a human figure is drawn from a block of stone. The finished David weighs about six tons. The original stone must have weighed at least twice that. Michelangelo started chipping away early in the morning of Friday, September 13, 1501. I suppose he worked through the weekend. It seems a miracle that he was able to pull that figure out of that stone.

So much has been written about this iconic sculpture, the youthful pose, the contemplative but tense facial expression. While many representations of David show him after his defeat of Goliath, Michelangelo’s David is shown just before the battle, after he has determined to fight. Muscles bulge with tension, and the body is slightly twisted as though he is about to spring into action. The surface of the marble shimmers, and the figure seems almost alive. We stood staring, taking a few steps to change the angle, with a sense of awe . . . amid a throng of tourists with phones in their hands. Some looked up from their phones to snap a picture, but most were nose down, immersed in their screens in the presence of one of the most famous pieces of art in the world. It is a triumph of human expression, of one man’s interpretation of a legendary mythical moment in time, his squeezing life, action, and emotion from a huge piece of stone, and most of the people in the room were not present to appreciate it, taking up space while dulling their minds.

Wendy’s car has an annoying feature that nags the driver when taking eyes off the road—look to one side for a few seconds too long, and you hear a loud ding as the dashboard flashes, “Eyes on the road.” I wonder if a museum hall could have such a feature. Take your eyes off the art, and you get ejected.

A lucky stroke during our visit to Florence was to visit the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo just as it opened in the morning. Ghiberti’s bronze doors are among the first things you see as you enter, but deeper into the museum is another masterpiece of Michelangelo, The Deposition, the same scene as his famous Pietà in Rome, Jesus being removed from the Cross. It is smaller in scale than David, the figures are roughly life-sized, but like David across town, it is exquisite. Michelangelo worked on this piece between 1547 and 1555, when he was in his seventies. It is supposed that the figure of Nicodemus standing behind Christ is Michelangelo’s self-portrait. We were lucky because we were alone in the room with The Deposition for over fifteen minutes. I did take some photos, but I did not check email, send a text, or order dog food to be delivered before we got home.

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The lives of Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi encompass the earliest days of organ building. There are different theories about the age of the organ in the Basilica at Sion, Switzerland, made famous by E. Power Biggs’s recording from the 1960s. His jacket notes claimed it was built in 1390, while scholars and historians have suggested 1435. In any event, that instrument is from the same time as Ghiberti’s doors and Brunelleschi’s dome—all three artworks are tributes to the skill, ingenuity, and creativity of the day. The organ in the Koorkerk van Middelburg, Utrecht, the Netherlands, dates from 1479, and the organ in the Grote Kerk in Oosthuizen was built in 1521.

Andrea Gabrieli (1532–1585) was appointed organist of San Marco in Venice in 1566, two years after Michelangelo’s death. Orlando di Lasso (1532–1594) was born when Michelangelo was fifty-seven. Di Lasso and Gabrieli met in Munich in 1562, exchanging musical ideas that surely advanced the art of music during the Renaissance. Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621) was born in Deventer in the Netherlands two years before Michelangelo’s death. It is interesting to note that all this dazzling creativity was going on in Europe 200 years before the American Revolution. Sweelinck died the same year that British colonists landed at
Plymouth, Massachusetts.

To the hills

We rented a car in Florence and drove to Camaiore, thirty minutes northeast of Lucca, near the coast of the Ligurian Sea, where we spent four nights in a hilltop villa owned by a wine merchant friend in New York. The house was a lofty eighteenth-century place with thirteen-foot ceilings, marble floors, and feral cats. The bathtub was Carrara marble, as was the three-foot-wide kitchen sink. Our friend directed us to the local butcher, coffee shop, and pasta house. We had lunches in the pasta restaurant and cooked dinners at “home” for the nights we were there using the home-made pasta, treats from the butcher, and produce from a fruit and vegetable shop. 

From Camaiore we took day trips to Lucca where we visited Puccini’s birthplace and Carrara to see the quarry that was the source of the stone provided to Michelangelo for the masterpieces we had seen in Florence. We were there on a Sunday, so there was no work going on, but we saw hundreds of heavy trucks lined up at the nearby port loaded with stones marked in the tens of thousands of pounds. It is a dramatic mountain drive to the quarry itself, and we marveled at the skill and determination of fifteenth-century workers who managed to separate those huge blocks of marble from the mountain and transport them eighty-five miles to Florence. We got out of the car at the gated entrance to a quarry yard full of heavy equipment to soak in the view, and I pocketed three plum-sized chunks of marble that now sit on my desk as inspiration.

Mangia

We drove to Bologna, turned in our car, and took to the streets. After finding our hotel, we met a guide we had engaged for a personal food tour of the old city. Books have been written about experiences like that (I know because I’ve read them), but to walk from shop to shop for three hours with that charming woman sharing her passion about the city’s culinary culture was a highpoint of the trip, not to offend Brunelleschi and Michelangelo. Meat preserved and presented in hundreds of ways is everywhere. The care and pride that goes into the whole gamut of raising, processing, presenting, selling, and consuming food is obvious as people with gleaming smiles offered us samples and described their lives. We were taken to a “laboratory” associated with one of the finest pasta shops where a dozen women were making pasta of all descriptions. I was especially enchanted by Consuela who was making tortellini, taking a pinch of the pork filling from a pouch, and twisting little squares of pasta into the classic shape. They offered us a sample, gently boiled with a little Bolognese sauce. I have nothing to add.

Spectacular meals with exquisite wines (we came home with a new appreciation for Sangiovese), lots more art including Michelangelo, and driving rain completed our short stay in Bologna. It is a city of porticoes, long colonnades that line many of the city’s streets, more than twenty-four miles of them. They originated in the Middle Ages, some dating from before 1100, and were developed to increase the interior space of the upper floors of houses, leaving space for pedestrians at ground level. Most of them have vaulted ceilings, many of which are decorated with frescos. However much they increased the square footage of a city apartment, they sure were handy during four days of steady rain. We were feeling a little grumpy about the constant rain until we learned while checking out of our hotel that thirty inches of rain had fallen in just a couple days north of Bologna, terrible flooding was ruining crops and destroying houses, and more than eighty people had died. Desk clerks and taxi drivers were distraught about the regional calamity.

We flew to Zürich from Bologna where we changed planes to fly home to Boston. I was working on my iPad during the first flight and put it in the pocket of the seat in front of me when a meal was served, and got off the airplane without it. We had left the plane on the tarmac and were bused to the terminal, so I knew there was no hope of getting back to the plane, and I started an online claim for the lost article. As we were taking our seats in the next plane, an airport worker in a reflective vest handed me the iPad. They found it while cleaning the plane and traced our seat numbers. Fly Swiss Air.

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We were enriched by our ten-day immersion in Renaissance art, and I kept thinking about how the history of the organ and its music developed concurrently with the work of Brunelleschi and Michelangelo. Heinrich Scheidemann (1595–1663) was born sixty-three years after Andrea Gabrieli. Dieterich Buxtehude’s lifespan (c. 1637–1707) overlapped with Scheidemann’s by forty-two years, and Johann Sebastian Bach was born forty-eight years after Buxtehude. That succession of great musicians who nourished the art of the organ takes us from the time of Michelangelo to Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809).

The Renaissance was an explosion of creativity and inventiveness that covered the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Art, architecture, music, and science increased exponentially. I have mentioned some of the giants, but each of the great museums we visited is chock full of the work of dozens of other artists.  

We’re living in a time of political mayhem and ecological disasters. Take an afternoon to visit a museum and be reminded about what’s good about human expression, and draw the lines that connect the organ and its history to the wide world of arts and humanities.

Shipping and handling included

Wendy and I live in a building with about two hundred households. We are mostly anonymous neighbors; just a few fellow residents are casual acquaintances. The people we chat with the most are the other dog owners, and we are more likely to know the dogs’ names than their owners’. Farley the goldendoodle is a cheerful and friendly guy so he attracts a lot of attention in the elevators and lobby.

Living in close proximity to that many people, we are constantly reminded of what a click-and-ship world we live in. Adjoining the building’s lobby is a large package room lined with shelves ten feet high where the doormen sort hundreds of parcels. Since Amazon started same day delivery in the city, as many as a half-dozen delivery trucks stop each day.

Twice a week, mountains of trash and recyclables are piled on the sidewalks including thousands of collapsed cardboard boxes tied with twine. Along with the boxes, we routinely throw away bales of bubble wrap, tons of Styrofoam peanuts, and miles of strips of air-cushion bladders. It can be a wicked nuisance dealing with a big carton of peanuts. It is especially annoying when they get charged with static electricity and I cannot get them off me. And for goodness sake, keep them away from the dog.

I am thinking about packaging today because I am just finishing an organ project in my little workshop in Maine, starting to take things apart and getting them ready for shipment. Yesterday, I went to a storage locker I rent nearby and loaded several empty pipe trays into my car. The standard size we make at the Organ Clearing House is eight-feet by two-feet by eight-inches deep. They are larger than those made by some other companies, and when they are full, they are heavy, but we think they are just right. Low EE of most 8′ stops fits in those eight-foot trays, so we also make some ten-footers to hold the biggest four pipes. We can get the biggest four of an 8′ Principal into one of those, or the biggest four of two 8′ strings.

My car is a Chevrolet Suburban, big enough to hold an eight-foot rowing dinghy with the doors closed. A guy at a local boatyard called it a Chevy “Subdivision.” When there is no boat inside, I can get four eight-foot trays in the car with the doors closed.

I took the pipes off the windchests and laid them out in order on a big work surface. I lined the bottom of each tray with a ¼-inch thick Styrofoam sheet (we buy it in 250-foot rolls, perforated every foot, three rolls come in a “tube”). I opened a carton of clean 24-inch x 36-inch newsprint, and started wrapping pipes. With experience, you get a sense of how many pipes should be in a package. I use several sheets of newsprint at a time to weave between six-foot pipes so they cannot bump against each other. Going up the scale, getting to around tenor F of an 8′ stop (a three-foot pipe), each pipe is wrapped individually. After middle C, two to a package, then three, then maybe as many as six or seven treble pipes. When I am putting several pipes in a package, I roll it each time so there is paper between each pipe, and I fold the ends over opposite sides to increase the padding. My favorite local butcher does the same thing with the marvelous sausages he makes. A piece of tape holds the package closed, and the bundles are lined up in the trays. If the pipes are not very heavy, I can put a couple layers in a tray separated with Styrofoam.

My personal shop is a three-car garage that adjoins our house, and this is a tiny organ. It started as an M. P. Möller Double Artiste, and we are adding a third three-rank division to make a total of nine unified ranks. The user interface is a large three-manual console, also by Möller but from a different organ, equipped with a fancy combination action. It is to be a practice organ for a school of music, providing students with a platform for working on the complex Romantic and symphonic registrations that are so popular these days. This will be a simple shipment, nowhere near a full truck. The only complication is that we will be driving it over the Rocky Mountains in mid-winter.

That load will include eleven trays, nine with pipes and two with odds and ends, bits and pieces (the stuff Alan Laufman called “chowder”), console, bench, three windchests, two “expressive” cases including shutters and shutter motors, three wind regulators with windlines, a blower, the biggest pipes of a nicely mitered 16′ Bourdon (too big for trays), and the rest of the flotsam and jetsam it takes to make an organ. I am guessing the load will weigh around 6,000 pounds including the trays and packing materials. We will also be carrying a new residence organ built by a colleague firm, as its new owner lives in the same western city. We are always happy to throw another organ on the back of the truck if there is space.

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When we estimate the cost for dismantling and packing an organ, we consider the number of person-days and crew expenses like travel, meals, and lodging. We decide whether we will need to rent scaffolding and set up hoisting equipment, and we figure how much we will need in the way of packing materials. An important variable is the tray count, which varies as much by the style of an organ as it does by number of ranks. If we are packing an organ with mechanical action built in the 1970s with low wind pressure and small scales, we can figure on two or three ranks per tray. (A usual four-rank mixture easily fits in a single tray. You just have to be sure you label the packages so you do not mix up the ranks.) If we are packing a heavy Romantic organ like something built by Skinner, it is more like two or three trays per rank. A big fat Skinner 8′ French Horn can fill four trays!

Based on long experience, we run down the printed stoplist of an organ and note how many trays we will need for each stop, and I enter the totals for eight-foot and ten-foot trays into a spreadsheet that spits out the lumber list. A four-by-eight sheet of 7⁄16-inch OSB (Oriented Strand Board) makes two tray bottoms, and it takes two ten-foot pine 1 x 8s to make the sides and ends. When we dismantled an eighty-rank Aeolian residence organ on Long Island (imagine that!), we figured we would need 160 eight-foot trays and 40 ten-footers, and I sent this list to City Lumber in Long Island City, New York:

120 4′ x 8′ sheets OSB

320 10′ 1′′ x 8′′

80 12′ 1′′ x 8′′

120 8′ 1′′ x 2′′ strapping (10 bundles) for battens on tray tops

1,680 feet ¼′′ x 2′-wide Styrofoam (7 rolls)

50 pounds 15⁄8′′ coarse thread drywall screws

The bill was $5,277.33, including delivery, and we gave the driver a $50 tip.

When we have finished dismantling an organ, the packed trays go on the truck first. A standard semi-trailer is 100-inches wide inside so we can stack four piles wide. If we make stacks of ten trays each, we can cap the stacks with sheets of plywood and put 16-foot metal bass pipes up top. The big metal pipes are wrapped individually in Styrofoam for protection. Interior height of the trailer is 110 inches. Four trays wide and ten high, that is forty trays for each eight feet of trailer. The trailer is 53-feet long—240 trays is a truck full. That is less than the tray count for the wonderful Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City.

When we are packing an organ that large, the trays are just the beginning. Think about the organ’s biggest pipes, like that 32′ Double Open Wood Diapason. The biggest pipe is more than 35-feet long, and about two-feet square. I guess that pipe weighs 1,500 pounds and by itself makes a big dent in an empty trailer. Three 32′ ranks (Diapason, Bourdon, and reed) and the windchests of that huge organ fill truck number two. Reservoirs, shutters, expression motors, tremulants, windlines, ladders, and walkboards fill truck number three. And number four brings the console, frames, expression box panels, blowers, and 8,000 pounds of chowder.

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Most of the trucks with box trailers that you see on the highway are carrying loads of goods that are all the same size, packed on pallets whose dimensions are calculated to exactly fill the trailer’s interior space. Paper towels, potato chips, mattresses, and tableware are packed in boxes whose dimensions exactly correspond with the pallets. A truck backs up to a loading dock, and a forklift runs in and out carrying pallets, two or three at a time. The trailer is nothing but a metal and fiberglass box. There are no hooks, cleats, or straps to fasten the load. There is no need, because the load assembles to the same dimensions of the trailer, and it takes fifteen minutes to pack.

We engage special commodity trucks, which come with lots of special equipment. There are highway bars that span the interior by clicking into vertical tracks on the trailer walls and support plywood floors, so we can build a second story that safely carries smaller components. There are ramps and hydraulic tailgates because we almost never have the luxury of a loading dock, and a standard complement of twenty-dozen quilted furniture pads. We specify that we will need six or eight hours to load the truck as they typically charge extra when it is more than two hours. The trays go into the truck fast and neat, and the rest of the organ is like a ten-ton game of Tetrus. Because no two parts of the organ are the same size, the pallet-and-forklift equation does not work at all. Each piece of the organ is wrapped with pads as it enters the truck. At the other end of the trip, it is a huge job just to fold all those heavy pads, and the drivers are always fussy about making neat piles.

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Most of the organs we move fit into “Bobtail” trucks, the standard single-body box trucks we can rent from Ryder or Penske. A usual two-manual organ fits in a single truck. Forty years ago, when I was first in the organ business, there was little in the way of regulation controlling the type of trucking we do. Today, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration makes us jump through regulatory hoops. If we are carrying an organ that we have owned and are selling to a client, there is no problem. But if we are carrying an organ that belongs to someone else, like a church or school, especially if we are crossing state lines, we have to be ready with our DOT and MC (Motor Carrier) numbers whenever we encounter a weigh station on the highway. That makes us an official trucking company, and I receive a lot of a gear-jamming junk mail that has nothing to do with organs.

In 2008, we were engaged to bring an organ to an important church in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and we would include a dozen pianos in the shipment for a couple churches and orphanages I had visited. I found a moving company in Maine that had a barn full of surplus pianos, rented a truck, loaded them up, and started down the Maine Turnpike. As required, I stopped in the weigh station where the state trooper asked me, “What are you carrying?” “Pianos,” I answered. “Where are you taking them?” My sense of the ridiculous took control, and I answered, “Madagascar!” He directed me into a parking area where three troopers spent a half hour trying to find something wrong with my paperwork, with the truck, with its required emergency flares and reflectors, anything they could think of.

We have worked with many drivers over the years, mostly owner/operators who contract with central dispatchers. Richard Mowen was a special favorite, a wiry little man with a huge Peterbilt tractor. He had replaced the Caterpillar diesel engine after two million miles, and he traveled with a little dog in the cab. Many commercial drivers only come and go from big warehouses with loading docks, while our work in churches around the country is anything but predictable. It may be a narrow cross street in Manhattan or a winding dirt road in a rural village. Richard could put that rig anywhere. It is much more difficult to back a semi-trailer when you have to go backwards to the right, because that is the blind side. It was fun watching him figure his angle, nudging the tailgate right where we wanted it.

Richard loved carrying pipe organs. He moved many organs for us, and we recommended him to a number of colleague companies. He considered organs to be a specialty, and he was a treasure. Sadly, he had a heart attack that took him off the road, but he is still around. We miss his great work and thank him for his terrific service to our industry. Richard left us with one of the best driving tips ever. “I can drive down that hill too slow as many times as I want. I can do it too fast only once.” We will remember that next month when we are driving down the far side of the Rockies.

Then there is the guy who was dispatched to drive an organ from New Haven, Connecticut, to Reno, Nevada. With the truck loaded, we were chatting and joking on the sidewalk by the church when the driver mentioned that it was a good thing we were not shipping the organ to Canada, because he had been busted for transporting firearms illegally and was not allowed to drive there anymore. I called the dispatcher and requested a different driver.

Through all the shipments over the years, there was one that involved significant damage to the organ. We packed and loaded an organ in New York City and sent it off to Los Angeles. The shipment was to be received by a crew from the European company that built it, and they would install it in the church there. The truck arrived as scheduled, and when they opened the doors, they found a mess of broken woodwork and organ parts. There was a language barrier between the organbuilders and the insurance adjuster who viewed the damage. When they told the adjuster that they might have packed things differently, he interpreted that they were saying we had been negligent. Knowing that was not true, I got the adjuster to agree to reconsider if I went to Los Angeles to present a case.

That shipment had an unusual stipulation. We were required to remove the organ from the building in New York before a certain date, and the delivery could not happen until after a certain date, which meant that the organ would be in the truck several days longer than the actual travel time, and we had arranged to pay a daily standstill fee. Naively, I imagined that the truck would sit still in a parking lot. It did not take very much digging to learn that the driver had taken advantage of the situation and made a detour to visit family in the mountains of Tennessee. The trucking company admitted that there had been “an incident” on the road, and the insurance claim was paid.

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It is fun to think of the romance of building a fine organ, with dedicated craftsmen working together in a comfortable shop, cutting and milling wood, working leather and metal, building the thousands of individual pieces that combine to create an organ. The next time you are playing or listening to an organ, especially a really big one, give a thought to the physical challenge of taking all those pieces and parts from one place to another. The shipping industry calls it logistics or material handling. I think it is a great glimpse into yet another reason that pipe organs are so special. What other musician can measure the size of the instrument by the truckload?

When a load is complete, paperwork signed, doors locked, and the driver climbs into his cab, we give a classic truckers’ greeting, “Shiny side up!”

One size fits all.

As a plus-sized organ guy whose shoulders are four or five inches wider than an airplane seat, I always sit in an aisle seat so I do not have to crunch up against my neighbor. Instead, I am regularly clobbered by the flight attendant’s cart and the sloppiest of my fellow passengers as they negotiate the trek to the restroom. Years ago, on a flight to who knows where, I was seated next to a young woman who was sitting with her legs curled under her on her seat. I marveled at her flexibility, and when we stood to deplane, I realized she was under five feet tall and weighed a hundred pounds or less. We had paid the same price for our seats, and she was sitting perfectly comfortably while I was squeezed into my seat like toothpaste in a tube. Hats, mittens, or leggings might be sold as one-size-fits-all, but I know that really means they will be loose on small people and tight on large people.

So it goes with education. Modern public schools are governed by the demands of standardized testing as if every child in America needs an identical education. My son Chris teaches English as a second language in an urban public high school where his students are first- or second-generation immigrants who speak Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinese at home, as it is typical that their parents do not speak English. These kids cannot be expected to thrive if they are being held to the same standards as their classmates who grew up speaking nothing but English. It is a heinous form of discrimination.

My other son Mike did not finish high school but worked in a succession of bicycle shops as a teenager and graduated to specialized piping, building the complex networks of tubing in university research labs. When he told me he had learned to do internal welding on eighth-inch stainless steel tubing, I knew he was going to be okay. He has now had a fifteen-year career with an architectural fabrication firm where he builds high-end signage with complex electrical systems, like the miles of LED displays that encircle the guitar-shaped Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. He built and installed all the road signs for Terminal B of Logan Airport in Boston (“Central Parking, Next Left”), interior signs for Madison Square Garden including the jumbotron, and the new Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. You might think that Mike is disadvantaged because he did not have algebra or calculus in high school, but he uses more complex mathematics at his workstation every day than many of us do in a lifetime.

I had an industrial arts class in middle school where I learned to use a stationary shear, a metal brake, rollers, and rivets making a half-pipe-shaped, sheet-metal firewood caddy with decorative black iron legs and hoop handle. That gold-painted beauty stood next to the fireplace in my parents’ home until they moved into assisted living forty years later. I had algebra in high school, but I sure spent a lot of days in my career as an organ builder developing the metal-working skills I learned when I was thirteen.

In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin Press, 2009), Matthew Crawford wrote about the dwindling of public school industrial arts education as schools focused more on standardized testing and achieving 100% college admissions. The second paragraph of his book’s introduction begins, “The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.” He goes on to describe how modern engineering focuses on “hiding the works” by designing machines so that you cannot tell how they are put together or how they work. Open the hood of a new car, and you can hardly tell there is an engine in there, and to keep our precious hands clean, some newer Mercedes models do not have dipsticks, as if it is not the owner’s responsibility to pay attention to whether there is oil in the engine.

In 1917, Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act that provided funding for manual training in public schools, both as part of general education and as designated vocational schools. Crawford cites that starting around 1980, 80% of public high school shop programs began to disappear.¹ Throughout the book, he makes the case that while some people flourish practicing law or managing businesses, many people are cut out to work with their hands, gaining the satisfaction of making or repairing something, what he calls “primary work.” He points out that surgery is a meeting of intellectual and manual disciplines. Standardized testing implies that a kid who is destined to be a plumber needs the same foundation as one who will be a musician or a corporate executive. Who can tell the future of a ten-year-old? You can’t. You provide all children with an education that includes academics, the arts and humanities, the industrial world, and sports, and hope that each child will be captivated by something—liberal arts for teenagers.

Simply reading the table of contents of Crawford’s book gives an overview of his point of view regarding the manual arts: “A Brief Case for the Useful Arts;” “The Separation of Thinking from Doing;” “To Be Master of One’s Own Stuff;” “The Education of a Gearhead;” “The Further Education of a Gearhead: From Amateur to Professional;” “The Contradictions of the Cubicle;” “Thinking as Doing;” “Work, Leisure, and Full Engagement.” As an organ builder, I have spent much of my life negotiating and contemplating the differences between blue- and white-collar work, and I recommend this book as a good read with lively writing and philosophical musings from the life of a literary motorcycle mechanic.

Early in my career, living and working in Oberlin, Ohio, one of our friends taught diesel mechanics at the vocational high school. What could be more valuable to a rural farming community than a new generation of diesel mechanics? Let’s face it, we need plumbers and auto mechanics more than we need organ builders. Those kids at Voke-Tech were onto something.

Jack of all trades

David Margonelli was a woodworker whose shop was in Edgecomb, Maine, a few miles downriver from our house. His first woodworking project was a Barnegat Bay Sneakbox, a small shallow draft boat that could be sailed, rowed, poled, or sculled. He was interested in Shaker furniture early on, and over the years developed pieces that combined the Shaker tradition with elegant curves such as a chest of drawers with bowed front or a bow-legged dining table. He had an elaborate vacuum table set up in his shop, like that found in many organ building workshops used for gluing windchest tables to grids, that allowed him to use the pressure of the atmosphere to create his curved elements.

We have one of his tables in our apartment in New York. It is made of cherry with the signature bowed legs and a neat sliding mechanism to allow the addition of two leafs for larger dinners. It has been the host of countless wonderful dinners, and its graceful shape is a beautiful addition to our home. David was a gnarly old guy, very sure of himself, and proud of his designs and craftsmanship, and I loved visiting his shop as much as I love sharing meals at his table.

Camden, Maine, a coastal town an hour or so east from us, is home to a little shop that sells handmade leather goods where I bought a bag made of supple black leather that I use as a second briefcase. It is just the size of an iPad or letter-sized paper folded in half and has three zipper compartments with enough space for a phone/iPad charger, hand sanitizer, pens, a Moleskine notebook, and a bottle of water. It has a long, adjustable leather strap so I can carry it around my neck, and I take it to local meetings and on short trips when I know I am not going to need my MacBook. I never met the artisan who made it, but I appreciate the accurate cutting of the material, the careful hand stitching, and the thoughtful usefulness of the design.

Early in 2013, I was tuning a venerable Hutchings organ in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when a 127-year-old ladder collapsed under me. I had a classic view of a receding ceiling and landed flat on my back on the miraculously flat and uncluttered floor of the organ. (If I had landed on a windline, I would have never walked again.) Following surgery and rehab, and our first season with our new sailboat (we called it the Sciatica Cruise), I contacted those clients whose organs were particularly treacherous and suggested (required) that we would install new ladders, handholds, and railings to reduce the risk of accidents. There is a little metal fabricating shop in our neighboring village of Damariscotta, Maine, where two guys cut and weld iron to make things like gear for commercial fishing boats amidst a gallery of tool calendars. I took them drawings for a collection of railings and ladders, and it is a lot safer to work in those organs now.

All these skills and the specialized tools involved are part of the art of organ building. Add to them sophisticated electrical systems, mechanical and structural engineering, architecture, and the musical realm of voicing and tuning, and you approach the complete organ builder.

It takes a village.

Having spent countless hours and days on job sites, bringing organs in and out of churches and maintaining those in place, I reflect frequently on the wide range of trades and vocations. An organ builder must be conversant with musicians, clergy, and the lay or professional leaders who operate churches and equally at home with custodians, electricians, HVAC workers, and the plumbers who install overhead sprinkler systems. We deal with building and fire inspectors, insurance adjusters, and lumber vendors. And working with the Organ Clearing House, almost every job involves scaffolding and trucking. It is funny to deal with a big-city pastor and a scaffold delivery driver from Queens, New York, in the same morning, especially when it turns out that the pastor is the tough customer while the driver is a sweetheart who just wants to get things right.

In 2004, we dismantled a huge M. P. Möller organ in a chamber above the 125-foot-high ceiling of a 19,000-seat convention center. As it was in the union city of Philadelphia, we started the project with a meeting that would define who would be allowed to do what work. Representatives of the unions for riggers, laborers, and carpenters were present along with administrators of the University of Pennsylvania, which owned the site. I described how delicate organ parts can be in spite of their industrial appearance, and the guy from the riggers’ union assured me that their men had vast experience. “We’ve been rigging in Philadelphia for 100 years, we’re the guys who moved the Liberty Bell.” I quipped, “Are you the ones who cracked it?” He did not think it was funny, but there were audible snickers around the table. The laborers insisted they should be in the organ chamber with us, moving the crates around. In the end, I won the point that we “owned” the organ chamber, that no one but us could handle organ parts until they were packed, but as soon as a crate or organ part got to the riggers’ rope we could not touch it again. We found out that “touch” really meant touch. Later in the job, one of our guys was on the floor guiding the laborers about how to place and stack crates, and he pushed a loaded dolly a few feet. A whistle blew, the work stopped, and I had to go to an emergency meeting with the unions to smooth things over.

Mike, one of the riggers, showed up one morning looking pretty rough. His pal told us that he had been in a bar the night before that had a boxing ring set up where patrons could wrestle with a bear, and the bear had won. Hughie (six foot, eight inches tall) stands out in my memory. The union was requiring him to attend anger management classes because he had beat up a highway toll collector as he passed through the booth. (Who gets that angry in that short a time?) We got along famously, and I will never forget the goodbye hug he gave me when the job was finished. The music theory classes I had at Oberlin had nothing to do with preparing me for Hughie’s hug, but I am sure that my knowledge of theory and harmony has informed my tuning.

§

We are all aware of the decline of “electives” in public schools like home economics, industrial arts, and the arts in general. The focus on college acceptance and standardized tests seems to hinder a thorough education. It is a common sentiment now that public schools could and should offer courses in life skills like family budgeting, tax preparation, investing, and auto maintenance, things that all of us need to know and learn on our own later if our parents do not teach us.

I repeat the quote from Matthew Crawford’s book, “The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.” When I visit an art museum, I marvel at the manual skills of painters, sculptors, potters, and jewelers from centuries and millennia past. If you have never held tools in your hands, never tried to carve a piece of wood, or never put brush and paint to canvas, you will have less understanding of the magic that is around you. Visit the ancient sites in Greece or Rome, and imagine the knowledge, skill, and singular sense of purpose necessary to build the Colosseum, a 10,000-seat amphitheater, or craft an ornately decorated pottery urn.

When I was an apprentice in John Leek’s shop in Oberlin, Ohio, he taught me how to plane a rough board by hand before letting me loose on the thickness planer. That was a great lesson about sharpening and handling tools and understanding the flow of grain in a piece of wood so my plane would not tear chips out of the surface if I worked against the grain. That experience enhanced my appreciation of the historic organs I have visited and worked on in the United States and Europe. That iconic fifty-foot-tall organ case in Haarlem is made of lumber that was planed and cut without electric tools and machines. I get blisters on my hands just thinking about it. Since the fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, we have seen video footage of the wooden superstructure of that building, made by artisans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Felling trees, milling them into huge beams, transporting them from the forest to the city, and hoisting them hundreds of feet in the air with only the power of humans and oxen to haul wagons and turn winches is practically beyond belief.

Wendy and I are in New York City this week, and because of some complicated twists of schedule, a friend is staying in our house in Maine taking care of Farley, the Goldendoodle. She called at five o’clock Saturday evening saying there was no running water in the house. I walked her through resetting the pump at the wellhead without results, so I called Darren, the plumber. Meanwhile, I told her that she had three flushes (there are three toilets), after which she could use the outhouse. Darren was at the house in fifteen minutes, cleaned the filter at the pressure tanks (of course, the filter), and Cassie had water again. Take good care of your plumber, pay his bills promptly, and he will take good care of you.

Notes

1. Michael B. Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin Press, 2009), p. 11.

String too short to save

After my freshman year at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, I spent the summer working with Bozeman-Gibson & Company in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was 1975, and on my first day working in an organ shop, I was set up in the parking lot with sawhorses, a set of painted façade pipes, a can of Zip-Strip®, and a hose. If that wasn’t enough to send me running, I guess I was hooked. They were working on the restoration of an 1848 Stevens organ in Belfast, Maine, completing a new organ in Castleton, Vermont, and installing a rebuilt historic tracker (I do not remember the builder) in a Salvation Army chapel in Providence, Rhode Island. A lot of the summer was spent driving around New England between those organs, my first glimpse into the life of a vagabond organ guy.

During my sophomore year I started working part time for John Leek, the organ and harpsichord technician for the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. I spent the next summer working with Bozeman during which the company moved to their permanent workshop in Deerfield, Massachusetts. There were a couple hours of “barn building” each day after the organ building. I continued part time with Leek as long as I was a student and switched to full time after I graduated. Counting the summers and part-time work, I have been at it for forty-six years.

After Christmas of 2019 I retired from working on organs on site and in my workshop. No more weeks spent wiring organs, no more service calls, no more console rebuilds—my favorite workshop job. I hasten to add that I continue to run the Organ Clearing House, managing the sale of vintage organs, and keeping the crew busy. I am still working as a consultant and still writing monthly columns. They will have to snatch the MacBook® from my cold dead hands. I have not yet imagined a time when I would not be doing some type of work with pipe organs.

With the outbreak of Covid, Wendy and I left New York City for our place in Maine, bringing the families of two of our kids with us. My private workshop, the three-car garage, became a staging space for groceries for our expanded household as we quarantined everything we brought into the house. When winter turned to spring, we added a refrigerator beside the garage freezer. The workshop has always been at least part boatyard. I have a couple shelves of boat parts, the expensive stainless-steel screws we use around salt water, and there are several lengths of surplus line hanging on a wall. You never know when you are going to need some more line. It is also a gardening shed and kitchen overflow storage for the bigger pots and pans. Lobster pots, roasting pans, and canning jars live on the shelves above the fridge.

This sounds like a lot of clutter, but I still have not mentioned the cabinets, shelves, and industrial drawers full of organ parts and hardware I have accumulated over the years. One year I restored an Aeolian residence organ with its paper roll player. It was playable in the shop for a summer, and we had a string of dinner parties during which we would suggest a break before dessert and leave the table for an organ demonstration. Some of Wendy’s publishing friends and colleagues needed that to understand just what I do for a living. “It was always mysterious to me!” I have rebuilt four or five consoles here, refinishing cabinets, rebushing keyboards, and retrofitting solid-state controls and electric drawknobs.

I know I will keep most of the general hardware as long as we live here. It is handy to have hundreds of sizes of screws arranged in drawers to support home repair projects. This summer, I cut up several lengths of half-inch threaded rod and collected the necessary washers, nuts, and lock washers for a tool hanger I built in the shed. Mending plates, corner braces, and hinges will always come in handy. I have felt and punches to make pads for the bottoms of chair legs; I have lubricants and finishes for pretty much any purpose and big, well-lit workbenches. It is my own private hardware store. Funny, I still go to the hardware store most weeks.

He polished up the handle of the big front door.

Along with his organ work, John Leek built harpsichords, and as we made those keyboards and brass levers to control “choirs” of jacks, I learned about polishing. I have a bench grinder that spins abrasive wheels, wire wheels, and cloth polishing wheels. There is a drawer full of bars of polishing compound, a rake for dressing the cloth wheels, and the nasty wheel with an iron handle for dressing the abrasive wheels. I rejuvenated a rusty cast-iron skillet using the wire wheel. Handy.

There is a case of Parson’s sudsy ammonia on a high shelf. I think there are ten bottles left in it. It is a terrific solution for use in my ultrasonic cleaner. I have used it to clean reed shallots and tongues, little brass console parts like screws and switches. I will hang onto all this because there are lots of things around the house that need polishing, and Wendy’s engagement ring looks great after an ultrasonic swim in sudsy ammonia.

Totally tubular

I have worked on all sorts of pneumatic actions from different organ builders, many of which incorporate some type of rigid or flexible tubing. Seventy-year-old rubber tubing is likely to be crumbling apart. Quarter-inch (interior diameter) tubing is common to many different types of organs, so I have hundreds of feet of that in a coil, destined to be cut into six-inch pieces. There is about forty feet of three-quarter-inch (ID) heavy plastic tubing with nylon webbing embedded. It is made for high-pressure hot water in small gasoline engines, and it was great for use as pneumatic tubing in a big expression motor. I have coils of copper tubing and some straight lengths of aluminum and brass tubing. You never know when you are going to need some.

Parts is parts.

Sometime ago I got the idea that it would be clever to have a supply of the waxed boxes used for Asian carry-out food for storing specific organ parts. I used them for a while, decided they were ridiculous, and discarded most of the minimum order of 1,000 boxes, but some are still around. One is labeled “Schlicker console parts.” I installed a Peterson system in a Schlicker console. Having serviced many Schlicker organs over the years, I know that the little pressed metal toggles in the “ka-chunk” combination actions can wear and break or simply fall out, and here were two or three hundred of them going to waste. I used four or five for a service call repair, and I still have the rest of them. Pretty sure I am not going to need them again.

I have boxes of Austin magnets, Austin note motors, Kimber Allen keyboard contacts, pedalboard contacts, Heuss nuts, leather nuts, compass springs (for the pallets in slider windchests), pouch springs, fiber discs (for making pouches and valves), many sizes and styles of felt and paper punchings for regulating keyboards, and even coils of wire for stringing harpsichords.

For a short while I repaired and rebuilt harmoniums, and I have a heavy box full of the brass reeds. They must have been salvaged from derelict instruments. I do not remember where I got them, but I doubt I did the salvaging because I would have kept them separated and labeled by voices. I may have used ten of them, and the rest are here if anyone wants them. A soak in sudsy ammonia would help. Another box is full of keyboard ivories. I “harvested” them from old pianos and organ keyboards, and having a miscellany of ivories really is useful as you can pick through them to match color and size. While I used many of them for service call repairs and refurbishing old keyboards, I am probably finished with them now.

On the high shelf near the tubing, there is a stack of boxes of various types of windchest magnets. Some have pipe valves that work either electrically or pneumatically, others are the standard “screw cap” chest magnets for pitman and offset chests. And for those times when you are changing wind pressure, there are boxes of magnet caps with one-quarter-inch and three-sixteenths-inch exhaust holes. None of these will have household use.

There are about twenty three-foot cardboard tubes in the rafters containing skins of leather and yards of felt, fabric, and cork. There is enough material to releather a ten-stop pitman chest and a half-dozen reservoirs. There is pouch leather, gusset leather, alum-tanned leather for reservoir belts, and several types and weights of pneumatic leather. I am not sure how much of it I will use, but as I recently gave Wendy a big piece of thin black felt for a sewing project, I will assume it is worth keeping. Since it is up high, it is not in anyone’s way.

Twenty or thirty years ago, industrial chemists developed spray cans of graphite lubricant, perfect for treating windchest tables, sliders, and toeboard bottoms so slider stop action would work smoothly. Before switching to that, I mixed flake graphite with denatured alcohol creating a paste that I scooped with latex-gloved hands and rubbed over all the surfaces. It was a messy process, but when the alcohol evaporated, a rich, even coat of graphite glistened on the wood. Heaven help you if you spilled any on the floor. I have most of a gallon can of graphite that I guess I do not need anymore. I also have half a case of that graphite spray. I can use it on snow shovels to keep snow from sticking to them.

Material handling

In industrial catalogues, material handling is the section that includes dollies, carts, pallet jacks, and all the tools and equipment used to move things around. You can buy a Drum Dolly, a two-wheeler designed specifically to handle 55-gallon drums or a refrigerator dolly—you can guess what that’s for. A refrigerator dolly is a two-wheeler with straps to hold the load in place, and rubber belts that move over wheels on the back so you can haul the fridge up stairs. I have used mine for hauling reservoirs upstairs to choir lofts. The upright freezer in the garage needs to be defrosted occasionally. That can be a nasty job, but it is pretty simple here, and we have been “eating it down” in preparation. Soon, I will move the last few things into the top of the Covid fridge, wheel the freezer through the overhead door, and stand it in the dooryard facing the sun with the door open. It takes a few hours, and there is no need to catch the water.

I have a come-along, a tool with a steel cable, hooks on both ends, and a long handle that pumps a ratchet. I bought it when we were installing an organ and realized it needed to be a few inches to the left. A half-dozen pumps of the handle was all it took to scootch the organ to its proper place. I have not used it on a job since, but we have a half-mile wooded driveway that trees fall on occasionally. I can often hitch a chain to loops on my car and drag a tree out of the way, but several times I have used the come-along tied to another tree to do the job when I cannot make the angle with the car. We also use it to pull the dock out of the water. I am keeping that.

The opposite of the come-along is a house jack that I have used often when releathering reservoirs. After the hinges are glued to the ribs, the pairs of ribs are glued to the body and top, and the belts are glued on all around, you have to open the thing fully before gluing on the gussets. You are stretching all the new material and glue, and it can be a heavy lift, especially on a large reservoir. I have done it with blocks and levers, but a hand-pumped hydraulic house jack is just the ticket. When our daughter wanted to convert a small shed into a pottery studio, our son-in-law and I jacked up the shed and repaired its structure. I will keep the jack.

Another tool I used when gluing reservoirs is the big double-boiler you see keeping soup warm in a cafeteria line. Having hot wet rags is essential when using hot glue, and I have a Sharpie mark on the front for the little volume knob, setting the temperature high enough to soften excess glue, but not so hot that I cannot put my hands in it. When I was gluing four or five reservoirs at once, the pot would be hot all day, and I would change the water every hour as it got dark with the glue. We like to give big parties, and a steaming pot of clam chowder would be just the thing for a chilly fall cookout, but I think this appliance has too many miles on it for use in food service. It is handy for soaking labels off jars.

My Rubbermaid® rolling table has ball-bearing casters and a load limit of 500 pounds. I know it can bear more than that. It is about the same height as my workbenches and the rear end of my Chevy Suburban, so I can wheel a windchest or reservoir from the back of the car to the workbench without lifting anything, and it is perfect for moving lumber between planer, table saw, and cut-off saw. I can also wheel groceries from the car to the Covid fridge, and I have even used it to wheel our eight-foot fiberglass dinghy to the car. Yes, you can put an eight-foot dinghy in a Suburban and close the door. I get fussy when other people in the family leave stuff on my rolling table because I like to keep it free for the next use. I’m keeping it.

One of our kids bought a couple big inflatable rubber swim toys. I especially like the Grandpa-sized pink inner tube with its five-foot dragon tail, lots of fun for swimming off the dock with our grandchildren, and it is convenient to have an air compressor with a big assortment of fittings. It saves fifteen minutes of huffing and puffing when you could be in the water. The fifty-foot air hose hangs on a steel column between garage bays, so it only takes a moment to set up to check the air of the tires on cars parked outside.

Perspective

There is almost no end to the list of tools, materials, supplies, and equipment in my garage workshop. I am still using most of the tools for projects around the house. This summer I built a neat set of drawers using quarter-sawn oak to match my library table desk. I am just starting a new “private drive” sign for the top of the road using birch lumber left over from a set of bookcases I made for Wendy’s office. I will use a pin-router to make the lettering. Wendy is a talented and productive weaver, and there is nothing like an organ builder as tech department for a house with two looms.

I hope this little tour is informative to organists who might not know much of what is behind the service technician who works on your organ or the organ company that built or rebuilt it. Mine is a light-duty shop, a delight for me to work in alone or with a colleague or two. It is especially nice in the summer with the overhead doors open. I keep thinking I will not do any more organ work there, but it is easy to imagine a time when our crew is working nearby and something needs to be releathered quickly. I might just bend the rule.

A moving experience

I have been involved in moving hundreds of pipe organs. Now that I am over the age of sixty-five, I have retired from active site work. I am not carrying heavy loads up or down stairs, climbing ladders with organ parts on my shoulder, walking backward carrying one end of a loaded pipe tray, or squiggling around on my ample belly under a windchest and around a reservoir to reach those last few windline screws. I am happy to leave all that to others. Along with gathering information about organs for sale, I correspond with clients and arrange the logistics for our jobs, such as scheduling truck transportation, ordering packing materials and lumber for crates, renting scaffolding, and planning travel and lodging for the crew.

When I joined the Organ Clearing House I faced a steep learning curve about the trucking industry. For the first few jobs I organized, I hired household moving companies with familiar names like Mayflower and Allied. One of those outfits carried a Beckerath organ for us from New York City to Los Angeles. The shipment was received by a crew from Beckerath who reported significant damage to the load. It was insured through the moving company, and an adjuster was dispatched to view the damage. The German crew told the adjuster that their methods of packing were different from ours, but in the awkwardness of different languages, the adjuster heard them saying that we did it wrong and the claim was denied. I replied that we were widely known for our many shipments without damage and asked if the adjuster would revisit our claim if I went to Los Angeles at our expense to present our case in person.

The organ had to be removed from the building in New York before a certain date and could not be delivered until after a certain date, so we were paying for several extra days for the loaded truck to sit waiting. As we discussed the claim, we discovered that the driver had used those extra days to visit family in the mountains of Tennessee, and police reports revealed that there had been a “mishap.” The claim was paid.

Loading an organ into another moving van in New Haven, Connecticut, I was chatting with the driver who happened to mention that it was good we were not shipping the organ to Canada because he had been banned from driving there because of a firearms violation. I called the dispatcher and demanded a different driver.

It was when a household mover stood us up that I learned a better way. The organ involved was the huge M. P. Möller (Opus 5819) from the 19,000-seat Philadelphia Civic Center that we were shipping to the University of Oklahoma for the then-nascent American Organ Institute, now sadly shuttered. The organ had only eighty-nine ranks, but they included four Tubas, a huge proportion of sixteen-foot stops, two whopping “thirty-twos,” two huge consoles (theatre and concert), and was so massively built that we figured we would need five semi-trailers to move it. The day before we were to start loading, I was waiting at a baggage carousel in the Philadelphia airport when the moving company called to tell me that they needed all their trucks for something else. My reaction attracted the attention of my fellow travelers.

Some months earlier, I received a call from Malcolm, an international shipping agent, who had an abandoned shipment of new organ pipes in a warehouse. An American organ builder had suddenly gone out of business before receiving the pipes from a European pipe maker. Malcolm found me through a Google search and asked for my help to sell them, which I was able to do quickly. After the call from the moving company, I pulled myself together, retrieved my keys from across the terminal, and called Malcolm. Sure enough, with only one day lost to the snafu, Bohemian Logistics of Reno, Nevada, sent us a truck each day for the rest of the week. Since then, Malcolm has arranged all our international shipments (except to Madagascar), sending organs to New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Bolivia, Japan, Indonesia, and Great Britain, among others.

Why not Madagascar? In 2008, we were sending an organ to Antananarivo at the request of Marc Ravalomanana, then president of the Republic, and he was using his considerable influence and staff to arrange for a shipping container. My colleague Amory Atkins and I flew to “Tana” to install it in time for an important anniversary celebration at the principal church of FJKM, the Church of Jesus Christ in Madagascar. Ravalomanana, who was also the president of the national church, would preach at the service. We were on a tight schedule, but the container was being delayed by customs at Toamasina, the country’s principal port. The president had just imposed unpopular new rules and regulations regarding imports, and the port authorities were retaliating by holding up his prize project.

Finally, the president brought in the military to sort things out, and the container was trucked to the presidential palace on the outskirts of Tana because city streets could not accommodate a large truck. With the help of the army, we transferred the organ onto a military flatbed truck, and our crew of soldiers rode on top of the load for the twenty miles to the church. It was a riot watching Amory give directions to the group of Malagash soldiers. A few months later, a popular uprising tossed President Ravalomanana out of office.

What you want in a truck

Most of the enclosed semi-trailers you see on the highway are simple big boxes with no equipment to secure a load. A truck backs up to a warehouse loading dock, and forklifts load them full of loaded shrink-wrapped pallets. The pallets are built to fit snugly in a standard truck, so it is not possible for the load to shift while the truck is in motion. Loading a pipe organ is like a huge and heavy game of Tetris. The crew studies the staged load and calculates what component would go where, filling voids with individually wrapped smaller parts and commercial padding.

Dave, the owner and one of the drivers of Bohemian Logistics, introduced us to “special commodities” fleets. Those trailers have vertical rails spaced every six or eight feet that have rows of holes like modular shelving to accept ratchet straps to secure things to the walls of the truck, and highway bars that reach from side to side, and can be used to brace uneven loads and to support decking, a second plywood floor inside the truck that can be loaded with well-wrapped larger metal pipes and the like. These specialty trucks are intended to handle unconventional loads like large trade shows and pipe organs, and are equipped with twenty- or twenty-five-dozen quilted furniture pads, hydraulic lift tailgates, ramps, and other assorted gear to help make an uneven load secure and easier to handle in and out of the trailer.

Bohemian Logistics ceased operations, and searching for a new source of special commodities trucks I found Roland Dickens, a dispatcher for Landstar Systems, a huge transit company with a considerable special commodities fleet. We have worked with Roland almost exclusively for the last ten years, and I have shared his name with many of our colleague companies. He is a whiz at sending us skillful drivers, and he plays and wins pool tournaments in Las Vegas.

Richard Mowen was one of the first drivers Roland sent us. He was a tiny wiry guy with a tiny wiry dog and a twangy southern accent; a member of our crew thought he was the spitting image of Bugs Bunny’s archrival, Yosemite Sam. Richard passed out bottles of his favorite cherry soda, cracked wise about our complicated load, swung himself aloft into the cab of his Kenworth, and took to the road with a blast from his horn. He has since retired but left behind a lot of memories.

It is a safe bet that Bob Mead transports more pipe organs each year than any other driver on the road. He is a favorite of ours and at least four other organ companies. He is devoted to the United States Armed Services and has “wrapped” his fifty-three-foot trailer with ceremonial photos depicting all the service branches along with a lengthy list of members of his family who have served. He is not available to us during December because he volunteers with Wreaths Across America, a nonprofit that places Christmas wreaths on every military grave in the country. He joins a huge fleet of trucks that meet in the downeast village of Harrington, Maine, where the wreaths are produced, and has the honor of leading a convoy into Arlington National Cemetery. I bet that colorful trailer wrap helped him secure that post. When the convoy leaves Harrington and heads south on Route 1 to I-295 to I-95, bridges over the highways are manned with platoons of police and firefighters, the fire trucks parked with their ladders raised in salute.

One of the first times Bob worked with us, we were dismantling the iconic Klais organ at Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church (nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/StPeterLuth.html) on Lexington Avenue in New York City. (We called that job “Lex Luther.”) The church sold its land for the construction of the CitiCorp building at the corner of Fifty-third Street, and the development created a large contemporary worship space at ground level along with offices and gathering spaces for the church.

We were completing the job in the first days of February 2021, and the day before Bob was to arrive, a heavy snowstorm made a mess of the neighborhood. It seemed like a miracle that he drove down Lexington Avenue in the wee hours of the morning and parked his seventy-five-foot-long truck in front of the church as if he was going shopping. (That is the neighborhood where you can buy $50,000 purses.) Three weeks later, Bob joined us on Madison Avenue in Harlem where we had finished dismantling the glorious Roosevelt/Welte-Tripp organ (nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/AllSaintsRC.html#WelteTripp). This was a two-truck organ, so Bob’s city parking magic placed two semis on the street in front of the church. Have you ever tried to find a parking space in Manhattan?

Back in the day

It is difficult enough to move pipe organs with modern semi-trailers and interstate highways, but think about the days before internal combustion engines. Ellsworth, Maine, is a small town “downeast” on the Union River, north of Deer Isle, and about thirty-five miles west of Harrington, the wreath capital. John Black of Ellsworth, Maine, ordered an organ from E. & G. G. Hook (Opus 168) in the fall of 1853 as a gift to the Congregational Church of Ellsworth where he was a pew subscriber, planning for it to be installed before New Year’s Day of 1854. On January 4, 1854, Mr. Black wrote to the company, “I assure you gentlemen that it is a very great disappointment to me that you did not get the organ finished and here before the New Year, for our congregation had anticipated the pleasure of hearing it on Sunday, the 1st January.”

The next week, Black wrote to his shipping agent

Messrs. E. & G. G. have built and packed an organ which they wish to send down by first opportunity. . . . Since the violent storm we have had extreme cold—thermometer ranging many degrees below zero, but the weather has suddenly changed and today we have a very severe rain, the thermometer being at 38 above, causing our snow to disappear very fast.

It was early February before the schooner Abigail Haynes docked in Boston and received the shipment of the Hook organ. On March 7, Black wrote: “Capt. Lord has had a long and tedious passage but I have the pleasure to inform you that he has at last arrived safe with the organ, which will probably be received here today.” And on March 8,

. . . yesterday she arrived in the waters at Coggins Wharf at the end of Newbury Neck. She came from Boston to Bucks Harbor in 24 hours and has been ever since getting round to Newbury Neck [about forty-five miles by water]. The reach and all the passages among the islands being closed by ice, she is a long distance from here, but trams can cross the bay on the ice in all directions and as the sledding is good, her freight can be got up without much trouble.

Once the organ was safely at Coggins Wharf, the flurry of anxious letters stopped, so we do not know just when the organ was delivered to the church in Ellsworth and played for the first time, but the Hook opus list shows that #168 with two manuals and twenty-one stops was delivered in 1854. I picture a fleet of horse-drawn sleds crossing the ice to the ship to receive the crated organ. A bill of lading states that the cost of the shipment was $26.10. The Hook organ was replaced in 1912.¹

Wendy and I have sailed our Kingfisher in those waters around Stonington and Brooklin, Maine, Jericho Bay, and Blue Hill Bay to Newbury Neck. There are strong tidal currents swirling between the islands and the dozen or so bays in that area, and there are many rocks and ledges, so you had better pay close attention to where you are. We have a fancy new chart plotter mounted in the cockpit that shows our boat’s location within a few feet, and shows clearly all the dangers, including submerged rocks that you cannot see even in high tide that will tear the bottom off your boat in a heartbeat, and we only sail during the summer. We also have a diesel engine that keeps us out of trouble.

Captain Lord had nothing but primitive charts and a sextant. If he was blinded by snow or fog, he could either chance it or drop anchor. The Vineyard Gazette (Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod) of October 18, 1878, reported damage from a violent storm that included cows, chimneys, barns, and houses along with more than twenty ships destroyed. During that storm, the Abigail Haynes was dismasted in a collision with the schooner Florence Newell of Philadelphia.

Keep rolling.

I admire the guys who help us transport pipe organs. It is a special skill to get a shipment from one place to another on-time, especially when dealing with bad weather. Drivers like these replace the engines in their trucks every million miles or so and aim for records like two million accident-free miles. One driver shared his homespun wisdom about driving in mountains, “I can go down that hill too slow as many times as I want. I can only go down too fast once.”

We get to be friends as we see them repeatedly, and they draw genuine pleasure from being associated with our work. While many truckers come and go only from commercial warehouses with loading docks and huge tarmac aprons, our drivers must back their trucks into church parking lots and tight alleys. It is fun to watch a driver walk around his rig, pacing out distances, calculating how he will make it happen. And they always do. When they are loaded and getting ready to leave, the salutation is “shiny side up.”

Notes

1. The letters of John Black are quoted with permission from Woodlawn Museum, Gardens & Park of Ellsworth, Maine, the former estate of three generations of the Black family, Kathy Young, executive director.

That ingenious business

Great Britain’s King George III (1738–1820), whose oppressive rule over the American colonies led to the American Revolutionary War, has resurfaced in public conversation as a character in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant musical, Hamilton. In the king’s featured song, “You’ll be back” (in the style of The Beatles), the crazy king addresses the colonists, singing,

Why so sad? Remember we made an arrangement when you went away? Now you’re making me mad. Remember, despite our estrangement, I’m your man. You’ll be back, soon you’ll see, you’ll remember you belong to me. . . . And when push comes to shove, I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love. . . .

Wendy and I were fortunate to see Hamilton in the first months of its run on Broadway and were thrilled by the whirling, swirling singing and dancing from the first moments. Sitting to my right was a curmudgeonly man who looked like Winston Churchill (though thankfully not as large) who did not crack a smile until King George made his mincing appearance.

The American pipe organ industry started in the eighteenth century before the birth of “Mad King George.” Johann Gottlob Klemm (1690–1762) was born in Dresden, Germany, where he apparently apprenticed with the great organ builder Gottfried Silbermann (1683–1753). Silbermann was nearly an exact contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), who was a great champion of Silbermann’s organs, though a little skeptical of the pianofortes Silbermann built late in his life. Klemm built the first organ for the church now known as Trinity Church Wall Street, New York (in a previous building at the same location), and lived in New York City’s Moravian community until 1757, when he learned that the Moravians in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, needed an organ.¹

David Tannenberg (1728–1804) was born in Germany, moved to Zeist, the Netherlands, in 1748, and emigrated to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1749. He first worked as a joiner, and when Klemm arrived in Bethlehem in 1757, he became Klemm’s apprentice and assistant. After Klemm’s death in 1762 Tannenberg did no organ work for three years, but between 1765 and his death in 1804 he was involved in building more than forty organs.² As he grew older and became concerned that he had no apprentice who could carry on his work, Tannenberg obtained permission from the Moravian elders in Lititz, Pennsylvania, to write to elders in Herrnhut, Germany, asking them to send a suitable candidate. In response, Johann Philip Bachmann (1762–1837) arrived in Bethlehem on February 17, 1793. Two months later he married Tannenberg’s daughter, Anna Maria. Tannenberg and Bachmann worked together building organs until 1800 when tensions between them following Anna Maria’s suicide in 1799 led to their parting ways.³ While installing the organ in the Lutheran church in York, Pennsylvania, seventy-six-year-old David Tannenberg fell from a scaffolding on May 17, 1804, and died two days later.⁴

While most of David Tannenberg’s organs were built in Pennsylvania, he also built instruments for destinations in Albany, New York; Frederick, Maryland; and Salem, North Carolina. It is almost 500 miles from Bethlehem to Salem. I can drive that far in less than seven hours in air-conditioned comfort. It must have been a rough slog to transport an organ such a distance on eighteenth-century roads. There are only a few Tannenberg organs extant, notably the 1798 “Single Brothers’ House” organ restored by Taylor & Boody and installed in a new concert hall at the Museum of Early Southern and Decorative Arts in Old Salem, North Carolina.

Philip Bachmann built organs under his own name until 1821. An organ built by Bachmann in 1819 has been restored by Paul Fritts & Company in Tacoma, Washington, and is now available for installation in a suitable historic and architectural home. You can read the prospectus and see photos at the Fritts website: frittsorgan.com/opus_pages/galleries/bachmann_reconstruct/bachmann_prospectus.html.

Consider these dates. Klemm’s career in America started in the late 1730s—his organ at Trinity Church Wall Street was built in 1741, nine years before Bach’s death. Tannenberg’s career was in full swing in the 1770s, concurrent with the American Revolutionary War. Bachmann died in 1837 when Felix Mendelssohn was twenty-eight and Johannes Brahms was four years old. Klemm, Tannenberg, and Bachmann were all German-born American immigrants who built dozens of organs for the Moravian communities in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina during America’s Colonial period. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived from 1756 to 1791; he was twenty years old at the start of the American Revolution.

Three important books

Orpha Ochse (born 1925) received a Master of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music in 1948 and a PhD in 1953. She is ninety-eight years old. The University of Indiana Press published her masterful The History of the Organ in the United States in 1975. The worn and be-scribbled hardcover copy on my desk in Maine is inscribed with my name and “Oberlin, 1975.” I purchased it from the Co-op Bookstore in Oberlin the year it was published. I was nineteen.

Ochse’s book includes the histories of hundreds of American organbuilders, both companies and individuals. She traces the connections between personalities telling us who worked and apprenticed for whom, who influenced whom, and who formed and dissolved partnerships. The book is organized by regions and eras (“Rural Society,” “Expanding Society,” “Industrial Society,” “the Twentieth Century”). The comprehensive index includes thousands of entries making it a necessary first tool for someone like me who spends each day in the office considering and discussing dozens of organs. Many of the biographical details I am including here came straight from Ochse’s book.

The History of the Organ in the United States was released in paperback in 1988 and is still available from the University of Indiana Press, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers. If there is an organist in your life who does not own a copy, here is a great gift suggestion. Tell them I sent you.

Organbuilder Raymond Brunner (1949–2020) lived and worked around Lititz and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, home of many organs built by David Tannenberg and the other Moravian-Pennsylvania Dutch organbuilders. He wrote the authoritative history of that era of American organbuilding under the title That Ingenious Business, published by the Pennsylvania German Society in 1991. It includes technical and mathematical information of interest to the sophisticated organbuilder and portrayal of daily life at the end of the eighteenth century, such as a drawing of a Sunday morning at Christ Lutheran Church in York, Pennsylvania, with main floor and balcony packed with worshippers, the Tannenberg organ, a preacher gesticulating from the pulpit, and an usher with a stick chasing a dog. ’Twas ever thus. I last saw Ray at breakfast in New York during early planning for the restoration of the organ at Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I am sorry he did not live to see it.

Stephen L. Pinel’s The Work-list of Henry Erben, Organ Builder in Nineteenth-Century New York was published by the OHS Press, the Organ Historical Society, in 2021. It is a 624-page monster with appendices and indices that include many historical photographs, timelines, and detailed descriptions of most every Erben organ, alongside contemporary descriptions, reviews, often accompanied by newspaper articles. Its six pounds of minutia about one of America’s most influential organbuilders means that it is not a book for everyone, but a carefully researched, exhaustive tome of immense value.

An urban Erben

Henry Erben (1800–1884) was a premier organbuilder in New York City who built hundreds of organs for locations in New York, New England, and as far away as Texas and California. Imagine the logistics of moving an organ from New York to San Francisco in 1858. Calvary Church (Presbyterian) in San Francisco was formed in 1854 and commissioned an organ from Erben shortly after. The organ was completed in 1858 and loaded onto the clipper ship Caroline Tucker, which left New York on May 13, 1858, and carried the organ around Cape Horn “west about” to San Francisco.⁵

Erben’s father Peter (1771–1863) built organs and pianos and was organist at Trinity Church, New York (known now as Trinity Church Wall Street), into the 1840s. Thomas Hall (1791–c.1875) was an organbuilder who started working in Philadelphia around 1812. In that same year he installed an organ in Saint John’s Chapel in New York and was assisted by twelve-year-old Henry Erben. Hall moved to New York in 1817, and Henry became his apprentice. They formed the partnership Hall & Erben in 1821, which was dissolved in 1835.⁶ Between 1824 and his death in 1884, Henry Erben produced 1,333 organs, 250 of which were built between 1856 and 1860, the firm’s busiest five years.⁷ That’s more than an organ a week. In 1846 Erben built a new four-manual organ for Trinity Church Wall Street (replaced by Hook & Hastings Opus 2168 in 1907), where he quarreled publicly with the church’s organist, Dr. Edward Hodges, who had succeeded his father.

The Erben workshop was located on a corner of Canal and Centre Streets in lower Manhattan, in the neighborhood now known as Little Italy, one mile from Trinity Church. Erben’s largest intact extant organ was built in 1868 for what is now the Basilica of Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral at Prince and Mulberry Streets in NoLIta (north of Little Italy), just six blocks north of the workshop. As I write, the Organ Clearing House is completing the dismantling of the organ at Old Saint Patrick’s and shipping it to Brunner & Company in Pennsylvania for restoration. I was in the city last week as the project started and walked between those two churches. It was fun to imagine running into Mr. Erben as he walked the streets between his workshop and two of his important clients. Maybe I would treat him to a fruit smoothie, ubiquitous in the neighborhood today. I wonder what would amaze him most about modern organbuilding? Perhaps electric blowers?

Another Erben afloat

In 2006 the Organ Clearing House sent an Erben organ halfway around the world when the Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem in Wellington, New Zealand, purchased a one-manual, six-rank organ built in 1847 from Saint Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, Ellsworth, Maine. The Clearing House crew crated the organ and delivered it to the docks in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where it was loaded into a container for its 9,000-mile journey.

The organ’s specifications are 8′ Open Diapason (18–56), 8′ Stopped Diapason (18–56), 8′ Stopped Diapason Bass (1–17), 8′ Dulciana (18–56), 4′ Principal, 4′ Flute, and 2′ Fifteenth. There is a permanent coupler from the manual to the seventeen-note pedalboard.

That was the second time that organ traveled by boat. Ellsworth is a small coastal town with a population of about 8,400 located to the northeast of Penobscot Bay in a series of bays and waterways that defines Down East Maine. In the late 1840s there were about 4,000 people living in Ellsworth, and the town boasted nine sawmills, two gristmills, one tannery, eight brickyards, and thirteen shipbuilders, along with several other industries.⁸ There was plenty of work in Ellsworth. To drive there today, one winds along US Route 1, which crosses many bridges over water as it navigates Maine’s legendary rocky coast. It would have been an arduous trip by land in 1847, and traveling by sea was the most efficient and economical way to transport passengers and freight.

The Erben workshop was less than a mile from the docks in New York City, and the Episcopal church in Ellsworth is barely a block from the Union River. The Ellsworth organ traveled only slightly farther by land than the great organs at Old Saint Patrick’s and Trinity Church in New York, mere blocks from the workshop.

§

One of the highlights of visiting an organbuilder’s workshop is the fine woodworking that is such an integral part of the product. Hardwood frame-and-panel doors are as integral to a modern organ case as they were in centuries past, and many internal components sport dovetails and other classic joinery. We identify what variety of wood is being used by the smell in the milling room. There is no mistaking the difference in smell between sawing poplar or white oak.⁹

The same is true with boat building. Several of the coastal Maine towns with shipbuilding heritages are now home to small shops that build wooden pleasure boats by hand, and while organbuilders typically strive for perfectly square corners and straight lines, you hardly find any in a wooden boat. The bow comes to a point, midships swells to the maximum “beam” (width) and tapers back to a narrower stern. The hull often bulbs out a little from the top rails and tapers to a narrow keel below. Viewed from the side, the fairing line of the hull sweeps upward toward the bow. Every line and surface is a complex curve, which means the interior spaces are also full of curves and odd angles.

To start building a boat, the layout of the hull is drawn on the workshop floor looking something like a topographical map with increasing curved lines showing elevation. The keel is placed, and ribs are constructed according to the curves of the hull. The completed keel and ribs look something like a whale’s skeleton turned upside down. The outside of the hull is formed by “planking,” steaming and bending the planks, also called strakes, and fastening them to the ribs. The process reminds me of my years as an apprentice to John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, when we steamed boards until they were flexible and clamped them to a frame to form the bentside of a harpsichord. We had built a box just big enough to enclose the piece of lumber with a goofy rig using tea kettles on hot plates to produce the steam and the flexible tubing we use in organs to conduct the steam to the box. It was one thing to fire up that cute contraption and handle a piping hot board six feet long, one foot wide, and three-quarters of an inch thick. It is quite another to steam and bend a twenty-footer that is two inches thick and bend that around the ribs of a boat.

I witnessed this process on a large scale at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, where the 110-foot whaling ship Charles W. Morgan was being restored in the museum’s shipyard. Watching the workers fastening those massive thick boards to the ribs with wood pegs and bronze spikes was a glimpse back into the time when all ships were made of wood and no ships had engines.

Our boat, a Marshall catboat, had a reliable diesel engine in a spacious hold below the deck that I was happy to use when approaching a dock or mooring. I remember once watching a single-handed sailor leave a crowded mooring field in a large two-masted schooner under full sail. He let go of the mooring line, walked some forty feet back to the wheel, and away he went, weaving through the fleet as if he was rowing a skiff, harking back to the days when diesel engines were not an option, so seamen had to have real skill. Shortly after we bought our boat, I wrote an essay for Catboat Journal about the adventures Wendy and I had sailing her from the boatyard in Padanaram, Massachusetts (near New Bedford), to our house on the Damariscotta River in Maine, 250 miles in six days and five nights. I received an email from a fellow in California who would be teaching a course on handling catboats at the Wooden Boat School in Brooklin, Maine, not far from Ellsworth, saying if we happened to be near Brooklin he’d love to have us address the class. We “happened” to be near Brooklin at the stated date because we arranged our summer around it and had a week-long cruise that took us there.

He invited another catboat sailor to share stories with the class, a veteran single-hander who sailed an older version of the same model boat. The important difference was his boat didn’t have an engine. Fogged in, sit and read. Bad weather coming, sit and read. Need to get ashore for emergency or otherwise, but no wind? Sit and read. We were having dinner at a pub after the class, chatting about our boats, and I told Bill how much I admired his career of sailing single-handed without an engine. His response, “Where do you keep the wine?”

Notes

1. Orpha Ochse, The History of the Organ in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), page 15.

2. Ibid, page 52.

3. Ibid, page 62.

4. Ibid, page 53.

5. Stephen L. Pinel, The Work-list of Henry Erben, Organ Builder in Nineteenth-Century New York (Villanova, Pennsylvania: OHS Press, the Organ Historical Society, 2021), page 165.

6. Ochse, page 151.

7. Pinel, page 18.

8. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsworth,_Maine.

9. The smell of sawing ivory or cow bone reminds me of the worst day at the dentist.