Pulling Out All Stops to Save an Orphan Organ

There’s a definite whisper in her lielich gedeckt . Worse, the horn diapason may have moaned its last. But her great division remains great, the swell is swell and the sforzando piston, bless it, stands ready to commit thunder.

And for $40,000, or best offer, the great and venerable Austin Opus pipe organ of the First United Methodist Church of Los Angeles can be yours and ours to boom again.

God willing and with Job providing patience.

For this organ is in pieces and only a few bits short of 5,000 pieces. It’s a clattering clutter of tin and annealed zinc pipes ranging from 2 feet to 32 feet. From steamship funnels to piccolos. From contra bombards to dolce cornet and all the harps, clarinets, drums, tubas, French horns, violins, flageolets and even reedy human voices in between.

There are plus stops and pedals, console and couplings, tremulants and crescendos, four wind chests the size of bachelor apartments . . . well, look at it this way, when built by the Austin Organ Co. of Hartford, Conn., in 1921, this massive, four-story first cousin to the Biograph movie organ was the largest west of the Mississippi.

She (“and we do think of her as our great lady,” said Bill Miller, a former pastor) has been silent since 1983.

Placed in Storage

That’s when the First United Methodist Church’s splendid, imposing, landmark Spanish Renaissance sanctuary at 8th and Hope streets was sold to the Southern California Gas Co. for $9 million.

The building was bulldozed into a state-of-the-art parking lot. The ministry moved into temporary headquarters (a former insurance building at Olympic Boulevard and Flower Street) pending construction of its new edifice early in the next century. The organ--after a tear-jerking decommissioning recital attended by church officials and even members of the wrecking crew--was dismantled and crated and placed in warehouse storage donated by Southern California Gas.

Most chunks of the old church easily found new homes.

A Northern California church will take three towering Tiffany windows of favrile glass (considered by collectors to represent Louis C. Tiffany’s highest, certainly most colorful achievement) that crowned the choir loft. Oak from a chapel to the memory of Edgar Ellesworth Helms (pastor when the church was built in 1923 and father of that other Helms, baker Paul Helms) has gone to the Bardsdale United Methodist Church in Fillmore.

A liquidation sale raised $140,000 while disposing of chandeliers, skylights, leaded glass panels, mahogany hand rails and oak doors that presumably are now decorating everything from law offices to sushi bars.

But the organ remains an orphan. No serious inquiry has ruffled its dust. Three years of advertising to the esoteric through Diapason and American Organist magazines have stirred nothing. Part of the reason, concedes the Rev. Herbert M. Fink, current pastor of the First United Methodist Church of Los Angeles, is the noticeable shortage of buildings roomy enough to contain an organ that is larger than most buildings.

“There have been nothing but nibbles at this point,” said Fink. “One from an Episcopal church in Philadelphia, another from a prominent Mormon at a new community center at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas . . . and we’re negotiating with the Church of the Nazarene at Pasadena.

“We’re also negotiable on the price. If somebody gives us $40,000 we might even give it back to them to cover the cost of installing the organ in an appropriate place.”

Appropriate place. Ah, there’s another rub.

For the seller has issued rigid criteria for relocating its organ and they seem to exclude most things smaller than Dodger Stadium and just about anything less dignified than Westminster Abbey.

The organ, dictates the primary condition, must remain intact and cannot be cannibalized. It must be installed in a facility seating at least 2,500 persons. That church “or other appropriate religious or educational facility” should also be located in the greater Los Angeles area.

“For the (First United Methodist) church, it’s a little like finding a suitor for their daughter,” said former pastor Bill Miller. “There is a modest asking price, but the non-financial factors are more important . . . respecting its orchestral features, finding an appropriate monumental space so that the organ can be enjoyed without being taken apart or bowdlerized. I’ve always thought the Hollywood Bowl would be ideal.”

Lee Jessop, staff organist at the church for six years, sees more subtle difficulties. This, he says, was an organ built for the music and musicians of the ‘20s and ‘30s such as the Notre Dame Cathedral symphonies of Louis Vierne, thick organ sounds and Bach fugues played by Alexander Schreiner.

“When they played Bach back in the ‘30s, it was a more symphonic type of playing,” he said. “Today, it is much more detached . . . not big and loud and heavy but clear, a Baroque style, the lighter sound of the polyphonic music of today.”

Another Comparison

A less learned comparison? “If you have a car from the ‘20s you’re not going to get one with turn signals and air conditioning.”

Still, one would have thought that the organ would have been snapped up for no other reason than historic eminence.

She played for Norman Vincent Peale and Los Angeles’ old money marriages and funerals of young heroes from three wars. A gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Watchorn (he the treasurer of Union Oil and former U.S. commissioner of immigration on Ellis Island), the organ memorialized their late son, Emory Ewart Watchorn, a graduate of Hollywood High and World War I flier.

In pre-FM days when KIEV-AM was broadcasting live Sunday services, this organ was the musical accompaniment. And Schreiner, then living in Salt Lake City and playing at the Mormon Tabernacle, was a frequent guest organist.

“It has a soul, a life, a spirit, a geist,” Fink recalled. “When it played the toccata from Vierne’s 5th Symphony it would just lift you clear out of your seat.”

Grace Keehler became a communicant in 1923. She’s now 84 and delightful. She continues to serve the church as a volunteer and remembers its organ as an old friend she would like to meet again. Just one more time.

“There was tremendous music from that organ and we had great organists too,” she said. “Earl Blakeslee, Lee Jessop, Irene Robertson, Winifred Dunning, and when the choral groups sang the Messiah and the organ boomed it was simply gorgeous.”

Romance, however, is often in the soul of the beholden. For every philanthropist there’s a Philistine. Such as the automotive parts dealer who approached Miller with an offer for the organ pipes.

He thought they might be cut down and made into mufflers.

“Vulture,” Miller snapped. “I threw him out.”