In the Wind. . .

I remember when . . .

Leading up to Christmas of 2019, I decided to stop maintaining organs so I could concentrate more on the administration of the Organ Clearing House, especially the management of organ sales. I met with several colleagues asking if they would be able to take on more maintenance customers, and I wrote to my clients recommending those technicians for the care of the organs I thought they would be best suited for.

As the winter started winding down in early 2020, I was looking forward to missing the first holiday tuning season since I was a teenager, only to find that leading up to Easter of 2020, no one was tuning organs. Like pretty much everything else in our world, the whole business shut down as covid spread virulently around the world. 

No one has pronounced that the pandemic is over, and we are still hearing about spooky outbreaks, especially in big cities. But with a few reservations, life seems to have returned to something like normal. This past March, the organ tuners were out and about like never before, documenting each lapsed thermostat, each shallot-encased moth carcass, and each insistent vacuum cleaner on social media. I especially enjoy the posts of Richard Pelland, the prolific organ technician based in New Hampshire, who at my recommendation took on many of my former maintenance clients. His habit of posting videos of his assistant playing freshly tuned organs brings back memories of my mad dashes around the countryside, of the many lovely organs (and a few not so lovely), and of the satisfaction of completing a good tuning.

Would the average parishioner identify that great tuning as integral to the celebrations during Holy Week and Easter? Not likely. But they would go home after church with a tune in their head, and I always knew I was part of that. I believe that a well-tuned organ brings a smile or a raised eyebrow that sour notes cannot.

The body of Christ

Carolyn Manning of the Red River Organ Company in Norman, Oklahoma, posted a photo taken during an Easter tuning from high in the rear of the lofty sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church of Corpus Christi, Texas. The longest resonators of the Trompette-en-Chamade were visible in Carolyn’s photo, as was the console I helped build around 1986. I was working for Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and we rebuilt and expanded the four-manual Reuter organ there. Dan Angerstein, a terrific voicer, was in the thrall of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, and Lawrence, Kansas, became something close to Paris on Shoreline Boulevard in Corpus Christi, across the street from the Gulf of Mexico.

We did our best to reconstruct the classic shape of Cavaillé-Coll’s grand consoles. My shopmate, pal, and wicked wag Jack Carr built the cabinet, and I built the curved and terraced stop jambs and the four keyboards. I do not remember the exact dates, but I sure remember that the installation trip was in the heart of summer, a big deal for this life-long northerner. The church’s vacation bible school was going on while we were there, and I have a hilarious memory of the church’s organist, wearing a “coat of many colors,” having been put in charge of a live camel. This had not been his first choice, and he was not mincing words.

A local electrician was on the job with us, ostensibly helping identify the many cables running from the two organ chambers in the front of the church to the Antiphonal organ and the Trompette-en-Chamade. He was using live current to “ring out” the different cables. It turned out that there were speaker wires from the PA system in the same conduit that looked just like organ cables, and when he touched those with his hot wire, we heard such a sound. I am pretty sure that was the end of those speakers. The big reed had been given in memory of a young parishioner who was killed in Vietnam. The drawknob is engraved “Trompette Boyd.”

Our flight from Boston to Houston at the beginning of that installation was my first trip in first class. My coach seat had been double-booked with a guy who was refusing to move. I was rewarded for my ambivalence, and I took full advantage of the perks of first class even though it was a morning flight.

It was fun to see Carolyn’s post, reminding me of that job from so long ago. It’s nice to know that the organ is still being used and cared for.

§

I do not have a tally of how many organs I have maintained, but I know it is in the hundreds. My tuning career started in Oberlin, Ohio, when I was working for John Leek. John was the organ and harpsichord technician for Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music and had a healthy side business of maintaining instruments in that general area. I worked with John part time and summers while I was student and shifted to full time after I graduated. During my junior year, John left the school to concentrate on his business. Altogether, I worked with John for about seven years, during which time we built several new harpsichords and two organs together. We renovated and releathered a small fleet of organs and went on hundreds of service calls together. We took care of organs in big city churches and in tiny hamlets far out in farm country. We covered an area from Toledo and Cincinnati to the west, to Erie and Pittsburgh to the east.

The biggest trip I took with John was to deliver a harpsichord we built for a woman in Oakland, California—she had been a student at Oberlin and admired John’s instruments. It was the summer after I graduated, and John proposed the trip to me saying it would take two weeks. I would not get paid (I suppose he was not getting paid either), but we would stay in nice hotels and eat in good restaurants. We would gamble in Reno, see the Golden Gate Bridge, and swim in the Pacific Ocean. Of course I’d go.

We loaded his butterscotch-colored Dodge van and headed west. It is about 2,500 miles from Oberlin to Oakland, and we drove 500 or 600 miles each day. We marveled at the open spaces, hunkered down under bridges to sit out thunderstorms, and drove all day from Salt Lake City with the mountains of Nevada dead ahead that never seemed to get closer until we reached them. When we stopped for gas after crossing into Nevada, I put a dime in a slot machine, received a little cascade in return, and was all ready for Reno. We stayed overnight in Elko, Nevada, and ate dinner in a Basque restaurant recommended by Oberlin voice professor Howard Hatton. And we got creamed in Reno. My meager cash supply disappeared, and John played a few hands of blackjack—it was remarkable how often the dealer got twenty-one.

Arriving in Oakland, we carried the harpsichord into the house, and unpacked and set it up. John tuned it and fiddled with the voicing. We went outside for a cigarette and were admonished by the client’s physician husband about the dangers of smoking. The next evening, he brought home a cancerous lung in a jar for our viewing pleasure.¹ That jaunt with John was the first of many cross-country trips I have made carting about instruments.

One summer, John and his wife Maria wanted to add a large screened porch to their house, and he flung the resources of his company at the job. He made a nice drawing of a post-and-beam structure, and off we went. There would be a lofty pitched ceiling, stained and varnished plywood wainscoting, and a floor of wide pine planks. We cut mortises and tenons on the machines in the workshop and assembled the frame and shingled the roof. We made screened frames to fill the window openings, and we painted everything. Painting the floor, I had my back to John, but heard a big increase in his industry. I turned to find him rushing to paint me into a corner.

John Leek passed away in the fall of 2019, and I drove to Oberlin for his funeral. It was wonderful to see Maria and their children Paula, James, and Peter. A week later, Maria wrote me a note thanking me for coming, which inspired another flood of nostalgia—her handwriting had been on my paychecks for seven years.

§

Dan Angerstein had a large stable of service clients, and when he closed his business in 1987 to become tonal director at M. P. Möller, I assumed most of those accounts—that was the foundation of the Bishop Organ Company located in North Reading and then Wakefield, Massachusetts. When I joined the Organ Clearing House in 2000, I continued the care of most of those organs as the BOC morphed into the OCH. By the time I stopped doing service work in early 2020, there were still seven organs I had been caring for since 1984—thirty-five years. There were six instruments built in the late 1980s whose care I assumed when they were new. I was the only technician to work on them for the first thirty-plus years.

Shortly after I started the Bishop Organ Company, I became curator of the huge Aeolian-Skinner organ (four manuals, 237 ranks) at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (the Mother Church) in Boston, and of the double Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organs at Trinity Church on Copley Square. Jason McKown had cared for the Mother Church organ since its installation in 1952 and had worked for Trinity for over fifty years. He was in his mid-eighties when I met him, and he introduced me to many of his clients as he was finally ready to retire. Jason’s tenure at the Mother Church was extended so he would overlap with me for six months to show me the ropes of caring for such a large organ. We tuned there every Wednesday, and Jason’s countless stories were an important part of my education.

As a young man, Jason had worked personally with Ernest Skinner installing his Opus 692 at the West Medford Congregational Church in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1928 and had maintained it ever since. I worked there until 2009 when the church closed and the building was sold.2 Between us, Jason and I maintained that organ for eighty-one years.

Less is more.

When I mention Skinner Organ Company Opus 692 (1928) in West Medford, Massachusetts, I remember the pristine interior of the instrument. It was still playing on its original leather and had never been altered. This reminds me of another Skinner organ less than ten miles away that I have written about recently, Opus 459 (1924), which was sold through the Organ Clearing House to Galilee Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Both organs had been regularly maintained and well used, and neither show the familiar wear-and-tear damage of stretched tuning scrolls, out-of-round pipes, cotton balls left in mixture pipes, or spare wires looping about.

The only other century-old organs I have known in like-new condition are those in small remote churches that had never seen organ technicians. The organs might be full of spider webs and coal dust from obsolete heating systems, but the pipes and interior components could be straight from the factory. Ironically, organs that have never been maintained are the best candidates
for restoration.

I offer a challenge to all my colleague organ tuners and technicians. Leave each organ looking as though no one has been inside. Do not harm the organ in the interest of forcing it into tune. Do not leave little piles of your rubble. Do not leave obvious evidence of quick-and-dirty repairs. I know this is a tall order. I know that many churches are struggling financially and are unable to fund proper repairs. I am sure you will often have to take my admonition with a grain of salt, but I encourage you to respect the instruments you work on and the people who built them.

Those of you on social media, please keep sharing your experiences with the organs in your care. 

Retirement project

Retired organbuilder Gene Bedient has set about building a new two-manual tracker organ for his home and has documented the process intricately and intimately on Facebook. Starting with making open 8′ bass pipes from wood and progressing through building windchests, keyboards, actions, bench, and lately moving the completed base of the organ into the house with the help of neighbors, he has posted hundreds of photos with colorful descriptions of each step in the process. Every now and then, he posts a photo of the drawings so we have an idea of what the finished organ will look like. I recommend you follow Gene’s page and scroll through the last couple years of his documentation. This is a much more creative use of Facebook than photos of your cats or your savory breakfast.

Gene discusses the materials he is using, shows photos of complex gluing setups, and acknowledges the occasional need to “split the difference” to make something line up perfectly. His workshop is in the garage that adjoins the house, and while it is a tiny space and this is not the tiniest of residence organs, Gene’s photography provides a fascinating educational experience for anyone interested in how a pipe organ is built. I am eager to follow the continuation and culmination of this project.

As I write, I have been corresponding with Gene about his project, and he offers this statement about “Bedient Opus # Undecided”:

This home organ is for practice purposes and has only two stops—the lower manual, Principal 8, and the upper manual, Flute 4. Each manual couples to the Pedal. No manual to manual coupler. The lower manual is suspended action. The upper manual keyboard pivots in the center and pushes the top-of-grid pallets up to play, like the French Positif and Echo actions. It is the hope that two beautiful stops and two contrasting but light and responsive key actions will make the organ a pleasure to play.

Thank you, Gene, for sharing your exciting project so generously.

Notes

1. I stopped smoking two years later, on New Year’s Eve, 1981, when my first wife Pat was pregnant with our first child. Michael was born the following March into a smoke-free home.

2. I was in touch with the new owners of the building asking if they had plans for the organ. They replied that they did not plan to use it but did not want to remove anything original from the church building. I check in every now and again.

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.

Out and about

After Christmas 2019 I retired from maintaining pipe organs. With some forty-five years of racing about twice a year to get to every client during “tuning season,” I was looking forward to sitting back, watching my friends and colleagues as they blasted about doing Easter and spring tunings, but as it turned out, no one was doing any tuning that spring. In March of 2020 the world as we knew it shut down, churches closed their doors, and organ tuners across the country stayed home.

My tuning and service career started when I was a student at Oberlin during the 1970s, as I was fortunate to work three days a week for John Leek. If you are a regular reader, you have read about John before. He was a first-generation Dutch immigrant who apprenticed in various workshops in the Netherlands starting when he was a child. He came to the United States in the early 1960s to work with Walter Holtkamp, Sr., whose reputation as an innovating organbuilder was widely known. While working on Holtkamp organs on the campus of Oberlin College, Leek saw that the school was advertising for a full-time organ curator. “That’s the job for me.”

He was still employed by Oberlin when I started working with him, but as he had developed a lively organ service trade outside of his work at the school, he soon left Oberlin and founded his eponymous company. I loved traveling around the area with him servicing organs from the start, going in and out of church and school buildings, working on a variety of instruments. Each client had distinct personalities, both personal and institutional. It was easy to tell if a place was well run or struggling, ambitious or complacent, progressive or conservative. There were people we looked forward to seeing and people we knew would be difficult. There were organs that were fun to work on, and a few that we dreaded. Some buildings were immaculately maintained, always neat and clean, and others were dirty, smelly, and cluttered.

I left John’s shop in 1984 with my wife and two toddlers to return to Boston where I grew up, joining the workshop of Daniel Angerstein & Associates in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and taking a position as music director at a lovely Congregational Church in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. In my first weeks with Angerstein, Dan and I went on service calls together so he could introduce me to the more complex and important instruments, and I was soon exploring my home territory with helpers from the workshop, learning the tricks and foibles of each instrument and client.

Dan closed his business in 1987 to become tonal director at M. P. Möller for what turned out to be Möller’s waning days—that venerable firm closed in 1993—and I took on Angerstein’s service clients as I formed the Bishop Organ Company. Over the years I think I serviced more than 300 different organs, some for short periods, some for well over thirty years, and I know there was a stretch in the 1990s when I had close to 100 clients at once. I had a group of wonderful helpers, three of whom I taught to tune and who were my pleasant travel companions as we rolled around New England.

§

We worked on a wide range of organs, from the mighty 240-stop Aeolian-Skinner at The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), in Boston where we tuned once a week, to a three-stop positive organ by Bedient Pipe Organ. That Bedient organ is in Saint Mary of the Harbor Episcopal Church in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod. Provincetown is more than seventy-five miles from the Sagamore Bridge connecting Cape Cod to the mainland. It was seventy-five miles from the workshop to the bridge, so we would schedule another service call on the Cape to make the trip worthwhile. After all that driving, tuning that tiny organ was something of a lark. Once as we started that long drive home, my helper Mark was half asleep in the passenger seat, looking dreamily out the window. As we passed a car, I overheard him whimper softly to himself, “They have ice cream.” I took the hint, and we stopped at the next opportunity.

After his retirement, my father was interim rector at Saint Mary, and I played a short evensong recital on the organ. It was like riding a tricycle. The organ had been a gift from an elderly gay couple who had lived in Provincetown for decades who collected $30,000 worth of recyclable bottles and cans by rooting through the dumpsters behind restaurants and bars—600,000 bottles and cans.

I once got fired by a client after a long day of travel. When I was working with Angerstein, we did a renovation and expansion project on a small Hook & Hastings tracker organ on Martha’s Vineyard, a quaint but exclusive touristy island about forty-five minutes by ferry from Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Later, when I was working on my own, the organ ciphered on Good Friday, and I received a call from the organist informing me that Easter was the day-after-tomorrow. His panicky and self-centered demeanor was well remembered from the time of the renovation project. I was finished with my hundred-or-so tunings, and the program of Easter music at my church was ready to go, so on Holy Saturday I made the two-hour drive from home in North Reading, Massachusetts, to Woods Hole where you catch the ferry to the Vineyard. It takes most of an hour to get your car in line for the ferry, and it is a forty-five-minute trip across the water.

I got to the church around noon, opened the windchest bung board, found a pallet caught between two guide pins, pushed the pins apart with my fingers, closed the bung, checked the tuning of the Oboe, and drove back to the ferry terminal. The invoice I sent the next week reflected four hours of driving, four hours dealing with the ferry, the cost of mileage and ferry tickets, and my minimum hour-and-a-half service call. The organist was furious. “You were in the church for fifteen minutes and you’re charging me a thousand dollars? You’re never coming back here.” I would not have expected “I’m so grateful you could get here in time for Easter” from that guy.

I had another panicky call from an organist on a Saturday morning. A wedding was starting in an hour, and the organ would not play. When he turned on the switch, lights glowed, and he heard the blower, but no sound. The church was a half hour from home. By the time I arrived, there were limousines parked in front of the church, a bagpipe howling in front, and people pouring into the church. I raced up the stairs to the organ loft, verified that the organ was running, and the electric stop action was working. I went to the basement and found a card table sucked up against the blower intake. Easy fix. Here comes the bride.

John Leek and I worked for a Polish Catholic Church on the west side of Cleveland. At the end of each tuning day, we presented ourselves at the rectory where the pastor would ask what we like to drink, duck back inside, and return with bottles of booze and cash to pay for the tuning. It seemed like kind of a loose way to run a ship.

Gustatory tuning

When scheduling a slate of tunings, I kept two criteria in mind, geographic proximity and what would be for lunch. Some organs would command a full day a few times a year. On other days we might visit two, three, or even four organs. Wendy and I lived in the Charlestown Navy Yard for ten years, a neighborhood of Boston across the harbor from the city where our neighbor was the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the United States Navy. The Episcopal church in Charlestown was a service client with a neat little two-manual tracker organ. The organist there was a pal who was happy to hold notes, so that church was often an easy fourth stop of the day, getting me home in time for cocktails.

We had pairs of churches close to each other, each pair associated with a nice place for lunch, and I scheduled things so we had a variety of lunches. You would not want to have Mexican food two days in a row. We had a nice range of cuisines including Vietnamese (Harvard Square), Chinese (Boston University), Mexican (Worcester and Quincy, Massachusetts), Thai (Back Bay, Boston), Italian (Newton, Massachusetts), fried seafood and clam chowder (Cape Cod)—you get the idea.

Several of the organists of churches where we tuned often joined us for lunch, allowing fun conversations about what was going on in each church. I paid attention to what music was out in the choir rooms, what music was piled around the organ console, and what notices were posted on bulletin boards, so I had a comprehensive working knowledge of dozens of church music programs, all of which informed my work at the church where I was music director (as well as organ tuner).

Watch your step.

If you are paying attention, maintaining a lot of instruments is an education in organ building. It is a delight to work on a well-designed, well-engineered, well-built, and well-voiced organ. How easy it is to move around inside an organ and how easy it is to reach things that will always need attention is an important reflection on the quality of an instrument. No church wants to hear that an ordinarily simple repair would involve a week of dismantling other parts of the organ to gain access to the offender.

I maintain an organ in a large, central building in New York, built by a widely known and respected builder, that includes a common brand of solid-state controls for switching and combination actions. I was dumbfounded when I realized that the “brain” of the system was installed inside the console in a way that the interchangeable circuit boards could not be removed, making normal maintenance impossible without removing the entire unit from the console and stressing the immense jumble of ribbon cables that connect it to the organ. That Medusa-like tangle made my blood run cold.

We like to see neat wiring on junction boards in an organ, every wire in its proper place, soldered evenly, tied and dressed so it will be easy to troubleshoot in the future. Sometimes we are confronted by tangled messes of wires that show no order or logic. The weight of cables is hanging directly from delicate contacts, odd wires are laced about, and there is no logic from one row of pins to another. You just know by taking a glance that the mess will be unreliable, and it is difficult, sometimes hopeless to dig down to find the wire in question.

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Organs enclosed in free-standing cases are often among the best built, but they can be difficult to service because one must reach everything from walkboards outside the back of the case. If there are seven or eight stops on the Great, that tin façade seems a mile away, and the treble pipes of the Principal down at rackboard level are often out of reach, especially if they are cone-tuned so you cannot use a long tuning iron. Staying with the Great as example, you might find three or even four reeds at the back of the windchest (16′ Trompette, 8′ Trompette, 8′ Vox Humana, 4′ Clarion), and two or three compound stops buried behind them (Mixture VI, Scharff IV, Sesquialter II). It is a stretch to reach over those hulking reeds to get to those tiny mixture trebles. As you get used to such an organ over the years, you realize which big reed pipes you can remove to gain the angles needed.

The lowest notes of the 8′ Gedeckt are probably tubed off the main chest and mounted on the case wall, but they are far away, and they can be especially tough to handle because if the pipe is sharp you must reach the pipe with two hands, one to hold the pipe and the other to move the cap higher on the pipe. Sometimes I asked a helper to hang on to my belt to keep me from falling into the pipes.

Ernest Skinner cared a lot about the serviceability of his organs. Stable ladders, ample walkboards between windchests, and sturdy tuning benches above the pipes make tuning comfortable and safe for both the tuner and the instrument. There are no surprises like treacherous spongy boards underfoot as you pass through the organ. We hope for this quality in any organ, but some are spooky. You must figure out what can bear your weight. A good rule for when you are walking somewhere in an organ where you have not walked before is do not put all your weight on anything without trying it gently first.

Over the years

Over years I learned the priorities and interests of the many organists I worked for. For one, I would always double check all the expression boxes, shutters, motors, and mechanisms, knowing that he used them constantly and considered them an important part of his playing. For another, it might be the trebles of the flutes, making sure that solo stops like orchestral reeds or harmonic flutes were in tune with each other, especially if there were antiphonal pairs of similar stops.

I learned the strengths and weaknesses of each organ, which reeds would need attention, the trebles of stopped wood flutes, keyboard contacts, and recalcitrant tremulants. I also learned which firms build organs that are reliable, easy to maintain, and, most important, beautiful. In my conversations with many organists, I learned what features of an organ made it most useful to the working musician, and how effectively it led the church’s music, especially congregational singing.

It is fun to reflect on how much easier that work is in the age of the mobile phone. Thirty years ago, while on the road doing service calls, I had to find pay phones to let people know if I was running late and to maintain my schedule. I had a memorized list of gas stations that had phone booths that were likely to be available. If I had to call a vendor with questions about the systems of an organ, I would ask in the church office if I could use the phone and sit facing away from the secretary so I could not see her angry glare when I had tied up the church’s only phone line for too long. Today you have your phone with you all the time (and it has a flashlight). If you are explaining something to a technician at Peterson Electro-Musical Products, Organ Supply Industries, or one of our other valued suppliers, you can snap a photo and send it instantly. What could be easier?

In several churches where I tuned for decades, I outlived generations of staff members and could be relied on to find a stepladder, to know where the controls for HVAC equipment were located, and how to program the electronic tower chimes. (I like to call them Bongatrons.) It is fun to think back on tens of thousands of miles driven, thousands of satisfying repairs—it is fun when you solve a knotty problem and get an organ back on its feet—endless conversations with musicians, clergy, and staff members. I had running jokes and teases with people I saw twice a year.

What an adventure, what a privilege, and what an education. Thanks for the great ride.

Doo-dads

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

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

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

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

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

A man and his tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Many sets of drill bits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• open-end wrenches;

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

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

• screwdrivers;

• that set of Marples™ chisels;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not just an organ shop.

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

String too short to save

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

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

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

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

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

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

He polished up the handle of the big front door.

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

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

Totally tubular

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

Parts is parts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Material handling

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perspective

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

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

Teachers

Elizabeth Swist was my first piano teacher. I was six years old. She lived with her mother, and their house smelled like boiled cabbages. It was about a mile walk—I know that for sure because I have driven the route watching my odometer a couple times. My lessons included the Hanon piano method and little novelty pieces that I played as loud and fast as I could; spinning wheels were a common theme in the music. My mother likes to tell how I came home from my first lesson, ran to our piano, played middle C and shouted, “I knew it. Middle C on Miss Swist’s (say it three times fast) piano is higher than ours.” Mother says she complained to the tuner, “I just paid $25,” but the tuner said I was right. It was an old second-hand upright, and he had not been able to bring it up to pitch. She tells that story every chance she gets; some of it might be true.

Miss Swist got married and moved into a house a little closer to ours that did not smell like cabbages. Mrs. Holderied, née Swist, helped me out of the beginner’s novelties into real music like Bach minuets and Clementi sonatas.

We moved from Westwood, Massachusetts, to nearby Winchester when I was ten, and I took up lessons with Edith Bolster, an elderly woman who lived in an apartment with two pianos. I do not remember meeting her partner, but I got an occasional glimpse of her lurking about. Ms. Bolster introduced me to Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and the expressive qualities of the piano, and she encouraged me to play in recitals arranged by the various local piano teachers.

I was twelve when I had my first organ lessons with Alastair Cassels-Brown at Saint John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (later Episcopal Divinity School, now defunct) outside Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My father was the professor of homiletics there. The organ was built by Walter Holtkamp, Sr., in 1956, with three manuals including one of the earliest Rückpositiv divisions in the United States. I often rode my bike the eight miles over busy commuting roads through Somerville and Cambridge to get to my lessons. Dr. Cassels-Brown had been associate organist at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City during Alec Wyton’s tenure there. He seemed worldly to me and shared insights into the structure of music beyond stringing series of notes together.

I was a middle-schooler when Dr. Cassels-Brown showed me the Fibonacci series, how that sequence of numbers fit into the natural world and governed some of the flowing beauty of music. He also taught me to compare the characteristics of music of a given era between different nationalities—for example, eighteenth-century France and Germany—and how the different styles of composition reflected different types of organ building. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, and I guess he was a thoughtful, conservative player. Sometimes, he asked me to sit with him during special services, turning pages and witnessing what went into structuring a worship service from an organ console.

After a couple years, Dr. Cassels-Brown recommended I shift to studying with John Skelton, organist of the First Congregational Church in Winchester, just a couple blocks from where we lived. The church had a brand-new, three-manual Fisk organ, and I was fortunate to have generous practice privileges there. Mr. Skelton had studied with Yuko Hayashi at the New England Conservatory and with Anton Heiller in Vienna, and was well connected with the exciting organ scene in Boston in the early 1970s. There were several young “boutique” organ companies in the area rejuvenating the concept of the mechanical-action pipe organ, and John made sure I got to hear recitals and attend workshop open houses, drawing me into that crowd as a young teenager. I remember an after-concert dinner at the Wursthaus (a long-gone favorite haunt of organists in Harvard Square) after an organ recital, at which someone pointed out that there were nine organists present who played for churches that had Fisk organs.

John Skelton understood and nourished my fascination with pipe organ tone, discussing the functions and construction of the various stops and allowing me to register the pieces I was learning. I loved listening to the organ’s voices as I chose them.

The harpsichord builder Carl Fudge was organist of my home church, the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, where my father was rector. He led the junior choir, which was where I was first exposed to church music, and as my voice changed, I moved to the senior choir. Carl was supportive of my early studies and took me to organ recitals. I am especially grateful that I heard E. Power Biggs play on the Flentrop organ at the “Museum Formerly Known as Busch-Reisinger.” What a thrill it was to hear him play Charles Ives’s Variations on “America” as an encore following a recital of Baroque music.

Organbuilder George Bozeman was another mentor during my teenage years. His wife Pat sang in the choir at Epiphany, and together they took me around the circuit to concerts, workshops (George worked for the Noack Organ Company at the time), and social events. I worked in George’s new shop, Bozeman-Gibson & Company, during the summers of 1975 and 1976, after my freshman and sophomore years at Oberlin, my first real experiences as a newbie organbuilder.

Burton Cowgill was the music director at Winchester High School where I was put to work accompanying everything and everybody. I bet a lot of readers grew up as workhorse accompanists. As chorus director, Mr. Cowgill led us through a huge amount of sacred music, something that would likely get him in trouble today. The greatest hits of Vivaldi, Pergolesi, and Gabrieli, among others, helped further my interest in that rich repertory. I accompanied rehearsals of the Madrigal Singers and hundreds of hours with productions of musicals (Oklahoma and Little Mary Sunshine). Mr. Cowgill encouraged me out from behind the piano, out of my comfort zone, to sing solos in a cappella pieces (“Fare thee well, my dear, I must be gone, and leave thee for a while. . . .”).

Twenty years later, I was privileged to lead the music for Mr. Cowgill’s memorial service at the church where he had been director of music. The church’s choir was augmented by a couple dozen of his former students, including several members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and we offered some of the classics he had taught us (“I got a robe up in-a the Kingdom, ain’a that Good News”).

Leaving the nest

I started at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in the fall of 1974 with Haskell Thomson as my organ teacher. I had been a big fish in the little pond that was Winchester, Massachusetts, and quickly learned that I was not going to be such a big guy in Lake Oberlin. Mr. Thomson was a very tall man, impressive in the confines of the teaching studio. He did a lumbering dance, swinging his arms with the arc of the musical phrase, chanting, “and then to here, and then to there, and turn around and go to here.” He wanted the music to sweep purposefully to points of arrival, and he loved the motion of music. I especially remember learning Bach’s Fugue in E-flat, BWV 522ii (“Saint Anne”), for my senior recital, making those soaring passages of sixteenth notes in measure 100 fly with the encouragement of Mr. Thomson’s swooping about the studio.

Oberlin’s semester system leaves the month of January open for independent study, still known as “winter term projects.” Mr. Thomson organized a beauty for a group of us, a month of intensive eurythmics with the Dalcroze disciple, Inda Howland. She was elderly, and she had retired from regular teaching at Oberlin but came back for this special month. She wore long, colorful scarves and beads and carried a little drum so there was always a beat. We bounced and tossed balls and pranced about at her direction, and that month’s workshop gave me more insight into the motion and direction of music than any other period in my education. Twenty years later, I engaged a eurythmics instructor to work with the choir I was leading at our season-opening retreat on Cape Cod.

Halfway through my sophomore year, I started working with John Leek, the school’s organ and harpsichord technician. In addition to his work at the school, John had a growing business maintaining organs in the area, and I went off with him three days a week for the rest of my Oberlin career. This did not please Mr. Thomson, because it cut deeply into my practice and study time on campus, but John was teaching me to tune and how the actions worked in a wide variety of organs. I knew I wanted to spend a large part of my life working as an organbuilder, and this was my start.

I have written often about working with John and about John as a teacher. He was an old-world craftsman who had apprenticed in the Netherlands in a cabinet shop as a child and with an organbuilder as a teenager and married the daughter of the shop foreman. He had come to the United States in the 1960s to work for Walter Holtkamp and saw the job posting for Oberlin’s organ technician when working on campus for Holtkamp. We had tons of fun and countless adventures together, and by the time I left his shop, I had a foundation as a woodworker, a mechanical troubleshooter, and a tuner. I had participated in building three or four new harpsichords, two new mechanical-action pipe organs, and I knew how to releather regulators, pitman windchests, and countless other specialized pneumatic actions.

You’re in the big time now.

In the spring of my freshman year, I was hired as director of music at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, Ohio, a large, multi-racial congregation at East Seventy-Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue with a four-manual Austin organ and a volunteer choir with a couple paid singers. I had several simple church jobs while I was in middle school and high school, but this was a big church in a big city, and the job came with some responsibilities beyond plodding through choir rehearsals and Sunday morning services. Roger Shoup was the pastor at Calvary, a big bear of a man who had been associate pastor there through the integration of the formerly all-white congregation. Roger was a devoted and prolific pipe smoker, and his vast collection of carefully seasoned pipes was on display in his office. When a well-meaning cleaning staff carried them all to the kitchen for washing in soap and water, Roger managed to keep his cool. (Keep away from my iron skillets.)

Roger was a great champion of my early ambition, making sure that there was money available to hire musicians (typically my pals from Oberlin) for special performances and for expanding the number of regular paid singers, again drawing from my classmates. He had the treasurer teach me how to create and manage a budget, counseled me on how to get along with the variety of personalities in that big rollicking diverse place, and let me know when my naiveté got in the way of my creativity. I count Roger among my most important teachers. He helped me grow up.

I have named eleven of my teachers, and I have skipped over dozens who had important roles in my education. Those eleven were all one-on-one teachers or mentors. Each had different methods of teaching and different ways of being. Some were quiet and encouraging, some were demanding, purposefully driving me to be better. They each gave me part of who I am as a musician, craftsman, consultant, and entrepreneur, and I am grateful to them all.

The art of the question

Charles Fisk (1925–1983) was one of the pioneering organbuilders active in the Boston area when I was a teenager, and there was so much excitement about the resurgence of tracker organs. In the early days of C. B. Fisk, Inc., in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the company worked in a long, low building that had been a rope walk for the fishing industry. The people who worked with Charlie in the 1970s and 1980s knew him as a Socratic teacher, the eponymous style of teaching by asking questions. He gave design problems to small groups of his employees and guided them to solutions with questions. Robert Cornell, who worked in the rope walk in those days, told me that Charlie would look at a solution and say, “That’s good. Is there another way to do it?” Over the years, I have talked with several people who worked closely with Charlie who remember fondly his unique and gentle approach to teaching. Encouraging his people to participate in design and problem solving was his way of ensuring that his company would outlast him. Bob Cornell supposed that was because Charlie knew his would not be a long life. He died of cancer in 1983.

On the bridge

I am thinking so much about teachers and teaching because recently a friend and I were privileged to witness a bit of Socratic teaching. This being our first summer without a sailboat, Wendy and I had promised each other we would look for a special experience on the water, and in early September, along with our old sailing friends Bill and Marlene, we went on a cruise in Alaska’s Inside Passage. We were on a small ship, about 250-feet long with only fifty cabins, operated in affiliation with National Geographic. There were fewer than 100 passengers and about seventy crew members including nine naturalists who guided hikes and Zodiac (small inflatable motorboats) excursions and gave evening talks about the geography, flora, and fauna of the area.

The captain had an “open bridge” policy, allowing passengers to visit the bridge without appointment unless there was complicated maneuvering going on. Bill and I spent a lot of time there, chatting with the captain and the chief mate, a young woman who had graduated from California Maritime Academy, a brilliant ship handler and authority figure, and on the last afternoon, approaching cocktail hour, Bill and I were on the bridge as the captain was teaching a young third mate how to drop anchor. “What are we doing?,” asked the captain. “Dropping anchor,” answered the mate. “What do we need?” “A place to drop the anchor.” The captain led the mate through establishing an anchor field on the chart plotter (the electronic chart on the sweeping dashboard), identifying an area a half-mile in diameter with a relatively flat, muddy bottom (it’s hard to anchor in rocks), far enough ahead that the ship could be slowed enough in time. We were traveling at 7-1⁄2 knots,¹ and the anchor field was five miles away.

The captain asked, “What should you do?” “Slow down.” “Right. Be sure you maintain just enough speed to steer when you’re ready to drop.” The mate eased back on the two three-inch throttle levers, and the engine RPM dropped from 1,100 to 890. Captain: “You have an anchor field, and you’re slowing down. What do you need now?” Mate: “Anchor watch” (the crew members whose job it is to operate the windlass that manages the heavy anchor chain). Captain: “Where are they?” Mate: “Off duty.” Captain raises an eyebrow. Mate says, “I’ll call the anchor watch.” Keys microphone, “Anchor watch to your bow station.”

The mate adjusted the throttle every few minutes, and the ship continued to slow to a little over one knot. As the ship’s image crept into the red circle on the chart that marked the anchor field, it slipped a little to starboard (to the right). Captain: “What do you see?” Mate: “We’re drifting to starboard.” Captain: “How do you respond?” Mate: “We’re in the middle of the anchor field, dropping anchor.” Captain does thumbs up with both hands.

Bill and I were surprised that the captain allowed us to stay on the bridge. I am sure he knew that we would be interested to watch the process, but I do not know if the mate had been prepared to receive his lesson with an audience. He sure was concentrating hard—it took more than a half hour for him to slow the ship enough to drop the anchor. The captain quipped that it was like watching paint dry.

Watching this, I tried to picture Charlie Fisk leaning on a drafting table, asking questions of his eager students. I thought of organ lessons when a question inspired a realization. And I imagined that third mate as a captain, twenty years hence, teaching his third mate how to drop an anchor in Sitka Bay, Alaska. As we traveled home the next day, Bill and I agreed that we had witnessed something special, a high point of our exotic trip. For some of us, how we get there is as interesting and thought provoking as being there.

Notes

1. A knot is a measure of speed, one nautical mile per hour. (It is not correct to say “knots per hour.”) A nautical mile is one minute of latitude, which equals 1,852 meters or about 6,000 feet.