In the Wind. . .

Making things

Before we moved to New York City, Wendy and I lived in the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. Our building had been an electrical warehouse for the Navy Yard, which actively built ships from 1801 until 1975. It is a building that once had forklifts racing around inside, so the ceilings were nice and high. Our living room windows looked across Boston Harbor to the Coast Guard base, the Custom House, and into the heart of Boston, and we had “cocktail chairs” in front of the sixth-floor windows where for ten years of evenings we watched the Wednesday night sailboat races, foolish non-seamen in overpowered speed boats, and the constant flow of commercial shipping including the mammoth Liquid Natural Gas tankers whose captains looked us in the eye from their towering bridges.

The Navy Yard still functions formally as a military base as it is home to the USS Constitution, the Navy’s oldest commissioned warship. One of the oldest buildings in the Charlestown Navy Yard is the Ropewalk, built of heavy granite blocks and completed in 1838, where most of the rope used by the United States Navy was made until it closed in 1970. Imagine the floor plan of a building designed expressly for making rope, over 1,300 feet long and 45 feet wide. That is more than twice the length of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. One of my walking routes included the length of the building that is almost exactly a quarter mile, and I wondered what sort of machinery was used for all that twisting and winding. Take a look at this video to see an antique ropewalk in operation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M5mo2I2c0Q.

The Maine Maritime Museum is on the site of the Percy & Small Shipyard in Phippsburg, Maine, where dozens of wooden sailing ships as long as 444 feet were built through the nineteenth century. The museum is adjacent to the Bath Iron Works, famous for having launched a new destroyer every twenty-five days during World War II with Rosie the Riveter riveting a river of rivets. Now, the Bath Iron Works is known for producing new Zumwalt Class destroyers.¹ The museum includes a diorama of the J. T. Donnell Ropewalk in Bath, Maine, which adjoined Percy & Small and provided the shipyard with rope. When you are building six-masted schooners you need lots of rope, and the ropewalk was a wooden structure some 1,200 feet long with a stationary steam engine at one end to power the equipment. A legend by the diorama shares a quote from The Bath Times in 1883:

John D. Smith of this city, a ropemaker at the J. T. Donnell ropemaking factory, has done a large amount of walking in his life. He is sixty-four years old and has worked at ropemaking for forty-five years working as a handspinner, in which time he has spun 69,940,666 fathoms [six feet] of thread, walking ten miles a day to do this, which in the forty-five years of spinning would aggregate the enormous distance of 140,400 miles [six day weeks for forty-five years]. Of this, one-half the distance has been accomplished walking backwards . . ., the equivalent of backing a distance nearly equal to around the world three times.

Reminds me of the quip about Ginger Rogers, who did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards in high heels. (Mr. Smith probably didn’t wear high heels.)

Color my world with a spring in my step.

Children have grown up watching Sesame Street since 1969. I was thirteen, and I had just landed my first paying job as a church organist, so I was above “strings and sealing wax,” but fifteen years later the show was a staple for my sons. As a lifelong machine geek, I loved the segments about how things are made, all of which are easy to find online. There is a humdinger about making crayons accompanied by a brilliant musical tone poem. My favorite is “Peanut Butter,” the jazzy flapper-style song written and performed by Joe Raposo that accompanies a tour through a peanut butter factory featuring smiling workers in what look like Krispy Kreme hats pushing the important looking buttons to run the machines. I especially like the shot of a broad stream of peanut butter oozing out of a press and into the pipes that lead to the jars as Raposo sings, “he keeps it pumpin’ through the pipeline like a peanut-butter-pumper should.” What great teaching.

Among the many factories I have toured are a potato chip factory (no free samples but a gift shop at the end), a major brewery (free samples), and an auto assembly plant (no free samples). When I was working for John Leek in Oberlin in the early 1980s, we were building an organ for Saint Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale, Virginia, and we planned to make the sliders in the style of Flentrop, double sliders of Masonite, the holes connected with little leather tubes, with hundreds of springs between them to press the two sliders against chest table and toeboard.

No hardware store could have supplied the thousands of identical fine coil compression springs we would need, and we found the Timms Spring Company in Elyria, Ohio, perfectly situated to supply the several large car makers in the area. The company had around twenty employees, most of whom were tool-and-die makers, and the factory was full of machines. Timms would receive an order from a car maker for a million specialized springs, and a machine would be set up to make them that would then run on its own for a week or two gobbling up coils of wire and filling bins with springs.

We brought a sample (probably borrowed from a Flentrop organ we serviced) and met Bill Timms, the third generation of the spring-making family. Bill gave us a fascinating tour around the factory explaining the purpose of each spring being made and gave us lots of free samples. We watched as a toolmaker set up a simple jig to copy our spring by hand and returned a week later to pick up our order.

Organ shops

Visiting a pipe organ workshop is a special treat, educational and eye-popping for both the layperson and the organbuilder. I have visited dozens of shops across the United States, in Great Britain, and in Europe, and while I like to think I know a lot about the building and history of organs, I always learn something fresh. It is fun to compare how different workshops approach common tasks like building windchests and reservoirs, racking pipes, or making wind connections. Different firms have particular products or processes they have developed of which they are particularly proud, different firms have thoughtfully designed console layouts that distinguish them from others, and different firms specialize in different types of windchest actions.

The organbuilding firm of Harrison & Harrison in Durham in Great Britain moved into a new well-equipped building in 1996, where one can pass from one department to another witnessing the deep skills of a venerable firm at work. Immediately upon entering the building, one sees displayed in an elegant frame a cast gold medallion and a letter from Queen Elizabeth II dated November 20, 1997: 

Prince Philip and I are delighted and deeply impressed with the marvelous work of restoration of the fire damaged area of Windsor Castle. Being anxious to show our appreciation of the skill and dedication, which you and others have devoted to it, we have this special medallion struck to mark the completion of the restoration and it comes with our grateful thanks. [Signed] Elizabeth R

The organ involved in the Windsor Castle restoration is a new instrument of seven ranks in the “Private Chapel” built in 1997. Harrison & Harrison has produced a vast list of important and well-known organs including those at King’s College, Cambridge, Durham, Ely, and Exeter cathedrals, Royal Festival Hall, Westminster Abbey, Winchester Cathedral, and Saint George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. We have all seen several of those organs on television. I especially like the thought that the marvelous organ in Westminster Abbey was built for the coronation of George VI in 1936—imagine the feelings of nervousness, expectation, and pride those organbuilders must have felt. When I visited that workshop in 2016, the organ from King’s College was in the shop for renovation. I got a kick out of noticing the pipe crate labeled “Solo Tuba,” the stentorian tenor melody under a certain verse-six descant ringing in my ears. My visit to Durham included a tour of the H&H cathedral organ with operations manager Jeremy Maritz, setting the standard that one Double Open Wood Diapason is not enough. There’s one on each side of the choir, one of which goes to 32′.

The workshop of Taylor & Boody in Staunton, Virginia, is housed in an old public school building with huge windows and high ceilings, a spacious, airy, and well-lighted place to work. Since the firm was founded in 1979, they have built nearly ninety mechanical-action organs, developing a great reputation for excellent workmanship. Most of their instruments show the influence of the North European Baroque, with tonal schemes that allow lots of versatility. They ensure their own supply of high-quality wood by harvesting carefully chosen trees, cutting them into lumber in their sawmill, and drying them in the adjacent kiln. It is a kick to walk around the yard among stacks of lumber designated for particular opus numbers. When Wendy and I visited there in 2009, we stayed in the apartment above the sawmill and saw the huge oak logs destined to become the wonderful innovative organ for Grace Church in New York City. We have a fond memory of John Boody showing us his “free-ranging” moveable chicken coop and giving us fresh eggs for our breakfast.

Taylor & Boody is one of a number of firms that casts pipe metal to their own specifications. Watching the casting box being pushed down the long table leaving a shining pool of molten metal behind is something special to watch, especially the magic moment a few seconds later when the elixir turns into solid metal. The transformation from liquid to solid is instantly apparent. It seems like alchemy. The idea that freshly cast metal and those huge oak logs would soon be a pipe organ epitomizes the craft we celebrate.

Schoenstein & Company in Benicia, California (the gateway to Napa Valley), mirrors the dedication to quality at Taylor & Boody, building organs in a style worlds apart. They are widely respected for the sophisticated tonal structures with versatile orchestral voices, double expressions, and powerful solo voices, and their elegant consoles are superbly appointed with accessories unique to them. One look at an expression shoe and you know it is a Schoenstein organ. Schoenstein purchased their building in 2004, leaving the 1928 workshop in downtown San Francisco. They have since raised the ceiling of one room to forty-two feet, creating an erecting space, and added a wing for pipe shop, voicing room, and archives. The attention to detail is unparalleled—the company logo is stenciled on the propane tanks of the forklift. Jack Bethards and his skilled staff are working with a clear vision, strongly influenced by the fabled companies of the early twentieth century. The firm has just completed a grand organ with four manuals and seventy stops, including a 32′ metal façade, for the new Basilica of Mary, Queen of the Universe in Orlando, Florida.

Glatter-Götz in Pfullendorf, Germany, is housed in a new facility built for them shortly after the famous Walt Disney Concert Hall organ was completed. When I was there in the fall of 2019, vast fields of sunflowers were in bloom as I drove to the little village. There is a one-story façade facing the street, effectively concealing the two-and-a-half story rear of the building. There is a huge slanted roof covered with solar panels allowing second floor offices at one end of the building and lofty open areas with plenty of space for erecting organs and handling long lumber. You enter at the end of the building where the lunchroom is to the left, the voicing room to the right, a corridor ahead to the workshops, and a long stairway to the suite of offices. All the workspaces have lots of big windows, plenty of clean bench space, storage areas for lumber, and fasteners, leather, and organ parts are neatly organized. There were two organs being assembled when I visited, one for Marietta, Georgia, and another older instrument being renovated for a music school in rural Russia. The next-door neighbor is a farm implement dealer, so a parade of tractors runs back and forth outside.

Paul Fritts & Company occupies an attractive architect-designed (craftsman style?) building in Tacoma, Washington. I visited there in April 2019 with my colleague Amory Atkins (it was Amory’s birthday) while we were installing an organ at the University of Washington. Organs for the First Lutheran Church of Lorain, Ohio, and the Chapel of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, were standing in the shop when we visited. The Lorain organ was complete and ready for shipment. I was especially impressed by their CNC (computer numerical control) router. It is housed in a separate building to separate the considerable noise from the rest of the workshop. It is as big as a bus and capable of drilling entire windchest tables with dozens of different hole sizes, milling the many sizes of wood reed boots, and mitering wood windlines, all by programmed computer control. The machine chooses and inserts bits as necessary and calmly progresses from one task to another while the organbuilders work on other tasks in the workshop across the way. We had a birthday dinner with Paul and college pals Bruce and Shari Shull in Tacoma, then drove back to our hotel in Seattle in a wicked rain squall, crowned by a complete double rainbow. Happy Birthday!

C. B. Fisk, Inc., moved into a new purpose-built facility in 1979. That building has been expanded significantly since, with tall erecting space added, and a large wing containing several department workshops. The first organ to be built and assembled in the new shop was Opus 68, a three-manual, twenty-seven-stop instrument for the Southwick Music Complex of the University of Vermont. Close to ninety new organs have been built in that building, which, like others I have described, is superbly equipped and spacious enough for nearly thirty people to be at work with all the tools and supplies they need.

Charles Fisk founded the eponymous company in 1961 in an old ropewalk building in Gloucester, Massachusetts. C. B. Fisk “lifer” Bob Cornell, who has been with the firm for fifty years, remembers that the ropewalk was actually built for making nets for the city’s fleet of fishing trawlers. (Remember George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in The Perfect Storm.) There was a twenty-foot-high room at one end where organs could be erected, and an attached structure over 120-feet long where the nets had been made and the various workspaces for the organ company were placed. Bob remembered poison ivy growing through openings in the walls, and that the long floor slanted away from the tall building as the land sank into the nearby bog causing window frames to become trapezoidal. About ten people worked in that shop. The landmark organs for Kings Chapel in Boston (1963) and Harvard Memorial Church (1967) were built in the ropewalk.

What groundbreaking work happened in that shop as the innovative and Socratic Charlie Fisk, with a loyal group of disciples, dug into the history of organbuilding and developed the signature style that has been so influential. The company has now built over 150 organs in distinguished venues all over the world. Those fledgling organbuilders may not have walked 140,000 miles, but they sure changed the content of the industry.

Each of these companies has a well-developed website with photo galleries, opus lists, and workshop tours. Happy visiting. And buy good organs.

Notes

1. Just to show that the Navy can have a sense of humor, the first launch of the futuristic evil-looking Zumwalt class ships was the USS Enterprise commanded by James Kirk. 

Photo:

The Fisk Ropewalk, moving day to the new shop, Charles Fisk loading the van (photo credit: Robert Cornell)

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.

Pipes, wind, and wood

During the 1960s and 1970s, a number of organ building firms were founded, dedicated to building mechanical-action pipe organs according to ancient principles. This proliferation has been generally called the “Tracker Revival,” among other names, but more to the point, it was a renaissance of the philosophy of building pipe organs in small workshops rather than in large factories. In the years leading up to World War II, the larger American organ building firms adopted mass-production practices and controlled expenses diligently, which diminished the artistic and musical content of the instruments.

The idea of building pipe organs by hand was revolutionary, and there was a steep learning curve for these artisans. Early in the twentieth century, most American organs used relatively high wind pressure. Four inches on a water column was common, and firms like the Skinner Organ Company routinely used pressures from four to six inches on the Great, six to eight on the Swell, and often included Solo Tubas on ten, twelve, and even twenty-five inches. Such high pressures in large organs were only made possible by the invention of the electric blower that could produce huge volumes of pressurized air. Historic European organs typically used pressures of three inches or less (remember that before about 1900 pipe organs were blown by human power), and twentieth-century American builders, starting more or less from scratch, had to learn anew how to make large organ pipes speak beautifully on low wind pressure.

A critical part of measuring wind pressure is volume. The output capability of an organ blower is measured in cubic feet per minute at a given pressure. And in a mechanical-action organ with slider windchests, the delivery of pressurized air from the blower depends on the dimensions of the windlines from blower to reservoir to windchests, of windchest tone channels, of pallet (valve) openings, toe holes sizes in both windchests and pipes, and many other minutia. Several years ago, I visited the huge Beckerath organ at the Oratory of Saint Joseph in Montreal while the people of Juget-Sinclair were at work on the renovation and was amazed to see that small paper tubing was used to provide wind for the behemoth 32′ façade pipes, demonstrating that in the 1950s, venerable European firms were also busy learning how to do great things with low wind pressure.

E. Power Biggs released his influential two-record set, The Golden Age of the Organ, featuring the organs of Arp Schnitger and the chorale preludes of Ernst Pepping in 1968. That recording was a bellwether, as important as any single document in the inception of the new age of organ building. I wore holes in those LPs as a teenager, poring over the published specifications, gobbling up Pepping’s cheerful leaping music, and forming a lifelong relationship with Bach’s transcription of Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Minor. The gorgeous tones of the 8′ Principal in the Pedal with intertwining 4′ stops playing the violin are fully in my ears as I write.

John Brombaugh established his company in 1968 in Middletown, Ohio, and gathered a group of five partners that included John Boody and George Taylor. In the following years, an absolute who’s who of the twentieth-century pipe organ worked in Brombaugh’s shop, including many who went on to form their own companies. Brombaugh was one of the first to dig hard into the study of older organs in Europe, taking thousands of measurements, trying to learn what made those instruments sound so wonderful, and bringing that information back to the workshop to convert the numbers into music.

Ten years after starting the company in Ohio, when Brombaugh was eager to move the company to Oregon, George Taylor and John Boody chose to stay and form their own company in Middletown. As part of the dissolution of the partnership, Brombaugh passed on to them a contract for a new organ of two manuals and eighteen stops for the Presbyterian Church of Coshocton, Ohio. George and John set up shop in John’s garage to build the organ. It was completed in 1979, and Harald Vogel played the dedicatory recital.

As they were finishing the organ in Coshocton, they dreamed of purchasing a school building, thinking that with high ceilings, big windows, and wood floors, such a building would make a great workshop. George’s sister was graduating from Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia. George and John drove down to attend, and a college friend of George’s suggested an old school in town that was available. During a short visit, they immediately started talking about the price and bought the building for $11,000. More than forty years later, Taylor & Boody is still building organs there.

§

John Boody and I have shared a special bond as I maintained the E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings organ (Opus 635, 1872) in the First Baptist Church in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where John grew up and where his grandfather had been pastor. (Sadly, the church and organ were destroyed by fire on October 24, 2018.) We have been friends for a long time and have shared many a meal, wiling away convivial hours, and we have collaborated a few times. I spent a cheerful ninety minutes on the phone with John on January 10, 2021, hearing his thoughts about the history of Taylor & Boody.

John expressed gratitude for the opportunities he and George had to study European organs. He talked especially about their encounter with the 1702 Schnitger organ in the Aa-Kirk in Groningen, the Netherlands, where with Lynn Edwards and Cor Edeskes they had the privilege of removing the pipes from the iconic organ for exact measuring. They measured the windlines and other components of the wind system, measured critical dimensions of the windchests, and analyzed the structure of the organ. John spoke with reverence about blowing on those ancient pipes and how the experience defined the future of their work. “That really set the pace for us. That was before we plugged in a machine.” 

After that first organ in Coshocton, Ohio, several modest contracts came their way. Arthur Carkeek, professor of organ at DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana, advocated Taylor & Boody to build a twenty-two-stop organ for the First Christian Church in Vincennes, Indiana (Opus 4, 1981). There followed a twenty-stop organ in Cincinnati, twenty-four stops for Richmond, Virginia, and a couple of one-manual organs, before they got to Opus 9 (1985), a four-manual organ with fifty-two stops for Saint Joseph’s Chapel at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Late in our conversation, I asked John how he would define the work of Taylor & Boody. “It’s that sound we made at Holy Cross where we had all those lead pipes working together. We never built a squeaky organ like other people thought Baroque organs should be; our organs have that dark, chocolate, choral sound, the core of the organ was different. I think that really grabbed people’s attention, and that has worn well. And Grace Church, New York, still has that, and Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue. So that has stuck with us. And I think that, for me, that’s what makes an organ an organ. It’s that Principal, choral sound.” Their first few organs were built with the memories of that Schnitger organ fresh in their minds, and the opportunity to build the large organ at Holy Cross established the identity of their work.

John and I talked generally about the work of some of our colleagues, and I made the comment, “there’s a group among us who tip their hat to Mr. Skinner every time they get out of bed.” 

Boody: “That’s good, and that’s bad. I would say we have to move ahead.” 

Bishop: “Somebody listening to what John Boody just said would answer, haven’t you been looking 300 years back ever since you first had a chisel in your hand?”

Boody: “No, exactly the opposite. We were looking to the future. We wanted to build organs that stand tall into the future, that people would love on their own merits.”

Bishop: “So how do you translate the influence of Niehoff and Schnitger into the future?”

Boody: “You have to go with the music. You have to think of all the mechanical parts and other components you make in the shop as a conduit to making music. And you have to think about how all those parts work together. We focused on the music.”

The means of Grace

The Taylor & Boody organ at Grace Church in New York (Opus 65, 2013) was both a departure and continuation in the history of their work. Wendy and I live at Broadway and East 9th Street in Manhattan (Greenwich Village), Grace Church is at Broadway and East 10th. While the organ installation was underway, I shared some grand evenings with John and his co-workers, both in neighborhood restaurants and in our apartment. They were working on a complex instrument (tracker action in three separate cases with a remote console, and an “action tunnel” under the floor of the chancel), and those evenings were bright and fun.

That landmark organ with four manuals and seventy-six stops combines the Schnitger heritage of those marvelous “choral” choruses of lead Principals with the expressive range of the best Skinner organs. Acoustic scientist Dana Kirkegaard stipulated the construction of the expression boxes: two-inch-thick poplar lined on both sides with three-quarter-inch plywood, making a massive and dense enclosure, and shutters everywhere, even on the back of the box, shutters with an unusual range of motion, the whole providing an astonishing expressive effect. All that, plus a sophisticated solid-state combination action, sensitive mechanical action, and a few solo voices on really high pressure, combine to make an exciting instrument capable of countless effects. But wait, there’s more! Standing in the rear gallery, more than a hundred feet from the organ, are the lowest twelve notes of the 32′ Open Wood Diapason, all that remains of Skinner Organ Company Opus 707, built for Grace Church in 1928. Those twelve pipes were restored with a discreet wind supply and wired as an extension to the new 16′ Double Open Diapason of the Taylor & Boody organ, a fitting bottom to the grand new organ and testament to the musical history of the church.

Wind

As John Boody and I talked about the Grace Church organ, he spoke especially of the wind system. Superficially, we think of the pipe organ as a keyboard instrument. In fact, it is a wind instrument operated by keyboards. The organ at Grace Church has more than a dozen 16′ stops and twenty 8′ flue stops. Making an organ like that go is all about moving wind. John spoke proudly of the fellow in their shop primarily responsible for the wind system with large capacity wood wind ducts with curves for turns rather than right angles, those gentle turns moving the wind in different directions without creating eddies that can disturb the speech of the pipes. 

Multiple parallel-rise reservoirs ensure that there’s plenty of volume available to make those big sounds and that the wind is regulated effectively so there is no whiplash from a sudden shift from ffff to ppp. There is a lifetime of thought and experimentation in the wind system of each Taylor & Boody organ.

Pipes

There are a number of companies in the United States and Europe that make organ pipes to the specifications of the organ builders who order them. Pipe making is a complicated art that involves considerable specialized equipment for melting, blending, casting, planing, hammering, cutting, and soldering metal. It takes a lot of investment and effort for a small company to develop those abilities, but Taylor & Boody committed early to the idea that they should make their pipes. There is a room in their workshop with the cauldron for melting and mixing alloys and a ten-foot-long casting table. Molten metal is ladled and poured into a wood hod that runs on rails along the sides of the casting table. When the hod is full, two workers walk it swiftly down the table, leaving a thin pool of shiny molten metal. I have witnessed this process there, marveling at the moment a few seconds after the sheet is cast when the metal flashes over from liquid to solid.

When the sheet has cooled, it is rolled up like a carpet so it can be safely transported to the next steps in the process. John talked about the importance of the precision of making pipes. If a pipe is not neatly made, the voicer has to try to correct the pipe maker’s mistakes. John’s daughter-in-law B. J. Regi makes all the smaller pipes. John said, “she makes exquisite pipes. And you know, that’s the deal. If you go to start voicing an organ and everything’s lined up well, the mouths are beautiful, and the windways are pristine, you can make good sound right away.” Robbie Lawson heads the pipe shop, and B. J. helps him with the larger pipes. 

Wood

John Boody attended the forestry school at the University of Maine at Orono (he holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in vocal performance) and has loved and respected wood throughout his career. Taylor & Boody has a sawmill where they cut all the lumber used in their organs. After it is sawn into boards, the wood is dried in a kiln made from a retired refrigerated (and therefore insulated) semi-trailer. The lumber is stacked neatly in piles, separated by the organ. In 2009, Wendy and I visited Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello, and we spent a night with the Boodys. (We were treated to fresh eggs from John’s chickens for breakfast.) John showed us the huge oak logs from which the matching organ cases of the Grace Church organ would be made.

The sawmill provides the company with the most desirable wood, especially quarter-sawn white oak. Black walnut has beautiful grain patterns and rich color. It is very expensive to purchase from a hardwood supplier, and it is typically used only for decorative casework and furniture. But since walnut trees are plentiful in their area and they are messy to have in your yard, neighbors often cut down walnut trees and offer the logs to the T&B sawmill. This allows them to use the stable and beautiful wood to make action parts and wood organ pipes. Carefully milled, beautiful lumber is a hallmark of Taylor & Boody organs.

John’s affinity with wood is so widely respected that he has recently started writing a regular column for the journal of the International Society of Organbuilders called “The Wood Guy,” in which he answers colleagues’ specific questions and writes about the wonders of wood, that most natural of materials.

And the hope of glory

Eighty organs in forty years. Some are small continuo organs. Some are larger one-manual organs. Many are two-manual organs with twenty or thirty stops. There are a bunch with three manuals, and a couple of four-manual doozies. As the company produced all those organs, they also produced a clan. John has retired from the workshop, though he still runs the sawmill, the “light-duty” job for the older guy, and George is preparing to retire. John’s son Erik is running the company, and his daughter-in-law B. J. and son-in-law Aaron Reichert are both part of the workshop.

John is a prolific gardener. Looking at his Facebook page during the summer, you might think they were going to make zucchinis into organs. There is a swirl of grandchildren about. I recently saw a photo of a wee lass pushing a broom in the sawmill. It’s been a lifetime since those twenty-something partners were digging into that Schnitger organ in Groningen, understanding what the old master had to offer, and converting that experience into a creative career.

Halfway through our conversation, the name of a mutual friend and colleague came up, and John’s gregarious personality shone through. “He’s a dear man. And you think of our whole trade, we have great people. I love to go to APOBA meetings, I love to go to the AIO. Right down to the little one-man-shop guys, there are some great people out there.” John Boody and George Taylor have been faithful members of that band of great people. Their organs have influenced countless musicians around the world, and they reflect and amplify the harmonies of the workplace they founded in the schoolhouse on the hill.

Photo caption: Taylor & Boody workshop, Christmas 2020 (photo courtesy Taylor & Boody Organbuilders)

In memory of Alan Laufman: the birth of the Organ Clearing House

I have written often about the dynamic renaissance that dominated the history of the pipe organ in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, E. Power Biggs toured Europe, bringing home recordings of distinguished historic instruments, catching the ears of the listening public. A large, four-manual tracker organ by Rudolf von Beckerath was installed at Trinity Lutheran Church in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1957, the same year that Biggs arranged for the installation of the iconic Flentrop organ in the museum formerly known as the Busch-Reisinger at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. American organbuilders and organists developed a renewed interest in organs with mechanical key actions and low wind pressures because of the clarity of tone and sensitivity of touch. Many new firms devoted to building tracker-action instruments were established, and with that came renewed interest in nineteenth-century American organs with their mechanical action and low-pressure voicing.

The change of direction affected electro-pneumatic instruments as well. In June 1956, G. Donald Harrison was hurrying to finish the new Aeolian-Skinner organ at Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City, a substantial “American Classic” rebuild of the original Skinner organ built in 1912. The national convention of the American Guild of Organists would be held in the city later that month, and Pierre Cochereau, organist of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, France, was scheduled to play the new organ for the convention. There was both a heat wave and a taxi strike in New York, and after working into the evening on June 14, Harrison had to walk home to his apartment on Third Avenue. After dinner, while watching Victor Borge on television, G. Donald Harrison died of a massive heart attack. He was sixty-seven years old.

By coincidence, John Scott, the brilliant British organist whose tenure as organist at Saint Thomas ended with his untimely death in 2015, was born on June 18, 1956, four days after the death of G. Donald Harrison.

On June 27, less than two weeks after Harrison’s death, with the AGO convention in full swing, a group of ten people interested in historic American organs gathered in the choir room of Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue to discuss the possibility of forming an organization for like-minded people. Present were Horace Douglas, Dorothy Ballinger, Robert Clawson, Albert F. Robinson, Barbara J. Owen, Donald Paterson, Kenneth F. Simmons, Charlene E. Simmons, Homer D. Blanchard, and Randall E. Wagner. They discussed the possibility of maintaining a list of endangered instruments and publishing a newsletter for the exchange of information of interest to members, and the Organ Historical Society was born. Barbara Owen and Randy Wagner are the two survivors of that group.*

One of the many reasons why historic organs were being threatened came from an act of Congress. The Federal Aid Highway Act passed in 1956 led to the creation of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (the Interstate Highway System). As commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower had been impressed by the importance of the German autobahn system in the mobilization of the military, and building highways was a priority of his presidency. It is difficult to imagine the United States without interstate highways, but their construction caused significant collateral damage as rights of way were carved through American cities causing the destruction of countless buildings, including churches and their pipe organs.

Barbara Owen was the first keeper of the endangered organ list. She solicited information from colleagues around the country and published the list in the mimeographed (remember that smell?) newsletter of the foundling OHS. Within a couple years, the newsletter was replaced by the society’s professionally printed journal, The Tracker, and Alan Laufman became interested in the movement to preserve historic organs. Around 1960, Alan assumed responsibility for the list of endangered organs; in 1961, he petitioned the board of the OHS to allow him to spin “The List” into an independent company, and by 1962, Alan Laufman was listed as director of the Organ Clearing House on the masthead of The Tracker.*

Alan Miller Laufman (1935–2000)

Alan was born in Arlington, Massachusetts. He taught English at Saint Thomas Choir School and later at the Thomas More School in Harrisville, New Hampshire. He was interested in the organ as a child, an interest that was surely nurtured during his time at Saint Thomas. In the early days of the Organ Clearing House, Alan was able to turn the list into action, finding homes for organs slated for destruction. He organized deals between churches that would cover moving costs and solicited thousands of hours of volunteer labor from organbuilders, organists, and enthusiasts. Parishioners provided lodging and meals, and organs were moved by the dozen at low cost.

Decades before the introduction of cell phones, Alan would commandeer the phone of the church where he was working, calling all over the country to arrange the next deal. Gradually, the operation became professional. Organs were delivered to organbuilders’ workshops for restoration. A permanent, paid crew was established, many of whom joined the company because they happened to live near where a project was underway. Alan would approach a group of kids, asking if they wanted to “earn some money over the weekend.” Amory Atkins, who first worked with Alan in 1978, and Joshua Wood, who joined in 1986, became Alan’s business partners and are officers in the company today.

Dozens, then hundreds of wonderful organs of all sizes by such builders as Hook, Hook & Hastings, Hutchings, Stevens, Erben, Jardine, Barckhoff, and Appleton were given “second wind” through Alan’s efforts. Organs facing demolition typically were moved without purchase price; so, from the beginning, the OCH charged a finder’s fee to the recipient of an instrument rather than receiving a sales commission.

Alan maintained the list of available organs in large, three-ring binders, typically one page per organ. He called the binders “The Family Album.” There would be a snapshot, a stoplist, and a brief description of the organ, its location, and situation. In the late 1980s and through the 1990s, I was running the Bishop Organ Company in the Boston area, and I was able to sell several organs to my clients through OCH with Alan’s help. I recall the lengthy phone calls as I described the buildings where an organ might be installed. Alan was often casually munching on something as he rifled through those binders. I would hear the click as he snapped the rings open and the creak of his desk chair as he swiveled toward the fax machine. Through the miracle of then-modern technology, I would receive pages describing a few organs Alan thought might be good candidates. The snapshots were taped to the three-hole page and showed up on the faxes as black blobs. “Laufman and his black blobs” was a common snicker between organbuilders. Looking back, it seems primitive, but it sure was effective, and I know many other organ guys listened to the munching and creaking as they received their black blobs.

A few examples

In 1981, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City acquired an organ built in 1830 by Thomas Appleton through the Organ Clearing House. Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Plains, Pennsylvania (near Wilkes-Barre), was closing, and the OCH removed the organ and delivered it to the workshop of Mann & Trupiano for restoration. It was installed in the balcony in the grand acoustic of the marble Equestrian Gallery of the Pierpont Morgan Wing where it joined the museum’s iconic collection of musical instruments. The organ has more recently been removed for cleaning and renovation and returned to its lofty location concurrent with the renovation of the gallery. The oldest organ in the United States was built by Snetzler of London in 1762—it is located in the Congregational Church of South Dennis, Massachusetts. There are a few British-built instruments in the Boston area dating from around 1800, and there is a two-manual organ built in 1800 by David Tannenberg at Old Salem, North Carolina. With those, the Appleton organ at the “Met” is one of the earliest extant American-built organs and perhaps the second oldest with two manuals.

One of the grandest OCH relocation projects involved the 1871 organ with three manuals and fifty-four stops built by E. & G. G. Hook of Boston for Saint Alphonsus Catholic Church on West Broadway in New York City, near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. The church was to be demolished to make space for a parking garage. There is a luxury apartment complex at that address today. This massive organ is over fifty feet tall, including the seven-foot-tall angels perched high atop the pedal towers. Ithaca, New York, area organbuilder Culver “Cullie” Mowers told of transporting those angels from New York to New Haven in his “Beech Wagon.” Driving through a toll booth on Interstate 95, the toll-taker took a look and asked, “Where are you taking them?” Alan gathered a large crew to remove the organ from its original home and created a consortium of organbuilders to renovate the instrument and install it at Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in New Haven, Connecticut. The project started in 1981, the same year as the relocation of the Appleton organ, and was completed in 1982.

Transitions

In July 2000, the Organ Historical Society held its convention in Boston at the Park Plaza Hotel. Though he was suffering from cancer, Alan addressed the convention, traveling across town from the hospital to speak about the history of the Organ Clearing House. During that lecture, he estimated that in nearly forty years he had been involved directly or indirectly in the relocation of more than two thousand pipe organs. Later that week, Amory, Joshua, and I met with Alan in his hospital room to discuss my succeeding Alan as director of the OCH, allowing the company to continue supporting their families and to continue the work that Alan had started and nurtured. We all shook hands, and Amory made the quip that has defined my life since, “Okay John, you kill ’em, and we’ll skin ’em.”

As Alan’s condition worsened, hospice care was set up for him in the front room of Amory’s house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where friends and family, colleagues and associates traveled from far afield to visit Alan. The number of people who passed through that house during the fall of 2000 is tribute to Alan’s influence on the world of the pipe organ and the wide reach of his professionalism and friendships. Amory, his wife Virginia, and children Ty and Sydney gave Alan a profound gift by making the farewell procession possible. He passed away during the evening of November 30, 2000.

Alan’s memorial service was held at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the Jesuit Urban Center in Boston, home of the monumental four-manual 1902 Hook & Hastings organ, created by the rebuilding of E. & G. G. Hook’s Opus 322 (1863). Thomas Murray played the organ, and I’ll not forget the experience of singing ST. CLEMENT (“The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended . . .”) with the vast, musically sophisticated congregation.

Alan lived in Harrisville, New Hampshire, for many years, a community he served as a selectman. He brought a one-manual Hook organ to Saint Denis Catholic Church, which he played for services when he was at home. His ashes were interred in Saint Denis Cemetery, enclosed in a box made by a colleague organbuilder from an old bass Bourdon pipe.

Among his many accomplishments, Alan was especially proud of the twenty-seven issues of The Organ Handbook he produced annually as editor from 1972 until 1999. Those publications were the program guides for conventions of the Organ Historical Society, and along with schedules and recital programs, they included organ specifications and historical essays about each instrument visited. Alan spent months in each convention city, visiting each instrument and researching the history of the organs and their buildings. Each volume was scholarly, comprehensive, and impeccably accurate. Complete sets of these vital books documenting hundreds of organs are to be seen in the offices of organists and organbuilders all across the country.*

Organbuilder David Wallace of Gorham, Maine, first met Alan at the 1963 OHS convention in Portland, Maine, and has been associated with the Kotzschmar Organ (Austin Organ Company, 1912, five manuals, ninety-six ranks) in Portland’s City Hall since he was a child. David tells of a conversation with Alan at the 1983 OHS/AGO convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, that has helped guide his career. Alan was asking David about the efforts to preserve the Kotzschmar Organ that was by then in poor condition having fallen victim to municipal budget cuts a few years earlier. A passerby cut in, “Why don’t they get rid of that piece of junk and get something decent in there.” After a stunned silence, Alan replied, “Because it is a noteworthy instrument on a global basis that significantly merits preservation.” Now David was stunned, “. . . here was the sacrosanct nineteenth-century organ hero Alan Laufman advocating for an over-the-hill twentieth-century orchestral organ.” Alan went on to say that each individual organ should be looked at with an eye for what it has to offer, not only its past but also what it can carry to the future. Recently, the organ has been thoroughly renovated and is in terrific condition well into its second century.

And the rest is history.

Since Alan’s death, the Organ Clearing House has continued the work of maintaining information about available organs, placing instruments in appropriate new homes. The pace has slowed to an average of about fifteen sales a year, and the emphasis has changed from the ubiquitous ten-stop Hook & Hastings organ to three and four-manual electro-pneumatic instruments. With organists’ renewed interest in orchestral transcriptions and complex Romantic music, the organs most likely to sell are those with lots of solo voices and fundamental tone, at least two expressive divisions (preferably more), and state-of-the-art consoles with the latest of whizbang solid-state gadgets allowing hundreds of registration changes at the speed of light.

The company has evolved to offer new services. With the experience of dismantling hundreds (thousands?) of pipe organs, we are specialists in hoisting and rigging delicate and heavy components inside ornate buildings chock full of precious artworks, and we are frequently engaged to assist organbuilders in the installation of new organs, erecting scaffold towers with hoisting equipment that rolls along I-beams on trolleys, and engaging truck transportation and overseas shipments. We have sent organs to Madagascar, Bolivia, New Zealand, China, Australia, Great Britain, and Germany. We cover organs for protection during building renovation, and we provide consultation services, advising owners of organs about their care, improvement, and replacement.

We prepare empty organ chambers for the installation of an organ, building level floors, repairing leaking gallery windows, plastering and painting, and working with HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and fire protection contractors to ensure a safe home for the organ. And we have enhanced, renovated, and installed organs under our own name. We are especially proud of the three-manual 1915 Casavant organ we moved from Maine to the Upper East Side of New York City, transforming it from a country organ to a city organ, and from a “downstairs church organ” to an “upstairs church organ.”

I have been director of the Organ Clearing House for twenty years, and I’m the new guy. Amory Atkins, Joshua Wood, Terence Atkin, and I all worked with and for Alan, and his influence is very much alive in our work. I was invited in 2008 to visit Madagascar by the country’s Federal President, Marc Ravalomanana, who was also an official of the national Protestant Church, to study the possibility of bringing American organs to Malagash churches. My “cold call” came from Madagascar’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Zina Andrianarivelo. Zina took me to the Presidential Palace in Antananarivo, the capitol city. Sitting in an upholstered chair waiting for my meeting with the president, I thought, “Alan would have loved this.”

* Thanks to the Organ Historical Society Library and Archives and archivist Bynum Petty for supplying and confirming this historical information.

Photo: Alan Laufman in 1979 at a Stevens organ, Blue Hill, Maine (photo credit: William T. Van Pelt)

Lost arts

The stone carvings in an ancient cathedral, the sparkles of light on Rembrandt’s tunic, the deep colors of a Tiffany lampshade, the intricacies of a Renaissance tapestry. These are all experiences available to us as we travel to ancient sites and visit museums. They are living testaments to the skills of artists and artisans, expressing their visions, observations, and thoughts in physical media. Did Rembrandt mix his paints from gathered materials as observed in artworks already old when he viewed them? Did he know that his paints would retain their colors and stay on the canvas for 350 years? Visit a modern artists’ supply store, and you will find rack upon rack of tubes of pre-mixed paints from different manufacturers. Do they expect that their products will last on canvas until the year 2352? Do the artists who buy and work with those paints trust that a glimmer of light on the nose of a subject will beguile viewers three centuries from now?

We play and listen to centuries-old organs, experiencing the same lively sounds that musicians and congregations heard over 600 years ago. We marvel at the monumental organ cases, knowing that they were built without the aid of electric milling machines. Perhaps some of us have tried to saw a board from a log by hand. I have. I can tell you it is hard work; it is tricky to produce a board that is anything like straight; and it takes a long time. We read that eighteenth-century organs took eight or ten years to build. Even so, Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) produced ninety-five new organs, forty-eight of which survive. Multiply that by the number of boards sawn by hand—case panels, toeboards, rackboards, keyboards, stop action traces, and hundreds of thousands of trackers. That many organs is a significant life’s work for a modern organ builder. And remember, delivering a pipe organ in those days involved oxcarts and rutted dirt (or mud) roads. Or did Mr. Schnitger set up a workshop in each church, casting metal and soldering pipes on site? That would simplify the logistics.

Something like 2,500 “Hook” organs were built between 1827 and 1927 by E. & G. G. Hook, E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings, and Hook & Hastings. Organs were shipped from the workshops in Boston to churches below the Mason-Dixon Line before the Civil War, to California, and throughout the Midwest. By then, steam ferries and railroads were available to make shipments easier—the tracks ran right into the workshop. During the same period, builders like Henry Erben, George Hutchings, George Stevens, and George Jardine, among many others, combined to build thousands of organs across the United States. With the introduction of electricity to pipe organ keyboard and stop actions, Skinner, Möller, Austin, Schantz, Kimball, and others combined to build as many as 2,500 new pipe organs a year in American churches during the 1920s.

Here’s to the crabgrass, here’s to the mortgage . . . .

So sang Allen Sherman in his 1963 smash hit recording, My Son the Nut, the same album that included “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh. . . .” The song was about the migration from cities to suburbs in the 1950s: “walk the dog and cut the grass, take the kids to dancing class, Jim’s little league got beat again.”1 During the 1950s and 1960s, suburban churches blossomed. The populations of towns surrounding Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and countless other cities exploded. Twenty years ago, I served a church as music director in a suburb of Boston that never had more than 2,000 residents until the circumnavigating commuter highway Route 128 (now I-95) was built around 1960. Within ten years, there were 15,000 residents, and the little country Congregational church built an impressive new sanctuary with an extensive parish house and a three-manual organ.

Many if not most of those powerful suburban congregations commissioned new pipe organs. Where I grew up, the ubiquitous New England town square had two or three competing churches. One town near home had two three-manual Hook organs built in 1860 and 1870. Another had three Aeolian-Skinners. And by the time I graduated from high school, my hometown had two organs by Charles Fisk, one of which has its fiftieth anniversary this year.

A new wave

Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, hundreds of American churches committed to commissioning new organs built by “boutique” builders of tracker organs, many of which replaced impressive and valuable electro-pneumatic-action organs. Of course, many of those organs had in turn replaced impressive and important nineteenth-century organs. The Andover Organ Company, then led by Charles Fisk, was among the first of the new wave of organ companies. Charles Fisk spun off to start what became C. B. Fisk, Inc., along with the founding of, in no particular order, eponymous organ companies such as Noack, Roche, Brombaugh, Bozeman-Gibson, Bedient, Taylor & Boody, Dobson, Visser-Rowland, and Jaeckel. Casavant started building tracker organs and firms like Wilhelm, Wolff, and Létourneau spun off from there in the following years.

As some of the “older” new firms began “aging out,” a new wave of impressive companies came along such as Juget-Sinclair, Richards, Fowkes & Co., and Paul Fritts, and companies like Nichols & Simpson and the revitalized Schoenstein & Co. started building new electro-pneumatic-action organs of high quality inspired both by the electric-action masterpieces of the early twentieth century and by, I believe, the increasingly high standards of the boutique organ movement. Toward the end of the twentieth century, American organbuilding was a vital, if small industry producing beautiful instruments of all descriptions at a rapid rate.

American organbuilders gathered in Washington, DC, in September 1973 to discuss formation of a new professional organization that would take the name American Institute of Organbuilders. This purpose statement was published in the program book for that gathering:

• to be the first such convention in recent times in North America and to be a model for future conventions of this type to be held regularly;

• to promote the exchange of principles and ideas among established organbuilders to aid in the improvement of the instrument while lowering its costs and ensuring the security of our future;

• to educate ourselves in potential new technologies and construction procedures, some of which are being employed by other industries and arts but perhaps not yet fully realized and exploited by organbuilders;

• to provide the many suppliers of organ parts and materials, many of which are new to our field, with the opportunity to display and demonstrate their developments and ideas where many builders may jointly view and discuss these products;

• to study some general business problems of concern to the organ industry, and to propose courses of action that might be taken by organbuilders, both individually and collectively, to alleviate these concerns;

• to enable social exchanges between organbuilders and their families; to provide families of organbuilders with the opportunity to share in the appreciation of the greater glories of the profession through mutual enjoyment of a convention environment and its program of entertainment designed for all.

The last decades of the twentieth century were very productive for American organbuilding, and we must not forget the vast number of European organs imported to the United States. E. Power Biggs famously purchased an organ from Flentrop that was installed in the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now Busch Hall) at Harvard University in 1957. He made it instantly famous with his fabulously successful series of recordings, Bach: Great Organ Favorites. Many of my friends and colleagues, myself included, cite those recordings as influential to devoting a lifetime to organbuilding. That organ was followed by a flood of Flentrops crossing the Atlantic, a wave greatly advanced by Fenner Douglas, professor of organ at Oberlin in the 1960s and early 1970s, whose influence led to at least dozens of Flentrops installed in American churches and universities, notably those at Oberlin College and Duke University. Also in 1957, Trinity Lutheran Church in Cleveland, Ohio, installed a four-manual, sixty-five-rank Beckerath organ, three years before the monumental five-manual Beckerath organ was installed at Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal.

As the twentieth century came to a close, a significant decline in church attendance was well underway. Churches continue to close at an increasing rate. And toward the end of the last century, there was a dip of interest in playing the organ. When I was a student at Oberlin in the 1970s, there were over fifty organ majors in four bustling studios. Fifteen years later, there were fewer than ten. Several colleges and universities closed their organ departments, churches with traditionally active music programs began having trouble filling empty jobs, and for a while things were looking pretty grim for the American pipe organ.

I am carving time into rough blocks for my own convenience, but as the twenty-first century got underway, a fresh wave of brilliant young organists appeared. Stephen Tharp and Ken Cowan, now in their late forties and early fifties, led the pack forging virtuosic concert careers. They were followed in no particular order by Paul Jacobs, Isabelle Demers, Nathan Laube, Katelyn Emerson, and many others, raising the art of organ playing to unprecedented heights. Concurrently, especially following economic lows following 9/11 and the near collapse of the American economy in 2008, noticeably fewer churches embarked on expensive organ renovation or new organ projects. Many of us in the organbuilding trade wondered silently and increasingly out loud if we were heading toward the end of the pipe organ industry.

Convention

The American Institute of Organbuilders held its annual convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, October 8–12, 2022. More than 300 members gathered in a convention hotel there to be immersed in the work of the Historic Organ Restoration Committee that is more than halfway through the herculean task of restoring the legendary Boardwalk Hall organ with seven manuals and 449 ranks. Built by Midmer-Losh, Inc., between 1929 and 1932 (Opus 5550), the Boardwalk Hall organ is the largest in the world, not by ranks (The Wanamaker Organ has more), but with 33,112 pipes. Many of the ranks have eighty-five pipes or more. The committee is about eight years into the project and anticipates completion in 2030. I will bet we will have another convention there then. (See the cover feature for this organ in the November 2020 issue.)

A convention of the AIO typically includes a lot of time riding buses to see organs throughout an area. Because of the huge attraction at the center of this convention, we had just one day of bus travel to visit three marvelous organs in the Philadelphia area: C. B. Fisk, Inc., Opus 150 (2016) at Christ Church, Episcopal, Philadelphia; Aeolian-Skinner Opus 948 (1936) at St. Mark’s Church, Episcopal, Philadelphia; and the instrument by Kegg Pipe Organ Builders (2014) at Bryn Athyn Cathedral, Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. These are three very different and very distinguished organs, all beautifully demonstrated, and all terrific examples of the art of American organbuilding. At the convention hotel, perhaps the only large hotel in Atlantic City that does not boast a casino, we heard lectures about the history of the Boardwalk Hall organ, the economics of refurbishing rather than replacing damaged old organ pipes, and the art of structuring a contract to define an organ project, among others. Nathan Laube, the brilliant recitalist and teacher I mentioned earlier, lectured organbuilders about his ideal of the modern organ console—his conclusion, keep it simple.

In the past, I have written in detail about the organs we heard after attending a convention. This time, I want to celebrate the trade. I have related an off-the-cuff bird’s eye view of American organbuilding over the past century to put in context what I am observing now. In addition to our work aiding the sales of vintage pipe organs and dismantling those organs to be delivered to workshops for renovation, the Organ Clearing House is privileged to work with many of our admired companies, assisting with the shipping, hoisting, assembly, and installation of their new organs. This allows us intimate exposure to the methods and practices of a variety of firms and close associations with their largest organs.

While varying styles of worship and the proliferation of digital instruments has consumed much of the market for simple pipe organs, it is clear that we are in an age of monumental new instruments. Noack, Fritts, Fisk, Schoenstein, Richards, Fowkes, Létourneau, Buzard, and Parsons, among others, have built exceptional new organs in the last five years. All of them carry forth the 500-year tradition of organbuilding, many aided by Computer Numerical Control (CNC) routers. These expensive but efficient machines use computer programs to interpret an organbuilder’s drawings to produce repetitive parts automatically, to drill windchest tables, to make toeboards, rackboards, skyracks, and countless other organ parts with precise perfection. Ten years ago, only a few shops had them, now some have two that grind along in the corner of a shop while the organbuilders are free to do the interpretive work that a machine cannot do.

A couple important firms have recently closed. After a century of work and producing more than 2,500 organs, the Reuter Organ Company in Lawrence, Kansas, stopped most operations on December 1. While they remained profitable until the end, as the senior staff reached retirement age, other administrative staff chose not to step in to continue the business. The closure of August Laukhuff GmbH, a huge and important organ supply firm in Weikersheim, Germany, is having a profound effect on American companies. Many organbuilders have long relied on Laukhuff for organ blowers, electric parts like slider motors and pull-down magnets, keyboards, polished façade pipes, action chassis, and countless other widgets essential to the trade. Other firms are working to fill in the gaps, but this remains an important loss.

The AIO has a relatively new tradition of having a special dinner for members under thirty years old. Since the conventions in 2020 and 2021 were postponed because of covid, this year’s dinner included all members under forty, and there were more than thirty in attendance. I was thrilled to realize that in a trade heavily populated by older people, more than ten percent of those attending this convention were under forty. I had wonderful conversations with many of them and was heartened by their excitement and commitment to continuing the art.

This year’s AIO Convention was particularly high-spirited with enthusiasm for our trade abounding. Nathan Bryson, convention chair and curator of the Boardwalk Hall organ, was an enthusiastic and welcoming host. His excitement for his job is evident in the attitudes of the members of the Historic Organs Restoration Committee, both staff and volunteers. My many conversations with our younger colleagues were highpoints of the week for me. I was happy to hear their enthusiasm about their work. Some newcomers to the trade expressed to me their amazement at the rich history of the organ and the complexities of building, restoring, and repairing them. A couple of the younger participants were in the process of starting new workshops, and their excitement was infectious. Many of the younger members are women, bringing lively diversity to our gathering.

Whenever I am with colleague organbuilders, I hear stories of how they got interested in the organ when they were kids, how the first years of learning piqued their interest enough to devote their lives to the trade. I love comparing notes about solving problems. I love hearing about new materials, methods, machinery, and tools that save time and money, and I love the comeradery of spending time with like-minded people.

Above all, I celebrate what seems to be a bright future for American organbuilding. Churches are investing in large expensive projects, and many of our colleague firms have years of contracted work spreading ahead of them. Perhaps most important, I believe that American organ playing is the best it has ever been. As long as there are brilliant, compelling musicians to play on the instruments we build, there will always be new organs to build. Keep working hard, my friends. ν

Notes

1. In fact, the couple singing that song winds up fleeing the suburbs to return to the city: “Back to the crush there, hurry let us rush there, back to the rat race, don’t forget your briefcase, back to the groove there, say, why don’t we move there, away from all this sweet simplicity.”

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.