Master Builder Pulls Out All the Stops for University

--His project to build a large organ from scratch began a year ago with John-Paul Buzard surveying an empty room at the University of Illinois in Urbana. “Organs need to be designed to the room architecturally and acoustically,” he explained. The magnificent music machine will be 13 feet long, 12 feet high and 5 feet deep when fully assembled. “I have to be a scientist in terms of the organ’s engineering and a musician and artist to know how to obtain the sound I want from the pipes,” he said. Buzard, a minister’s son, apprenticed with a Chicago organ-builder while in high school and later worked his way through Illinois and Northwestern universities tuning and caring for organs. He is using redwood, walnut, maple, mahogany and oak in the construction. Buzard is tuning each of the 632 organ pipes himself for the precise sound he desires. Will the musician-craftsmen get to play his creation? “I like to play organs very much but I don’t have much time to practice,” he said. “I’d rather build them than play them, though.”

--A Rochester, N.Y., woman who had saved her family jewels from the Soviet invasion of her native Latvia but lost them in a garage sale says that the secretive woman who returned the heirlooms put her on “seven clouds.” Inese Rencis, 64, said she had given up hope of ever seeing her $10,000 worth of jewels, which were inside a cookie tin she sold for a dime at a friend’s garage sale two months ago. But then the other day a woman phoned to say she had them. The woman, who declined to identify herself, told Rencis she had not looked inside the cookie tin until she heard about the missing jewels at church. “I’m proud to see there’s still honest people in America,” Rencis said.

--A state judge in Mineola, N.Y., has left a large stone unturned: a five-ton boulder that resident Arnold Carlson put in place as a tax protest, much to the chagrin of town officials who went to court to have it removed. Justice Howard Levitt ruled that “the village will have to live, if not with a piece of the rock, at least in peace with this rock.” Carlson, a contractor and frequent critic of high local taxes, placed the seven-foot-high rock next to an office building he owns. A plaque on the rock reads: “Taxpayers Tombstone. Dedicated to the Taxpayers of Nassau County, single and wed, living and dead, overtaxed and robbed, till they bled or fled, that is how it is said.”

--British army Col. Reggie Purbrick, accused by West German farmers of allowing his tank unit to flatten their asparagus fields, has been relieved of his command and summoned home to London, the Defense Ministry said. Purbrick allegedly led his crack “Death or Glory” tank regiment through the fields as part of a training exercise.