In the Wind: On the road again

On the road again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pennsylvania and Ohio

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

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

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

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

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

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

And back to Pennsylvania

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

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

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

Saying goodbye

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

J. G. P. Leek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Road trip

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

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

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

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

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

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

The twinkle in his eye

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

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

Opus 1

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

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

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

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

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

Nunc dimittis

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

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

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

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

Shipping and handling included

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

120 4′ x 8′ sheets OSB

320 10′ 1′′ x 8′′

80 12′ 1′′ x 8′′

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

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

50 pounds 15⁄8′′ coarse thread drywall screws

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

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

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

§

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

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

§

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

§

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

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

A moving experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What you want in a truck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in the day

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

The next week, Black wrote to his shipping agent

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep rolling.

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

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

Notes

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

Wandering

When I was born, my father was rector of the now-long-gone Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in Somerville, Massachusetts. It was on Washington Street near the Sullivan Square “T” Station; there is a Brazilian barbeque restaurant in that location now. It was a small parish, but I presume there was a pipe organ—all churches had pipe organs then. I was four months old when Dad was named the first priest for the new Episcopal mission of Saint John in Westwood, Massachusetts, just outside Route 128 (now I-95), which was the first circular perimeter commuter highway in the United States. We moved briefly to a rented house in Westwood, and in 1958, before I was two years old, we were ensconced in the brand-new rectory adjacent to the church building. 

There was a pipe organ at Saint John’s from the start, with a juicy tidbit of American organ history to boot. It was built in 1959 by the Andover Organ Company, then owned by the thirty-four-year-old Charles Fisk. It had one manual, six stops, and a two-manual detached, reversed console, all mounted on a platform—a strange little setup until you realize that it was intended as the Rückpositiv of a larger two-manual organ, the Great and Pedal to be built later in a free-standing case as the parish grew and funds became available.

The mission building was a simple frame structure with a linoleum floor, and the organ sat down front on the left. The building was also designed to be expanded to greater glory, and that happened starting in 1963 when two towers were added with stained glass faces (I got bagged when at seven years old, I climbed to the top of the scaffolding surrounding the seventy-foot tower only to see my parents’ car coming up the road), and a rear balcony was built. My earliest organbuilding memory was seeing that organ hanging outdoors from a crane. The roof had been opened in two places and the organ, pipes and all, was hoisted to its permanent home. I’m a professional. Don’t try this at home.

Dad was called to be rector at the Parish of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts, in 1966. That is where I had my first experience playing an organ. A new organ by C. B. Fisk was installed there in 1974. I took organ lessons at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a Holtkamp organ installed when Charlie Fisk was an apprentice with Holtkamp, just three years before the Saint John’s organ. I continued my lessons at the First Congregational Church in Winchester on the new three-manual Fisk organ, went to Oberlin to wallow in the renowned fleet of instruments there, and went out into the world as organist and organbuilder.

I have worked for four organ companies including my own, I have served two churches as organist for a total of thirty years, and I have been director of the Organ Clearing House for twenty, a position that has had me in direct contact with hundreds of organs. I have played hundreds (thousands?) of organs in the United States, Great Britain, Europe, even on a Cavaillé-Coll organ in Antananarivo, Madagascar. My wife and I have traveled extensively in Greece where there are very few organs, especially on sailing vacations in the Ionian and Aegean seas, but while I could not get access to it, I laid eyes on a tiny pipe organ in a high balcony in a Roman Catholic church on the Island of Siros. I am thinking that our Greek trips might be the only times since my birth that I have gone more than a week without playing, hearing, or seeing a pipe organ. Until now.

As the Covid-19 pandemic started to break out in early March, we left New York City with extended family for our place in Maine. A few days before that, I visited an E. & G. G. Hook & Hastings organ built in 1872 (Opus 668) that has been in storage for ten years. My colleagues and I were pulling it out of the container to measure key components to prepare for laying it out in a new location. It was the last instrument I saw. It has been 117 days since I laid eyes on an organ.

Remembering

In April 2016, Wendy and I spent a long week in Great Britain. We sure saw a lot of organs on that trip. I loved seeing the fifty-two-stop Willis organ (1891) in the library of Blenheim Palace. Following the tour path through the building, one first sees the organ partially through an archway at the end of the vast room. The organ was built in the height of the Victorian Era, and it looks it, bedecked with opulent swirls and swoops of carvings and elegant inlaid decorations across the keydesk. Beautifully made mechanical stop actions are visible from the sides, as well as miles of lead tube for the pneumatic keyboard actions. Next to the organ hangs a framed photo of Henry Willis sitting at the console, apparently working on tonal finishing. The case had not been installed yet, and lots of the organ’s innards are visible.

Our host was Andrew Patterson who serves as a volunteer curator of the organ and plays many of the regular recitals. He pointed out a dent in the largest façade pipe of the C-side tower, close to twenty feet off the floor. The story goes that the palace was temporarily home to a school for boys during the Second World War, and the dent was the result of an indoor ball game.

When I was in high school, I was assistant organist at the First Congregational Church in Woburn, Massachusetts, home of E. & G. G. Hook’s Opus 283 (1860). George Bozeman was the organist, and he figured out how to create a position for me so I could be his regular substitute when he traveled for organ installations. The parish has diminished quite a bit over the years, but the grand organ is still in place hoping for restoration. It was in good shape for my time there, and I learned a lot from it.

I had agreed to accompany a concert of the all-elementary school chorus in late June, not long before my graduation. I attended a couple rehearsals, and it promised to be a fine event. One beautiful June Sunday, a couple of my pals came to church in Woburn to hear me play, and we took off for the beach after church. I got home that evening to phone messages wondering where I was. You guessed it. I missed the concert. Carl Fudge, the organist of Epiphany in Winchester, was in attendance because his daughter was in the chorus. He volunteered from the audience to mount the stage and to accompany the concert. I wonder if any readers have a lifelong blush from a moment like that.

In the summer of 1976, I worked for Bozeman-Gibson for a few months. The shop was just completing a one-manual organ for the chapel on Squirrel Island, Southport, Maine. John Farmer, long-time organbuilder in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was my senior in the shop, and we would take the organ to Maine for installation. But first, over the Independence Day holiday, we installed the organ temporarily in the crossing of Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross for Barbara Bruns’s performance of Handel organ concertos with the orchestra of the Handel and Haydn Society for the convention of the American Guild of Organists, held in Boston that summer. We worked hard through a couple nights getting the organ set up. In those days, the Orange Line of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA, aka “the subway”) ran on tracks elevated above Washington Street, and the trains roared past the dark cathedral all night. Other highlights of that convention included Farmer and me playing the appropriate parts in a piece for organist and two organbuilders by Martha Folts on and in the Fisk organ at King’s Chapel, and E. Power Biggs’s last public performance, Rheinberger with the Boston Pops Orchestra and Arthur Fiedler.

After the convention, we dismantled the organ and drove it to Maine, where we loaded it onto the Squirrel Island ferry, a small vessel a lot like a lobster boat—it took three trips to get the organ there. The only vehicle on the island was the superintendent’s ancient beat-up pickup truck, which took many trips up the dusty road from the dock to the chapel laden with organ parts. A cold beer never tasted so good.

The island was buzzing with news of a recent faux pas. The island is roughly equivalent to a condominium corporation where homeowners own shares of the island and contribute to its upkeep. They had recently banded together for the construction of a water tower that brought “city” water to the island for the first time, eliminating the reliance on quirky wells. With construction complete, the tank was left full of a cleaning solution, and it was the superintendent’s job to empty it at a specified time and fill it with water. So he did, forgetting to open a valve allowing air into the tank as the fluid drained, and the tank collapsed inward with a big bang.

During the job, we took the ferry back to town for an evening or two and followed islanders’ recommendations to eat at Lobsterman’s Wharf in East Boothbay, Maine. My historically informed ongoing Oberlin education was enhanced by a local country-western band sharing such gems as I Just Kicked the Daylights Out of My CB Radio (Google™ didn’t turn it up for me, I wonder if it was an original?) and Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life, written and made famous by Bobby Bare and easily found on YouTube, which I later learned was Bill Clinton’s favorite country song. Forty-four years later, almost to the day, I am sitting at my desk in Newcastle, Maine, on the shore of the Damariscotta River, about six miles upriver from Lobsterman’s Wharf. We have often gone there by boat, tying up at their dock where I can hear the echoes of those two songs.

Adjacent to Lobsterman’s Wharf is the Washburn & Doughty Shipyard, famous for the construction of huge powerful tugboats that service the ports between Boston and New Jersey and move cargo, especially fuel, over the same waters. In July 2008, John Schwandt, then professor of organ at the University of Oklahoma, was staying with us while preparing for a concert on the Kotzschmar Organ in Portland. On July 11, John and I were sitting on a rock on the shore of the river when we noticed a vast plume of smoke to the south. Washburn & Doughty was on fire. The Boothbay Register reported that a 121-foot articulate tug barge and a 92-foot “Z-Drive” tugboat under construction at the time were towed to safety by the heroic efforts of lobstermen from East Boothbay and South Bristol across the river. The shipyard was rebuilt so quickly that local suspicion had it that plans and financing were in place for replacing the building before the fire started mysteriously.

Just a month before that riverside chat, I returned from my first trip to Madagascar. I had traveled on an invitation from Zina Andrianarivelo, ambassador from Madagascar to the United Nations, at the behest of Marc Ravalomanana, the Federal President. The president was also vice-president of the Protestant church there, and in preparation for an important upcoming anniversary, had asked the ambassador to “go back to America and find an organ for this church.” The cold call I received from Zina was the doozy of a lifetime, and I agreed to meet him in New York to discuss it. I was sure I was the only organbuilder at work at the United Nations that day.

I have written before about the travel plans that included no details about hotels or even a flight home. Once in the country, my name would be on a list for notification when there would be a flight back to Paris. Otherwise I had no itinerary whatsoever. Of course, I was treated handsomely. My flight arrived after midnight, I was met at the airport by snappily dressed presidential aides, treated to drinks in the VIP lounge, and whisked forty minutes to the capital where I checked into a room in a four-star, French-owned hotel reserved in the president’s name. As I ventured into the hotel restaurant for breakfast, a server informed me that my driver would be out front in an hour. Richard, the driver with a big government car, took me to the church where I met the ambassador, was given a cell phone, and was introduced to church officials who would show me the dozen or so churches the president wished to enhance with organs. 

I met Adolha Vonialitahina, a lovely young woman who had just graduated from Texas Christian University in a scholarship program instituted by the president. Adolha would be my translator and guide, so I had an entourage. The trip included many rich experiences, including a four-hour drive to Andasibe-Mantadia National Park where I saw lemurs in their natural habitat. We visited a church in Antananarivo (the capital city, colloquially known as Tanariv, or simply, Tana) where they showed me an organ in a non-descript plywood case. When I opened the fallboard I burst into tears. There was the familiar and distinctive gilded nameboard of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. I saw a lovely organ by Merklin in another church, reminding me that Madagascar was a French colony until 1963.

As I returned to JFK Airport, my wife Wendy was leaving for a trip to Jordan with a friend. We were in the airport at the same time. She saw my flight from Paris arrive, but we did not see each other in person, two ships passing in broad daylight.

Delivering an organ to a church in Arlington, Massachusetts, in about 1985, a co-worker slipped on a stairway. When he grabbed wildly to steady himself, he pulled a fire alarm and the city responded with vigor. We called him Sparky after that. And working in an organ loft in Manhattan, I forgot to turn off the smoke detector beam. When I walked in front of it, the horns started blaring. This time it was a big deal because there is a large and active day school in the building, and the FDNY knows to respond with intent. Fire apparatuses filled the cross street and blocked both Park and Lexington avenues. There must have been thousands of people affected, most singularly the rector who was in the shower in the sixth-floor rectory and came to the street with wet hair wearing a cassock. That memory is filed away next to the trip to the beach in 1974.

Twenty years ago, the Calgary International Organ Festival was my host for a project. The Calgary Stampede is held each year on the Fourth of July, a huge rodeo festival celebrating the end of the roundup and castration of the herd. When they asked what I liked to eat, I said since I am from New England, I would pass on Alberta seafood. One fellow rubbed his hands together and smiled, and off we went to Bottlescrew Bill’s Testicle Festival. They don’t taste like chicken.

Bottlescrew Bill’s, the 1976 American Guild of Organists Convention, my trip to Madagascar, the delivery of the organ to Squirrel Island, the tugboat fire, the fire alarm in Manhattan, and the missed concert in Winchester all happened within a week or so of the Fourth of July. Today is July 6th. I wonder when I will see an organ again.

Photo: Squirrel Island organ. Photo credit John Bishop.

Let’s hoist a few.

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

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

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

The bells, the bells

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

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

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

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

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

Doing it the old-fashioned way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making the impossible possible

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

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

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

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

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