SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Long-Lost Organ Returned to Mission

A 98-year-old walnut Estey Reed organ now sits in the Serra Chapel at Mission San Juan Capistrano, just as it did for about 30 years earlier this century.

The organ arrived by truck last month as a gift from the estate of Maureen Sutton of Washington, who had reportedly bought it from a Santa Ana antique dealer.

That’s when Nick Magalousis, the mission’s museum director, enlisted the help of mission archivist Charles A. Bodnar to research the instrument’s history and how it managed to disappear from the control of the mission.

Bodnar recognized the organ immediately.

“I used to play it at Saturday night benediction services in the chapel in 1956,” he said.

The organ, built in Brattleboro, Vt., in 1892, was installed in the mission chapel in 1930. The installation was reported in the Anaheim Bulletin in October of that year.

The Bulletin ran a follow-up story in 1931 reporting that the James C. Rimmer Co. had electrified the organ’s hand-operated bellows. That’s how Bodnar remembers the instrument, with chain-driven bellows on its side.

“The chain drive is the same one that Father (Joseph) Nagy got his cassock caught in,” Bodnar recalled. “It stopped the organ and stopped the service in its tracks.”

In 1961, when the mission got a new pipe organ, the old one was sent to a a dusty warehouse where it sat for about 20 years until it disappeared.

Magalousis believes the organ’s return might have something to do with the letter he sent to Mission Santa Barbara recently, inquiring about whether the Capistrano mission’s original barrel organ could be returned. That instrument was moved from Mission San Juan Capistrano to Mission Santa Barbara sometime in the 1800s.

“That’s how this business works sometimes: You ask for something that someone may or may not want to let go, and you wind up getting something else in its place,” Magalousis said. “But we’re happy to have this one back.”