I thought it looked like it was an old dog that was dirty and needed a bath.

John Dapolito, reserved and thoughtful, doesn’t seem like a man with a passion, but he is. The 61-year-old La Mesa resident lights up visibly when the conversation turns to organ music, and to his 10-year restoration project of a 1926 theater pipe organ in particular. For Dapolito, a physician at Grossmont Hospital, playing and maintaining the organ is more than a hobby, more than a way to unwind. It is a part of daily life. By simply pumping pedals with his feet and tickling the ivory keys, Dapolito can create the melodic strums of a harp, the zing of a xylophone and the deep echo of a gong. Dapolito designed and constructed a special temperature-controlled room to house the 1,450 pipes he acquired over the years. He devoted years to restructuring the console, cleaning each pipe by hand, and adding several more instruments to the organ’s original collection. Dapolito and his wife are hosts to formal concerts twice a year in their home and, on a more frequent basis, hold impromptu jam sessions with fellow theater organ society members. Times staff writer Caroline Lemke interviewed Dapolito at his La Mesa home and Vince Compagnone photographed him.

I became interested in acquiring an organ around 1977. You can’t buy them new; they just don’t make them anymore. Theater pipe organs were originally designed to accompany silent movies. With the advent of talking movies, these pipe organs have just become extinct.

After looking for several months, we finally found a suitable one in Portland, Ore. My wife and I belong to the American Theater Organ Society and subscribe to the Theater Organ Journal. We ran across the organ in a small classified ad of the journal.

This organ was built in 1926, and over the years it had gotten extremely dirty. It was originally installed in the Hollywood Theater in Portland. In 1957, the organ was moved into a skating rink, and there it sat in the rafters, uncovered, gathering dust. At that time, it had 10 ranks, or 10 rows of pipes. I’ve expanded the organ to 21 ranks.

I thought it looked like it was an old dog that was dirty and needed a bath and some care and doctoring. It was like bringing a dog in off the street that needed a good home.

It was so dirty I just couldn’t stand having it in my home the way it was. It was just a mess. So I gave every single pipe a bath. Everything that was wooden was scrubbed and given a coat, sometimes two coats, of shellac. I cleaned every one of the 1,450 pipes inside and out.

It was a massive cleanup job. That was part of the restoration process, going through and cleaning up. A little pipe takes as quick as two minutes to clean. A big pipe, maybe five minutes.

I had a lot to learn. There are leather pouches on the inside of the chest that can’t be seen. I had to learn how to re-leather those. I had to learn how to wire and how to put in plastic wind lines. I asked questions from people who already had organs of their own. I read books and the articles on maintenance and construction in the Theater Organ Journal.

Originally, we rebuilt the console in the old-fashioned way and got it working. Then we decided that we wanted to make it modern, state-of-the-art. So I tore the whole thing out and started right from scratch.

I just like the sound. It is so far superior to anything that could be achieved with an electronic organ. There’s no comparison between what you can do with this pipe organ versus an electronic organ. And my wife and I felt we were both willing to go through the effort to obtain this.