In the Wind:

Made right here

The organist of my home church was a harpsichord maker, and visiting his workshop was my first exposure to building musical instruments. I guess I was something like ten or eleven years old so my impressions may not have been very sophisticated, but as I think back over more than fifty-five years in the business, I must have been impressed. I started taking organ lessons when I was twelve, and sometime soon after that a mentor took me to an open house at the original workshop of the Noack Organ Company in Andover, Massachusetts. There I got an early eyeful of what goes into the instrument I was learning to love.

Since that first encounter with the art of organ building, I have been privileged to visit many organ builders—from large and impressive operations like Casavant Frères and Schantz to tiny one-person shops. There are elements common in the smallest and largest shops. For example, every organbuilder has a table saw. I like to say that organbuilding can be described as the art of knowing where to put the holes, which means each workshop has a drill press and an impressive collection of drill bits. There are thousands of drill bits in my workshop, ranging in size from a few thousandths of an inch or tenths of a millimeter to three-inch behemoths for drilling large holes in rackboards. You have to hang on tight when one of those bad boys is turning in the wood.

Every shop has a setup for cutting and punching leather. I use the plastic cutting boards you buy in fabric stores for cutting long strips of leather and a rotary knife like a pizza cutter, and I have a heavy end-grain block capped with half-inch-thick PVC for punching the thousands of leather circles and buttons needed for the leathering of pneumatic actions and valves.

Over my half-century experience with organ shops, there have been countless innovations in the world of tools. When I was an apprentice working with John Leek in Oberlin, Ohio, we turned all our screws by hand. Dismantling a large electro-pneumatic-action organ for releathering was like a triathlon, working over your head with a screwdriver turning thousands of screws to release bottomboards, pouchboards, stop action machines, and windlines. We had forearms like Popeye. Later we had the first electric screwdrivers, which were simply drill motors that had to be plugged in. At first, they were too powerful for driving screws into the soft wood of organ windchests, but soon adjustable clutches were introduced allowing you to set the torque of the machine to avoid stripping the threads of too many screws. Still, these had power cords that were a nuisance to keep away from the pipes of the windchest below where you were working. It was always a Mixture.

When cordless drills and screw guns were introduced, the battery life was not great. You would need to have three or four batteries dedicated to each tool if you wanted to run it for a few hours, changing and charging the batteries as you went. Today there is a wide range of powerful twenty-volt tools available with remarkable battery life and torque enough to sprain your wrist. I have switched my entire assortment of professional and home maintenance tools to the 20V DeWalt system, including chainsaws and weed whackers, delighting that I no longer need to keep gasoline around the house. I can run that weed whacker for an hour on a single charge, long enough to get around our large rural lawn. And the screw guns just keep going and going.

Was it twenty years ago when Computerized Numerical Control (CNC) machines were becoming popular? These technological marvels can be programmed to quickly produce complicated woodworking projects. One of the first uses of CNC machines in organ shops was the drilling of windchest tables that have rows of different sized holes for each stop. A drawing is fed into the computer, and the machine selects the bits and drills away. I remember standing at the drill press, drilling the holes in rackboards, toeboards, and sliders for a new organ, changing the bits by hand for each different hole size. A long row of boards stood against the wall nearby, and I drilled the 7⁄16-inch holes in all of them, then would change the bit to half-inch and start again. (I followed the rule of drilling the smallest holes first, knowing that if I made a mistake and drilled a hole or two too many with one bit, it would be easier to correct than if I had started with the big holes.)

When I first saw CNC machines in operation, it seemed that you would need a group of NASA scientists to operate one. Today, knowing some of the very small shops that had adopted them, it is apparent that pretty much anyone can learn to run one. CNC machines crank out windlines, action parts, reed blocks, pipe shades, and pretty much any part of an organ made of wood. CNC machines are also used for making things from metal, mass producing hundreds of identical parts or producing single complex fittings.

Making metal organ pipes is one of the magical parts of our trade. To do that, especially to make alloys and cast sheets of molten metal, a shop needs an expensive, complex setup that requires a lot of space, so most organbuilders buy pipes made to their specifications by specialized pipe-making firms. Still, several shops have all this equipment, and it is a thrilling process to witness. Metal ingots are melted in a cauldron over high heat, with the different metals, usually tin and lead, weighed carefully as the alloy is specified by the tonal director. The cauldron is mounted near the end of a long narrow table, typically with a stone surface, and the table is fitted with a sled. The metal is ladled into the sled, and two workers push the sled steadily down the length of a table, leaving a thin sheet of the molten brew on the stone. Stare at the gleaming surface for a few seconds, and watch it glaze over as the liquid turns to solid.

Casting metal for organ pipes is a process that has been in use as long as we have had organ pipes. The Benedictine monk, François-Lamathe Dom Bédos de Celles (1709–1779) included beautiful engravings of this process in his seminal book, L’art du facteur d’orgues (The Art of the Organ-Builder), published between 1766 and 1778. When the metal has set and cooled, the sheets are rolled up. They are then either planed by hand or on a huge drum to the specified thickness. Some pipe makers hammer the metal before forming the pipes, duplicating an ancient process that compresses and strengthens the metal. Then they cut the metal to create the different parts of an organ pipe, rectangles for the resonators, pie-shaped for the tapered feet, and circles for the languids. They are formed into cylinders and cones and soldered together to form the pipes. Every organist should find a chance to witness this incredible process.

Potter at work

Harry Holl’s Scargo Pottery in Dennis, Massachusetts, was a common summer evening family outing when I was a kid. We all loved the woodsy setting with a row of potter’s wheels under a corrugated fiberglass roof where we would stand watching Harry and his colleagues, many of whom were apprentices, create beautiful dinnerware, mugs, vases, and bowls. Like the mysteries of casting organ metal, it is a bit of magic to watch an artist place a blob of clay on a wheel and poke and prod it into a vessel. Watching a blob become a bowl is like watching a flower open. The craft is exacting when making a set of plates or bowls. Each is a hand-made individual, but they will stack better in your kitchen if they are pretty much the same size, so the potter uses a caliper to measure the height and diameter of each piece to form a set.

When Wendy and I moved into our house in Newcastle, Maine, in the winter of 2001, my parents gave us a set of eight large dinner plates made by Harry Holl with deep blue glaze in a rippling pattern, which we still use frequently. There is a large table lamp on my desk, and the house is scattered with the lovely artworks from Scargo Pottery that we eat and drink from each day.

Harry worked mostly with ceramic clay that emerged white from the kiln. There is a particular beach near Scargo Pottery with distinctive black sand that Harry liked to blend with his clay, giving his pieces a speckled effect that shows through the glaze. His sense of shapes and his love of his material made him a great artist. His daughters Kim and Tina run Scargo Pottery now, long after their father’s death.

Those summer outings typically had a pleasant coda, as we would pass an ice cream shop called Sea Breezes on the way home. Getting into the car at Scargo Pottery, we would pipe up a sing-song chorus, asking if “Sea Breezes are blowing.” My father was a sucker for ice cream, so it was always a safe bet.

Will it float?

Around us in Maine there are several boat yards that build custom wooden boats. Like any artisan’s shop, they are a delight to visit, and as a life-long organbuilder to whom straight and square are virtues, the absence of straight lines in the hull of a wooden boat is mind-boggling. The hull is nothing but voluptuous curves in every direction, from front to back (forward to aft), top to bottom (rail to keel), and side to side (beam to beam). Boat builders place huge planks into steam-filled vessels to soften them and carry them to the side of the boat where they are fastened to the ribs with huge bronze screws (which don’t corrode in salt water) or wooden pegs. When I worked with John Leek, we used the same steaming process to make the bentsides of harpsichords.

When a hull is complete and decks and interior are fitted out, the boat is launched, a test that no organbuilder ever has to face. I marvel that the never-before-immersed vessel floats flat and level. I guess it is comparable to the marvelous moment when you turn the wind on in an organ for the first time. Both the boat and the organ come to life at their first moments of usefulness.

Back to its maker

In the spring of 2013, Wendy and I set sail in Kingfisher from Marshall Marine in Padanaram, Massachusetts. She is a Marshall 22, built there in Padanaram in 1999. We had purchased her the preceding fall and spent the winter imagining and planning our maiden voyage to bring her to her new home in Newcastle, Maine. Our son Andy then lived in nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts (home of the largest fishing fleet in the United States). We left one of our cars in Newcastle, and Andy dropped us off at the boatyard and took care of the other car while we were at sea.

Our trip took six days and five nights and covered more than 250 miles. We had mapped out the route and reserved dock space or moorings in different marinas for each night. We ate dinner onboard most evenings and reveled in showers at the marinas. It was one of the great adventures we have shared as a couple. A friend raced out in her motorboat to snap a photo of us entering the Damariscotta River. Stepping onto our dock and walking up the back lawn seemed like a miracle. Sleeping on solid ground for the first time in six days, I rolled out of bed onto the floor.

Each summer since, we have set aside weeks for “cruising,” when we provision the boat for days and nights on the water and explore the infinity of the famous rocky coast of Maine. We have anchored in picturesque harbors and on remote islands. After the huge learning curve of handling the boat on the first trip, we have mastered Kingfisher, learning when we can push her, when we should reef the sail against heavy wind, and just how high can we “point” against the wind to round that reef without tacking. We have several friends in the area who have waterfront houses, and one of our favorite outings has been to sail to them for rollicking dinners and slumber parties. And one of the great things about a boat is that you can go places otherwise unreachable.

Last summer, nudged by the pandemic, we left Greenwich Village, moved into our new home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and quickly made a gaggle of new friends. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, fifteen minutes from home, would be less of a summertime conflict if they only held concerts when it was not good sailing weather in Maine.

When our local boatyard hauled Kingfisher out of the water last fall, I asked them to touch up the varnish on the brightwork, the teak pieces that trim the fiberglass hull whose finish is ravaged by constant sunlight and salt. He touched it up, all right, and sent me a bill that recalled the saying, “She looks like a million bucks.” It was a surprise, but we took it as a hint. What better time to offer her for sale than when she looks like a million bucks?

Two weeks ago, Kingfisher went by truck back to Padanaram, and last week I stopped by Marshall Marine to deliver the sail that had been at a sail maker for winter cleaning and repair. Geoff Marshall, who runs a workshop with seven people building those lovely boats, is also the broker from whom we bought her, and he walked me through the different buildings, talking about the various boats in different stages of completion. Here is one that is just getting started, and here is another that is due to launch in a few weeks. The new owner is just as eager to see her in the water before Memorial Day as the organist is to play the new organ on Easter Sunday.

When I watched Kingfisher drive up the hill away from Round Pond, Maine, on the back of the truck, I felt as though a piece of me was dying. How we have loved the time onboard with family and friends, and with Farley the Goldendoodle curled up on the deck. There is nothing like the taste of the first sip of coffee in the morning or of a gin and tonic after a long day of sailing, and there is nothing like the thrill of bending the wind to get you to a party.

Frequent readers will remember that I have written many times about the common philosophies of sailboats and pipe organs, that both are human attempts to control the wind. Kingfisher is leaving our family, but I will always have a little salt water in my blood. You haven’t heard the last of it.

Doo-dads

In the late 1970s and early 1980s I lived in a four-bedroom house in the rolling farmland outside Oberlin, Ohio. I had just graduated from Oberlin, was working for the local organbuilder John Leek, and was director of music for a big Presbyterian Church in Cleveland. The house was part of an eighty-acre farm, and like most similar properties in the area, the fields were rented by a farmer who worked a total of about 1,500 acres in the neighborhood. It was typical to rotate corn and soybeans year by year, because their effect on the soil is complementary. Around the house, there were three or four outbuildings including a large barn that I remember as being in better condition than the house. The house had a natural gas well, pretty unusual for many people, but common there in those days. After all, now we know it as fracking country.

Our neighbors Tony and Claire-Marie across the street had a similar property with a neat house, an enormous barn, and fields that were rented by a farmer. They were friends of the Leeks from church and lovely, considerate people. Tony ran an excavating business and used his barn to store and maintain his huge pieces of heavy equipment. Occasionally, Tony invited me to help him with a repair project. I do not think he really needed my help but knew that I would be interested, so I would spend a Saturday with him doing things like changing the wheel bearings on his Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer.

That machine was over twenty-five feet long, fifteen-feet wide, and weighed over 100,000 pounds. You don’t just jack it up, pull out a tire iron, loosen the lug nuts, and pull the wheel off. He had a homemade hydraulic jack made from parts taken from old construction equipment. The hydraulic pump came off an excavator and was driven by the power-take-off of a farm tractor. The lug nuts were three inches in diameter (his sets of socket and open-end wrenches went up to five inches), and he used a backhoe and a hoisting strap to lift the wheel off the machine. I was a young apprentice, the proud owner of a new set of Marples™ chisels (I still have them and use them regularly), and I had never seen such an ingenious caper. Because of my career in organbuilding, I have had a lifelong fascination with tools and, as Tony realized, I would always be interested in seeing something new to do with tools.

Watching Tony make that heavy work look easy by using the right tools influenced my work with organs. It was not long after that time that I was helping to install a large three-manual tracker organ in a high organ loft. We centered the floor frame properly, but when the case started getting tall, we could see that it was not going to center under the peak of the vaulted ceiling. We used hydraulics to move the entire organ with case, windchests, reservoirs, keyboards, and actions, budging it to the right about an inch-and-a-half. (Don’t tell anyone.)

When we were done with the wheel bearings, we started the D-9 (the starter motor is a forty-horsepower diesel motor), climbed on board, he backed it out of the barn, and let me drive it around in a circle in the big gravel apron. I had another experience running heavy equipment when the farmer who rented our fields was harvesting corn, and I got to run the combine for a couple rows. Glad I didn’t have to parallel park it.

A man and his tools

As more than forty years have passed since my heavy-equipment-operator days, I have downsized to a small private workshop which is the three-car garage attached to our house. I have a table saw, drill press, and band saw left from my big shop days, and shelves and drawers full of countless hand tools and odds-and-ends. I have a terrific woodworker’s workbench, the maple job with built in vises and bench dogs, and I have a sturdy well-lit, double-length workbench where I do most of my work. Wendy and I are thinking about enlarging the laundry room (sometimes called the mud room) that shares a wall with my shop, a wall covered with shelves. We were standing there tossing ideas around, and she commented that I might just get rid of all that stuff. Quickly and defensively, I pointed out the house jacks.

Why does an organbuilder need house jacks? When releathering a reservoir, you get to the step where the pairs of ribs are glued to the top frame and the whole assembly is glued to the body. You cut and glue on the eight leather or rubber cloth belts and let the glue set overnight. In the morning, you have to open the reservoir by lifting the top, as if it were filling with wind. All that freshly set glue and nice stiff material has to be convinced that this is a good idea, and the reservoir is on your workbench, so you are lifting it to chest level. That is a perfect use for a small house jack. I prop the jack up on blocks and pump the hydraulic handle. You can also use a house jack lying sideways to budge an organ an inch or two to the right.

But more to the point, remember when our daughter Meg wanted to convert the little shed out back to a pottery studio and we realized that one of the posts had rotted? Remember how her husband Yorgos and I jacked up the corner of the shed and sunk a new post into the ground? That’s why I need a house jack.

What is that next to the house jack? An ultrasonic cleaner, a little tub with a metal basket and a dial on the front. I use it to clean brass parts like reed tongues and shallots, cabinet hinges, escutcheons (look it up), and the fancy little brass doo-dads that organbuilders like to use for trim pieces, specialized controls, and the like. Parson’s Sudsy Ammonia™ is a great solvent. Fill up the little tub, fill the basket with your parts, and Bob’s your uncle. Oh, and anytime you have metal jewelry that needs cleaning . . . .

There is a big stainless-steel double boiler, the thing you ladle soup from in a cafeteria line. It’s on the shelf next to the glue pot. Hide glue comes in dry flakes or crystals. You mix it with water and heat it in the glue pot. You keep adding more water or more glue as you work to keep the consistency the way you want it. You can also put cloves of garlic in a cheesecloth bag and let it soak in the hot glue—it’s supposed to keep the glue from getting moldy, and it makes it smell a little better. When you are working with that glue, you need to have a hot, wet rag nearby to clean off excess. I can fill the double boiler and use the thermostat to keep the water just exactly as hot as I can stand putting my hands in, so I always have a good hot, wet rag. Oh, and when we have a cookout, I can clean it up and serve chowder from it.

There is a beat-up old steam iron. For the same reason I use hot water to clean up while gluing, applying heat is a big help when ungluing something. Crank up that old iron and heat up the rubber-cloth strips on an old reservoir, and voilà, off it comes, smelling like burned rubber. You can put heavy paper between the iron and the rubber to keep it from sticking, but it is hard to avoid gumming up the iron with melted rubber, so when it cools, I hold the iron on my belt sander to clean it off. This maximizes the awful smells you can extract from old rubber cloth. You should not take this iron into the house and use it on white linen. There is a household benefit, however. When it finally stops working, I will steal the iron from the bedroom closet and buy a new one for pressing clothes.

A popular meme says that you only need two tools, WD-40™ and Duck Tape™. If it’s supposed to move but doesn’t, use WD-40™. If it isn’t supposed to move but does, use Duct Tape™. As a professional organbuilder, I find that pretty sophomoric. But Wendy wanted to know why I need so many spray bottles. WD-40™ is great stuff, and it smells better than burned rubber. But it is oily, so you might want to use silicone for some applications. That is what I used on the sliding doors in the living room the other day. If you have WD-40™, why do you need Marvel Mystery Oil™? Simple. I love the pepperminty smell of it.

Goof Off™ comes in spray bottles, aerosol cans, and squeeze bottles, different dispensers for different situations. It is a terrific solvent for Duck Tape™ residue, or any kind of adhesive. The last time I used it on a service call, I was removing old chewing gum from under the keyboards of a distinguished organ. C’mon, people. And that is what I used to remove that nasty tar from the fender of the car. Works on stubborn windshield bugs, too.

3M 77 Spray Adhesive™ is terrific for gluing felt and leather together to make valves or for covering pallets. Spray that stuff on both surfaces, and according to the instructions on the can, “make bond while adhesive is aggressively tacky.” The can bears the warning,

Extremely flammable. Vapors may cause flash fire. Vapors may cause eye, skin, nose, and throat irritation and may affect the central nervous system causing dizziness, headaches, and nausea. Intentional misuse by deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents may be harmful or fatal.

At least the valves do not come unglued. When Wendy finished that beautiful woven tapestry and wondered about fixing it to a piece of fabric for framing, that’s what I used. I feel fine.

My two favorite general cleaning agents are Murphy’s Oil Soap™ and Simple Green™. Both are biodegradable, and both are really effective. Both can be used full strength or diluted in water. Murphy’s is terrific for cleaning old woodwork, Simple Green™ cleans just about anything. I have two spray bottles for each, one diluted by 50%, the other full strength. You can also pour a bit in a bucket of water. And they both smell great. And there is some of each under the kitchen sink.

There must be thirty heavy plastic cases. Get rid of half of them?

• A set of dado blades I use to make the table saw cut wider. I used them to make that bookshelf.

• A propane torch that is good for light metal work. That is how I bent that piece of iron to hang the birdfeeder on the deck.

• A tap and die set that cuts threads on metal wire or rods (outies) or inside holes (innies) from one-eighth to one-half, in coarse and fine threads.

• A set of ratchet socket wrenches, both English and metric, with quarter-inch, three-eighths, and half-inch drives with extensions. The last time I used that, I was tightening all the hardware on your loom because you said it had gotten wobbly.

• Many sets of drill bits.

* One goes from one-eighth to half-inch, graduated by sixty-fourths.

* One has about a hundred bits graduated by the numbers and letters of the American Wire Gauge (AWG).

• Say you are using bronze wire that’s .064′′ as an axle in tracker keyboard action parts. You want the wire to be tight in the hole in the part that moves, and barely loose in the mounting hole. Use the .059′′ bit (#53) for the tight hole, and the .067′′ bit (#51) for the loose hole.

* One is metric from two to twenty millimeters, graduated by tenths.

* One is Forstner bits from a quarter to two inches, graduated by eighths, especially useful because they drill flat-bottomed holes, and since they are not guided by a central pin, you can drill overlapping holes.

* One is “airplane” bits from one-eighth to three-quarters, graduated in eighths, especially useful every few years because they are eighteen-inches long. I don’t need them very often, but when I do, nothing else will work.

* One is spade bits from three-eighth to two-inches, best for making very sloppy holes in soft materials, and for spraining your wrist. I do not use those very often.

* Okay, okay. I have two of the AWG sets, and two of the sixty-fourths sets. There are a few bits missing from each, and one of the drawers over there has replacements bits for every size.

• Digital calipers that read in fractions or thousandths of an inch, or hundredths of a millimeter. That is how I know that piece of bronze wire was .064′′.

• Another big set of socket wrenches that does not include metric sizes. That is the one we carry on the boat. I forgot to put it on board this summer.

• Caddies with assorted screw sizes that I bring to installation sites, so I never have just the size I am looking for.

• You get idea. The next time, I will write about why there are eight toolboxes full of tools. Sometimes they are all in the car at once.

That huge rolling steel cabinet with drawers that looks like it belongs in a gas station? In my previous shop, all my hand tools hung on purpose-made racks. There is not enough wall space for that here, so I bought this. In the drawers, from top to bottom:

• hinged tools like pliers and wire cutters. I used this big Channel Lock™ wrench last week to fix the drain for the outdoor shower;

• open-end wrenches;

• measuring tools like squares, scribes, miter gauges, calipers, micrometers, folding rulers, steel rulers;

• cutting tools like dovetail saws, Exact™ knives and blades, scissors, rotary knives and blades (for cutting leather and felt), small carving tools, razor blades, and the three beautiful leather knives that John Leek brought me from Holland in 1976;

• screwdrivers;

• that set of Marples™ chisels;

• pneumatic accessories like blow guns, detachable couplings, and assorted valves for inflating things. That is how I blew up the soccer ball. And remember when friends from New York were worried about their tire pressure? There is the gauge and valve;

• staple and pop rivet guns, staples and pop rivets;

• arch punches for cutting round pieces of leather and felt, or for cutting round holes in leather and felt. My set goes from one-eighth to three-inches;

• rotary bits for routers, cutting plugs, deburring holes;

• multi-spur bits—the big dangerous looking ones for drilling the holes in rackboards, dozens of them from a half-inch to three inches.

That cabinet serves me well and is big enough for the available space, but I admit to having tool-chest-envy when I walk through the big stores and see the jobs as big as a bus that have charging stations for power tools and mobile phones, refrigerators, and mirrors. What a great idea. You can tell which mechanic has a mirror in his toolbox because his hair is always combed.

It is easy enough to explain all these tools and supplies, especially when I can argue their domestic usefulness. How does anyone get by without an ultrasonic cleaner? But I also have boxes by the dozen with cryptic markings. “Schlicker Console Parts” is full of the little toggles that set stops on pistons, salvaged when I installed a solid-state combination action in a Schlicker console. Anyone needs some, I’ve got them. “Austin Coils” are the “electro” part of the Austin electro-pneumatic note motors. Anyone needs some, I’ve got them. “Skinner Toggle Springs,” “Misc. Peterson,” “Large Slide Tuners,” “Spare Ivories,” “Reed Organ Reeds,” anyone needs some, I’ve got them.

It’s not just an organ shop.

There is a cabinet full of flowerpots and gardening supplies and tools. There is a cabinet full of stockpots and lobster pots, overflow from the kitchen. There is a bag of life jackets, ready for winter storage. There are a half-dozen boxes full of spare parts for a sailboat, an outboard motor, a couple anchors, and lots of nautical line. You never know when you’re going to need a piece of line. Or an air horn. Or Schlicker combination parts. It would be aggressively tacky to think that I would get rid of them.

On the road again

In the 1980 movie, Honeysuckle Rose, Willie Nelson played Buck Bonham, a country music singer looking for national fame. His life as a traveling music star is a strain on his marriage to Viv, played by Dyan Cannon; one thing leads to another, and not everyone winds up happy. The best thing that came out of that movie is the song, “On the Road Again,” which won a Grammy Award for Best Country Song and an American Music Award for Favorite Country Single.

In the 1980s I was working in an organ shop where some of us preferred classical music and some preferred rock and roll. In the days before earpods when music was played through speakers we had to compromise—ours was often country music. It was fun to make up words to go with the rhyming schemes, and some of the country songs of those days were simply hilarious. Bobby Bare’s “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life,” Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias singing “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” and Dolly Parton’s “Better Keep Your Hands Off My Potential New Boyfriend” (really) gave us lots of material.

“On the Road Again” seems full of hope, opening with a major sixth (“My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. . .”), with lyrics about the pleasure of “making music with my friends.” There is a sort of choo-choo-train-like rhythm underneath, and some lithe, right-in-tune harmonica playing. “Like a band of gypsies, we go down the highway, We’re the best of friends, insisting that the world keep turning our way, and our way is on the road again.”

My daily office routine includes lots of correspondence with people wishing to buy and sell pipe organs, and I keep a list of places that might be productive to visit, sort of like pins on a map. Several times a year, when those pins meld into a circle that I might drive in a week or so, I set off in my Suburban. I make a point of visiting any organ workshops that might be along the route, and I am often able to include errands for us or for colleague companies, like delivering a blower here, a rank of pipes there, or picking up a pedalboard—it helps pay for the gas. When I leave home, sappy as it may be, I think of the indefatigable Willie Nelson and dial up that song, fixing myself up with an earworm that will easily last a week.

§

Last December, Willie cheered me on as I headed for Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. My first day out, I met with people at a church who are considering purchasing an organ and had dinner with my son in central Massachusetts. The following morning, I drove to New Holland, Pennsylvania, to visit New Holland Church Furniture, a company that builds miles of pews, thousands of chairs, hundreds of altars, and dozens of organ cases. The Organ Clearing House has helped with the installation of several large new organs with cases built by New Holland, and they have since engaged us to install a few other large pieces such as a cathedral reredos. I was given a lengthy tour of the facility and marveled at the production volume and values.

I was especially impressed by an extensive layout of curved pews in the shop for the floor and balconies of a large church under construction. It is one thing to build straight pews; all organ builders have equipment in their workshops for cutting wood straight. It is much more challenging to work with curves, especially because you would not necessarily use the same curved layouts in several different churches. The forms and patterns for gluing those long, curved boards are custom made for each location. And in this building, the balconies had layouts much different from the main floor, further complicating the job. Massive custom-built sanding machines finish those twenty-foot-long curves with the grain, as any good woodworker would.

Computer-driven machines were cutting out chair backs, pew ends, Gothic arches, and Stations of the Cross at dizzying rates. A procession of ten-foot-long pew seats, hanging from iron hooks like sides of beef, rode conveyors through a huge spray booth. Carts of chair frames rolled from gluing stations to assembly rooms. Engineers and designers stared at computer screens, moving pixilated lines around to create perfect drawings. Those drawings were fed into the machines that cut the wood. Semi-trailers were backed up to loading docks, ready to haul the finished products to their destinations. Seventy-five or eighty workers were toiling in the factory, combining artistry with automation, creating elegant furnishings for church buildings across the country.

New Holland is in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and I was sharing the roads with Amish families in black carriages drawn by single horses and large flatbed trailers drawn by teams of three horses, all with reflective triangles on the back. Driving around them in a big comfortable car with the heat on gently and music playing, I reflected on the contrasting lifestyles. I saw those buggies parked in the driveways of prosperous-looking farmsteads where oxen were waiting patiently to be harnessed to plows and reapers. It is quite a feat to make a living as a farmer in these times without burning diesel fuel.

Pennsylvania and Ohio

I went from New Holland to Wooster, Ohio, home of Wooster College, where I helped maintain the large Holtkamp in the chapel and smaller practice organs when I was working with John Leek in the 1970s. I drove by those buildings nearly fifty years after I first worked in them, reliving John’s often humorous, sometimes stern teaching. I remembered standing on a ladder behind the Great windchest as a fledgling tuner, confronted for the first time by a Sesquialtera II, Mixture IV, and Scharff III, struggling to decipher the relationships between all those tiny pipes.

I drove past the First Presbyterian Church where in 1980 Leek and I attended the dedicatory recital of Karl Wilhelm’s Opus 76 played by my organ teacher, Haskell Thomson. Jack Russell, professor of organ at Wooster College and a former student of Haskell’s, was organist at that church. Jack is still a friend, now located in the Boston area. Opus 76 is a grand three-manual affair with thirty-six stops, free standing pedal towers, and beautiful carved pipe shades. What I remember most about that recital was a cipher that stopped Mr. Thomson in mid-sweep (his students will get an inward chuckle from that), bringing him to the balcony rail to ask for assistance, an organbuilder’s nightmare.

While in Wooster, I visited the newly formed Greenleaf Organ Company founded by Samantha Koch and her husband Daniel Hancock. They are working on the renovation of a 1916 Hook & Hastings organ purchased through the Organ Clearing House by a church in Kansas. The organ had been in storage for years in Newcastle, Maine, where I live, and it was fun to see “my baby” getting a new lease of life. The folks at Greenleaf are smart and skillful, and I look forward to seeing lots of great projects come from that shop.

I drove from Wooster to Oberlin, Ohio, where I went to school forty-five years ago. My timing was bad as I arrived a few days after the holiday break started, so there were not many people around. I had breakfast with Randy Wagner, longtime executive at Organ Supply Industries (OSI) in Erie, Pennsylvania. OSI has been for decades the largest company supplying to the organbuilding trade in the United States.

I met Randy in the 1970s when I was working for John Leek, and Leek and I traveled back and forth from OSI to deliver and pick up parts for our projects. Our relationship continued through my days with Angerstein & Associates, the Bishop Organ Company, and the Organ Clearing House. It is one of my longest collegial friendships. Randy retired to Oberlin where he cut his teeth working with Homer Blanchard in the 1950s. He shares with Barbara Owen the distinction of being one of two surviving participants in the founding meeting of the Organ Historical Society, held in the choir room at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York City in 1956.1

From Oberlin, I drove to Hartville, Ohio, for a quick visit with Charles Kegg of Kegg Pipe Organ Builders. Charles’s shop has a luxurious amount of space for his staff, with a snazzy collection of machines and equipment. His interest in automated musical instruments means that there are collections of paper rolls for player devices and a very rare machine that punches those paper rolls. Charles and I are collaborating on a project in New York City, and it was a nice opportunity to compare notes and questions.

And back to Pennsylvania

Organ Supply Industries in Erie, Pennsylvania, is one of the largest pipe organ companies in the United States and serves as a supplier to most of the independent organ companies around the country. My pal Bryan Timm, OSI vice president, gave me the “family rate” tour followed by a nice lunch. Their vast factory building is a wonderland where everything is on a huge scale, where forklifts stack organ parts sky high, and where the multiplicity of organ stuff boggles the mind. Eight pedalboards are lined up, in the early stages of their construction. A couple dozen keyboards are making their way through production. Thousands of the little dividers between coupler tablets roll off saws into boxes—the blanks that they are cut from look like houses and hotels from “Monopoly.” It takes hundreds of clamps to glue up things like the huge wood organ pipes from 16′ and 32′ open wood diapasons, and those clamps are stacked on carts, ready for the next project. Organ pipes of all sizes are under construction, and the countless forms and jigs needed to make pipes in an infinity of shapes and sizes are neatly organized in racks and shelves. Ranks of wooden pipes whip through their production department and wind up in crates labeled for shipment to organ companies all over the country. Huge woodworking machines seem to be everywhere, all connected with the metal ducts of the dust collection system that gathers tons of sawdust and plane shavings into hoppers, powered by immense vacuum motors.

OSI is something of a nerve-central for the American pipe organ industry. The bustle of activity through the various departments reassures us that pipe organs are being built across the country, and that talented and dedicated people are pouring their hearts into them.

I left Erie to visit an interesting vintage mechanical-action organ in a recently closed church in Canaseraga, a village of about 500 people in rural central New York, about sixty-five miles south of Rochester. Garret House (1810–1900) was the most prominent organbuilder in Buffalo, New York, of his time. He built a nine-rank, one-manual organ for Trinity Episcopal Church in Canaseraga, and my circle of pins included a snowy drive on long lonely country roads to meet with a small group of parishioners of the now-closed church. They were a cheerful band of lifelong residents, families who have been friends and neighbors for generations, and they are hoping we can find a new home for the lovely organ. Since I joined the Organ Clearing House, I have met with many such groups, sorry to have lost their church and eager for the organ to carry life’s breath to another congregation. Having gathered specifications, dimensions, and photographs, I was put in touch with the officer of the diocese who manages property. I hope we can offer the organ soon. Keep your eye on our website.

Saying goodbye

One of the sure effects of celebrating people I have known for forty or fifty years is the passing of treasured colleagues, mentors, and friends. Thomas H. Anderson was all of these. He was born in 1937 in Belfast, Ireland, and started as an apprentice in an organ pipe making shop when he was fourteen. He emigrated to the United States at age nineteen to take a job with the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company. That was 1956, when Aeolian-Skinner built nearly twenty organs, including the beauty at Saint Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, New York (see footnote). Not long after that (not sure when), he started his own firm, the Thomas H. Anderson Organ Pipe Company. He purchased a home in Easton, Massachusetts, not far from Dorchester and Randolph, Massachusetts, where the Aeolian-Skinner facilities were located. His property included a handsome barn attached to the house that he converted to a workshop, and a long, low “chicken coop” where he stored large pipes and materials.

I first met Tommy around 1984 when I went to work for Daniel Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, less than ten miles from Tommy’s shop. What a convenience to have a pipe maker so close by; we frequently drove up and down Bay Road between the two shops. Daniel Angerstein closed his shop when he was appointed tonal director at M. P. Möller, and I started the Bishop Organ Company by assuming Dan’s maintenance business. At the same time, I assumed the care of the large Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church and The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), both in Boston, and I quickly had a list of rebuilding and restoration projects, most of which required Tommy’s help.

Tommy and his wife Susan grew up on the same street in Belfast. Once he was established in the United States, he went back to Belfast to marry her and bring her to join him in Easton. I imagine there were many letters between them in the interim, planning a life together in a new country. What a courageous decision it was for Susan to join Tommy here. They raised four children, six grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, all supported by Tommy, also known as Granda, hammering away in that workshop.

There are few craftsmen whose intuitive grasp of π can outstrip an organ pipe maker. When I was working in a shop every day, I could easily eye the difference between eighteen and twenty millimeters, or between an inch and an inch-and-a-sixteenth. Tommy could hold a pipe in his hand and sense the width of the rectangle to cut to form an identical tube. Circles are the province of the pipe maker. It’s uncanny.

Susan passed away on December 31, 1996. Tommy passed away on December 30, 2023. His funeral service was held in Easton, just a mile from his house, on January 6, 2024. I was there with nine other organbuilders to meet his family and share stories of our work with him. One of his daughters remembered the chore of loading crates of newly made organ pipes into their van and delivering them to the Consolidated Freightways Terminal in nearby Canton, Massachusetts.

We were a group of old-timers, most of us had known Tommy for decades, and each of us know many organbuilders out there on the grapevine. None of us could remember hearing anything but lovely words about Tommy. He was kind, humorous, caring, diligent, and skillful—a valued and admired colleague. He made organ pipes. Tens of thousands of organ pipes. His work will sing on in dozens of churches around the country. He was a valued friend. He was a gentleman.

Notes

1. Pierre Cochereau, organist at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, was scheduled to open the 1956 American Guild of Organists national convention with a recital on the new Aeolian-Skinner organ at Saint Thomas Church in New York City. During the months preceding that convention, G. Donald Harrison was racing to complete the organ. It was fiercely hot, and there was a taxi strike going on, so after a long workday on June 14, Harrison had to walk several long blocks to his apartment on Third Avenue. After dinner with his wife Helen, he sat down to watch Victor Borge on television and died of a heart attack. It is interesting to note that John Scott, future organist at Saint Thomas Church, was born on June 18, 1956, just four days after Harrison’s death.

Let’s hoist a few.

On September 24, 2023, Alyson Krueger published an article in The New York Times under the headline, “My Running Club, My Everything,” telling of the culture of running clubs in New York City in which twenty-five or more people gather at a specified meeting place and run together for four or five miles. She described an outing of the Upper West Side Running Club that met at the American Museum of Natural History (Central Park West at Eighty-First Street) where members ran a loop around Central Park and wound up at the Gin Mill on Amsterdam Avenue at Eighty-First Street, one block west of the museum. I chuckled as I read because the Gin Mill is a favorite after hours haunt of the Organ Clearing House crew. I wonder how many of you reading this have sat there with our guys?

The Gin Mill has a happy hour routine with discounted drinks, and if you are anything like a regular and the bartender knows you, it seems as if you are charged by the hour. Your glass gets magically and repeatedly refilled, and the closing check is a nice surprise. I have spent quite a few evenings there, but our boots-on-the-ground crew has spent dozens. In 2010 the crew spent most of the summer hoisting organ parts into the chambers at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, followed by hoisting pints and other concoctions at the Gin Mill. Numerous subsequent projects have allowed reunions with the friendly staff there—friendly to good natured partyers, but hard on bad apples.

Since so many of our projects involve hoisting organ components in and out of balconies, towers, and high chambers, I spend a lot of time talking with scaffolding vendors around the country. I have first-name relationships with reps in a dozen cities, as well as with our personal representatives from national scaffolding vendors. We own several electric hoists, including one with a 100-foot reach purchased for that job at Saint John the Divine that can hoist a 2,000-pound load 100 feet in two minutes with a soft start and stop. A multiple-week job like that means that someone has held a finger on the up or down button for dozens of hours. We like to ship our own hoist across the country because specialized rental equipment like that can be hard to find and in poor condition. In a usual setup, the hoist is hung from a trolley that rolls on an I-beam so a heavy load like a four-manual console or ten-stop windchest can be lifted clear of a balcony rail, trolleyed out over the nave floor, and safely lowered. Safely for the console, safely for our crew.

The bells, the bells

Wendy and I left our apartment in Greenwich Village on the heels of the pandemic and moved early last year to bucolic Stockbridge in western Massachusetts, about five miles from the New York border. Our house is three doors up Church Street from Main Street where stands the granite Children’s Chime Tower on the Village Green that is shared by the First Congregational Church. After we moved in, we were delighted to learn that we can hear the largest bell ringing the hour, every hour, from the house—no more wondering what time it is in the middle of the night.

The tower was built in 1879, the gift of David Dudley Field II, son of David Dudley Field, pastor of the Congregational Church, and his wife, Submit (really). David II was a prominent New York politician and attorney who represented William Magear “Boss” Tweed in his Tammany Hall embezzlement trial. (Tweed died in prison.) David II dedicated the tower to his grandchildren, stipulating that the chimes should be played every day from “apple blossom time to first frost.” His grave is in the Stockbridge Cemetery, just across Main Street from the Chime Tower. My grandfather was rector of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Stockbridge when I was a kid, and I remember sitting on that green with my grandmother at picnic suppers listening to recitals on the chimes. The music was simple as there are only eleven bells, but since it was more than fifty years ago, I remember it as grand. That tradition continued until recently when the timber frame supporting the chimes was deemed unsafe due to an infestation of carpenter ants.

The big bell continued to ring every hour until a storm caused a power failure last spring, stopping the clock at 2:16. The clock was not reset after the storm, leaving us wondering about the time during the night. At the last town meeting, the citizens approved rebuilding the chimes with a new steel frame, refurbishing the chimes’ playing action, replacing the roof, and re-pointing the stone work.

I was returning to Stockbridge last week from our place in Maine and saw a large crane set up next to the tower. I went home, unloaded the car, walked back to the green with Farley the Goldendoodle to see what was going on, and I found three men from the Verdin Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, preparing to hoist the bells back into the tower. They had removed them earlier in the week, placing them on a flat-bed trailer owned by the town so they could be driven to safety overnight at the public works yard a half-mile away. The new steel frame was in place, and they were hoisting the bells with their new striking mechanisms back into the tower.

In the twenty months since we moved to town, we had only heard the largest bell as it tolled the hours, but now, as the people from Verdin were putting things together and testing the new actions, I heard all the bells for the first time in more than fifty years. At least one of the technicians knew how to play a little so a few hymns and a couple children’s songs wafted up the street to our house. Before they left town, they set and started the clock, freeing it from 2:16 to cover all 720 minutes of the twelve-hour cycle. The morning after the first night of tolling the hour, I was walking Farley a few minutes before 7:00 and ran into our neighbor Marty with Brody the Labrador at the poop-bag kiosk across from the tower. When the bell tolled the hour and we were chatting about the return of the bells, Marty told me that Stewart across the street used to play the chimes and was looking forward to volunteering again when the rest of the work on the tower is complete and the chime goes back into service. I suppose I will, too.

Doing it the old-fashioned way

After Wendy and I visited Florence, Italy, in May 2023, I wrote about the hoisting equipment designed by Filippo Brunelleschi for the construction of the dome of the cathedral there. He had won the design competition in 1418, and construction started in 1420 on what is still the largest unsupported dome in the world. Brunelleschi’s hoisting gear was powered by oxen walking on a circular treadmill on the floor of the cathedral, a rig that was a lot messier and required more maintenance than what we use on our job sites. He made use of blocks and tackle, the same as used to handle the rigging of sailing ships. It is fun to picture workers hauling hay into the church to feed the oxen, and I suppose there was a poop-bag kiosk there also.

The real genius of Brunelleschi’s hoist was the crane at the top that could transfer stones weighing thousands of pounds laterally to every spot in the circumference of the dome. In the world of rigging, it is one thing to hoist a heavy load vertically; it is a very different challenge to move horizontally from under the hoisting point.

We marvel at ancient feats of lifting. Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, is believed to be between four- and five-thousand years old. It includes some thirty stones, some as heavy as twenty-five tons. The stones came from a quarry sixteen miles away—simply bringing them to the site was effort enough. In most American states, the weight limits on tandem axles of commercial trucks are between 25,000 and 40,000 pounds. Rhode Island has the highest limit, 44,800 pounds, which is about the weight of one of the stones at Stonehenge. The Grove crane that was helping my friends from Verdin hoisting bells is a robust machine with a fifty-ton lifting capacity. The engineers and laborers at Stonehenge would have been pleased with help from Gary the crane operator.

We visit iconic churches in Europe built in centuries past and admire their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century organs. The monumental organ completed in 1738 by Christian Müller at the church of Saint Bavo in Haarlem, the Netherlands, has 32′ pipes in the pedal tower. As modern organbuilders, we know how much work it is to handle things like that. Those eighteenth-century craftsmen worked very hard.

I was twenty-one years old when my mentor John Leek and I helped a crew from Flentrop in Zaandam, the Netherlands, install the three-manual organ at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio. The organ has a beautiful twenty-five-foot mahogany case topped with a massive crown with heavy moldings that stands on a pedestal balcony something like fifteen feet above the floor. The balcony is shallower than the organ case so when you are up on top, you look straight down to the floor.

There is a polished 16′ Principal in the façade, and come to think of it, we installed that organ using technology and equipment similar to that used by Brunelleschi, lifting everything to the balcony and into the organ using a block-and-tackle with hemp rope. Looking back, it would have been a lot more pleasant had anyone thought of using nylon rigging rope like you find on a modern sailboat because that hairy, prickly hemp was hard on our hands. The heaviest piece of the organ was the impost frame with the huge moldings that form the bases of the case towers and the rigid structure that connects the lower and upper cases. I suppose it weighed around 1,500 pounds; so instead of oxen, there was me and a young guy from Flentrop pulling on the rope. We were much neater and easier to maintain than Brunelleschi’s oxen. My sixty-seven-year-old shoulders and back could no more do that kind of work now than fly me to the moon.

To lift the big shiny façade pipes up to the case, a co-worker picked up the top of the pipe and climbed a ladder from the nave floor to the balcony as others moved the toe end toward the ladder, bringing the pipe to vertical. I wore a leather harness around my waist as if I was carrying a flagpole in a parade, we placed the toe of the pipe in the cup, and I climbed the ladder, toe following top as the others above me balanced and guided it into place. Today I stand in a church gazing up at the organ, remembering doing that work, incredulous. I am not half the man I used to be.

I have been with the Organ Clearing House for nearly twenty-five years, watching my colleague Amory Atkins set up scaffolding and hoisting equipment on dozens, even hundreds of job sites. There is still plenty of hustle to the work, but the I-beams, trolley, and electric hoist all supported by steel scaffolding make for a much safer and less strenuous work site.

Making the impossible possible

When I was running the Bishop Organ Company in the Boston area in the 1980s, we had a releathering project in the large organ of one of Boston’s great churches. As usual, we started the job with a string of heavy days disconnecting organ components covered with decades of city grime and removing them from the organ for transportation to our workshop. After we had wrestled a particularly awkward and heavy part down the ladders and out of the building, one of my employees announced that now he thought he understood organbuilding. “It’s squeezing into tiny spaces to remove screws you can’t reach, to separate a part of the organ the size of a refrigerator that’s covered with mud and sharp pointy things and carrying it down a ladder next to a Tiffany window.”

He was right. A big manual windchest might weigh 800 or 1,000 pounds, more for a large console. If we are planning to dismantle or install a Skinner organ that has one of those wonderful electro-pneumatic harps, we might plan an entire day to handle that single specialty voice—they are big and heavy and include row after row of little prickly things that dig into your hands, arms, and shoulders. When I hear a harp in service playing, recital, or recording, my mind jumps instantly to the titanic struggles I have had moving them. They sound so ethereal in a lofty room, but they are pugnacious bulky brats to handle.

The thrilling rumbles of big 16′ and 32′ stops do not happen anywhere else in music, but again, my mind jumps to the herculean task of moving such things. The pipes, racks, and windchests of a 32′ Double Open Wood weigh many tons and will fill half of a semi-trailer. One of the marvels of the pipe organ is the idea that a single pipe might be approaching forty feet in length including pipe foot and tuning length, weigh close to a ton, and can produce only one musical tone at one pitch at one volume level. What a luxurious note.

When I meet people at social events, they are invariably surprised when they learn about my work. “A pipe organ builder. I didn’t know there were any of you left.” Another common comment is someone remembering the organ looming high in the back of the church and if they ever gave it any thought, they assumed that it was part of the building. Not so. Every organ in every building anywhere in the world was put there intentionally by craftsmen. They had to figure out how to mount and secure each heavy component. Think of the sprawling sixteenth-century organ case at the cathedral in Chartres. It gives the impression that it is somehow hanging from the stained-glass windows, but 500 years ago, those workers built scaffolding clear up to the clerestory windows and hoisted and lugged the heavy woodwork and huge pipes to their lofty spots.

Twenty years ago, we were delivering a three-manual organ to a church in suburban Richmond, Virginia. There was a big organ case with polished façade pipes, five large windchests, all the machinery and ductwork for the wind system, seventy or eighty eight-foot pipe trays full of nicely packed pipes, the console, and all the mysterious looking bits and pieces that make up a full-sized pipe organ. Parishioners volunteered on a Sunday afternoon to help unload the truck, and by day’s end the sanctuary was jam packed with carefully made, expensive looking stuff. I had worked with the church’s organ committee and governing board to create and negotiate the project and knew several of the people involved very well. After the dust had settled that evening, one of them came up to me and commented, “John, it wasn’t until this moment that I understood why organs cost so much money.”

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.

J. G. P. Leek

When I was a student at Oberlin (Class of 1978), students were not allowed to own cars, ostensibly to limit traffic and parking congestion in the small town. I lived in an apartment off campus during my senior year, and since it came with a parking space, I flouted the rule and bought a 1969 Mercedes 230. I put a great sound system in it—those cassette tapes were just the thing—and I felt like the big man driving around. It was in pretty good shape, but it was a nine-year-old Ohio car, and there were little fringes of rust here and there.

At a time when my rent was $175 per month, I splurged and spent $200 on four new Michelin tires. The next morning, I drove to the organ shop where I was working and proudly showed off the new tires. My boss, John Leek, quipped, “It’s like putting alligator shoes on a wino.”

John Leek died in Sandusky, Ohio, on November 15, 2019, just short of the age of ninety. Until a couple years ago, I called him on his birthday. We stayed in touch now and again, especially after he read about himself in this column, but I had not seen him in more than fifteen years. I dropped everything to drive to Ohio for his memorial service, but I am sorry I did not drop everything a couple years ago to visit him. I am grateful to him, I miss him, and I want to tell you about him.

His name bears the Dutch pronunciation. A bank teller commented, “Your name should be pronounced ‘leak.’” His quick quip, “Then it should be pronounced ‘Bea-thoven.’”

The wino crack was one side of John. He was able to squeeze the greatest delight from the smallest joke, and when it was a big joke, we would laugh all day. He could also be stern. He had been brought up in the rigorous system of apprenticeships in the Netherlands, starting with a cabinetmaker at a very early age and moving to organ shops in his hometown. His teachers had been tough, and so was he. He was quick with compliments and encouragement and equally quick with a hard lesson. I was late to work once. He was in the workshop, the doors were locked, and he waved me away, telling me to come back tomorrow. I was late to work only once.

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Johannes Geratus Petrus Leek was born in 1929 in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, on the shortest day of the year, the youngest of eleven children. He apprenticed with Bernard Pels & Zonen in Alkmaar, and he continued his education in the workshops of Vermeulen, Wattell, and Verschueren. He served in the Dutch army shortly after the end of World War II. During his military service, John was seriously injured in a railroad accident. He recalled lying in the wrecked car realizing he was hurt, asking God for “twenty more years,” and then getting the creeps as the twentieth anniversary approached. I do not know the exact dates but suppose that accident happened in the early 1950s. He died last November about five weeks short of his ninetieth birthday—God granted that prayer.

After his time in the army, he returned to work in the organ shop of Verschueren. He and his wife Maria moved to the United States in 1961 as John went to work for the Holtkamp Organ Company under Walter Holtkamp, Sr. He was working on the installation of the organ in Warner Concert Hall at Oberlin when he saw a notice on a bulletin board that the school was looking for a new organ curator. “That’s the job for me.” He worked for the school from 1964 until 1976, all the while gathering organ maintenance clients “on the side,” and he left the school to start his own company in the workshop building behind his house on Route 58 (Main Street), just on the southern outskirts of town.

Just as John was starting out on his own, in the fall of my junior year, I began working with him three days a week and summers, and continued in his shop full time from my graduation until 1984, when my wife and two toddler sons moved to Boston. John was my important mentor in the craft of organbuilding. He taught me to tune, how to read and cut a piece of wood, how to glue pouches, how to build and leather a reservoir. I learned why you want wood to have standing grain for pallets in slider chests and flat grain in keyboards. (Wood warps only between the growth rings. You do not want pallets to warp so their surface does not meet the windchest grid, and you do not want keyboards to warp so the keys come into contact with each other.)

He helped me grow through the awkward end of youth when I was sure I knew everything into the awkward beginning of adulthood when I began realizing how little I knew. He never hesitated to let me know when I was full of it, and he never hesitated to confess when he was. While still an organ performance major, I was increasingly aware that organbuilding was my first love. I wondered aloud to John about quitting school so I could work with him full time. “If you quit school, you’re fired.”

Whenever my weak apprentice attempts resulted in a mangled job, John nailed it to the wall over my workbench. It turned really funny when I came back later to visit and they were still there, warning my successor apprentices to pay attention.

Road trip

Early in the summer of 1978, just after I graduated from Oberlin, we were completing construction of a harpsichord for a former student of the conservatory who lived in Oakland, California. She asked John to deliver the instrument to her, and he invited me to make the trip with him to share the driving. His offer was that I would not get paid, but he promised we would stay in the best hotels, eat the best meals, gamble in Reno, swim in the Pacific Ocean, and eat at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. John had a mustard-yellow Dodge van with a broad brown stripe (remember, those were the days of appliances in harvest gold and avocado colors), just the vehicle for such a caper, and off we went.

The trip is about 2,400 miles each way, and I suppose we drove between 400 and 500 miles each day because I remember it taking about a week in each direction. Anyone who has made a similar trip by land will appreciate our marveling at the rich agricultural heartlands, the prairies, the mountains, and the deserts. We drove all day through Iowa into Nebraska watching a huge weather system develop from the west all across the horizon, driving into light rain, and finally parking under a bridge for more than an hour waiting for the thunder, lightning, and hail to stop. We didn’t see a tornado, but that surely was on our minds.

When we stopped for gas just after entering Nevada, I put a dime in a truck-stop slot machine and won ten dollars. Bad. Very bad. We spent a night in Elko, Nevada, where we had a memorable meal in a Basque restaurant recommended by Howard Hanson, a member of Oberlin’s voice faculty. It is almost three hundred miles across flat arid land from Elko to Reno, and it seemed that we were staring at the distant mountains west of Reno all day, a visual effect that is hard to fathom the first time you see it. It was in a posh casino in Reno that I learned how it was bad that I had been sucked into the slot machine the day before. Inhibitions were loosened as the champagne was on the house, and I ran through all the quarters I could find (I think that may have been before there was such a thing as a dollar slot) while John got beaten up at a Blackjack table. It was interesting how often the dealer came up with twenty-one.

As we delivered the harpsichord, we spent two nights in the house with the customer and her physician husband, allowing us to visit San Francisco and fulfill a couple of John’s original promises. We were both smokers, and that was not allowed in the house. The second night, the good doctor brought home a preserved smoker’s lung in a jar and delivered a thoughtful lecture.

John burst randomly into song many times each day. The simple chanted Alleluia from the Roman Catholic Mass was a several-times-a-day regular. Another was a short clip from a bawdy little Dutch song asking a woman named Elena why the baby poops green. Maria and I joined elbows and sang that one for their grandchildren on the morning of the memorial service. There were many others, all brief excerpts. I do not believe John knew the complete songs, but he sure enjoyed the clips. Over and over.

John and Maria had been naturalized as citizens of the United States in 1968. He thundered the first four words of the refrain of “This is My Country” each time a new wonder was revealed on that wonderful trip. It was a punctuating anthem for a man of deep faith marveling at the process of his life that had brought him to live and work in such a huge country with such diverse landscapes.

The twinkle in his eye

John and his family were members of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Oberlin, which was the site of his memorial service. When I worked for him, new carpet was being installed in the church, and the old had been given to a smaller church out in the countryside where the unworn sections would be enough to cover the floor. John volunteered the two of us to join a crew of parishioners removing the old carpet, which was loaded into his van and my pickup truck, where the huge roll hung over the back of my open tailgate. I was in the lead as we left on the delivery run, turning left from the church parking lot onto Lorain Street. I was stopped at the traffic light at the intersection of Main Street (Route 58) across from the art museum when I felt a strong push from behind. John had been careful to see that no traffic was coming, and, with a maniacal smile clearly visible in my mirror, was shoving me, carpet, truck, and all, through the red light into the middle of the highway.

In between organs, we built a screen porch on John’s house with a high peaked ceiling. Coming to the end of the project we were painting the floor. I was working my way out a corner with my back to John when I became aware of the quick whooshing of John’s brush flashing back and forth as he hurried to paint me into the corner.

Opus 1

In the fall of 1979, John signed a contract to build a new organ for St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia. The organist there was Ben Dobey who had recently graduated from Oberlin as an organ major and was sure that while John had never built a pipe organ himself, he would be well able. Originally, the instrument was planned with twelve stops on two manuals, but the agreement was altered in December of 1980 to include the addition of an independent 8′ Octaafbass in the Pedal, which made necessary the construction of a separate case for the two pedal stops. You can see the specifications of the organ at https://pipeorgandatabase.org/OrganDetails.php?OrganID=8401.

The case is made of white oak with black walnut accents, drawknobs were made from a huge log of boxwood that John kept in the attic of the workshop, and the pipes were supplied by Jacques Stinkens of Zeist, the Netherlands. The slider windchests were made with sponsils, individual strips of wood fitted and glued between the ribs of the key channels to form the table surface, rather than the more usual plywood windchest table. With the experience of having built more than a dozen harpsichords, we made the keyboards in the shop. (That is when I learned about choosing slab grain.) In the first days of March 1982, I was standing at the drill press in the shop, drilling the holes in rackboards for the three windchests—start with the smallest holes so that if you make a mistake and drill an extra hole of a given size, it is easier to correct by making it bigger rather than smaller. (I have this memory exactly because those were the days of waiting for Pat to go into labor, and our first son Michael was born on March 4. I had quit smoking the previous New Year’s Eve.)

After the first week of the installation, the new organ case was standing in the church’s balcony with façade pipes in place. John and I sat proudly in the pews that Sunday as the congregation was gathering in the quiet church when a little girl near us took a look backwards and piped up clearly, “I like the old one better,” raising a polite Episcopal titter.

Patrick Summers, the current interim organist at Saint Alban’s, provided a great boost to my memory by forwarding the documents concerning the new organ from the church’s archives. As I read, John’s distinctive voice came alive. When petitioning the vestry to consider changing the schedule of payments from a list of completed components to one based on the calendar, John wrote (as Maria typed), “We would like to ask in a very polite manner from the Counsel to be paid each half year.”

John spoke English rapidly and fluently, but he never lost the grammar of his native Dutch. Coming into the shop in the morning, he would declare, “I feel myself good today,” typically followed by the ubiquitous Alleluia. (“Myself” was pronounced my-selliff, just as the name of his hometown was pronounced Allick-mar.) My primitive classroom German gives me, “Ich habe mich . . .” Although I had never been addressed by a nickname, in that workshop I was “Yonnyboy.”

Nunc dimittis

At John’s service I was reunited with his son James who runs the Leek Organ Company, his siblings Paula and Peter, their spouses and children, and his wife Maria. All of us bear the marks of the thirty-five years that have passed since my young family and I moved to Boston to start a new chapter, but the memories and stories flowed like it was yesterday. It was hilarious to hear the familiar stories as passed through the generations to John’s grandchildren, and it was fun to share some they had not heard.

John believed that there is a little voice in the head of a craftsman that pipes up when something is about to go wrong. “If you do that, you will stab yourself with that chisel.” I still hear that little voice and think of him. When I am tuning a chimney flute, I remember the moment he showed me how to hold the tool in the Congregational Church in Austinburg, Ohio, and I remember his teasing my beginner’s “yo-yo tuning” in the chapel at the College of Wooster. He insisted that I learn to tune with both hands and made me tune entire organs left-handed. There are some pipes you just cannot reach with your right hand.

John Leek was not a nationally known organbuilder, but he was widely known by generations of students at Oberlin that gave him an impressive reach. Many of my friends worked for him during their student years, and many other former students have commented in recent weeks about how generous he was with advice and goodwill. He built more than a dozen harpsichords and two pipe organs, renovated or restored dozens more, and performed thousands of service calls on hundreds of different organs. While I worked with him, we helped install four new Flentrop organs including the big three-manual instrument at Trinity Cathedral in Cleveland. I believe his greatest legacy was as a teacher, sharing his old-world experience, knowledge, and insight with young craftsmen.

John and I worked regularly on the big Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland, releathering a division at a time and doing regular tuning visits. As we left the church one afternoon, a woman was contemplating a flat tire, and we offered to change it for her. When we finished, she thanked us profusely, declaring that there would be a special place in heaven for us. John replied, “Yes, tuning harps.”