With These Organ Transplants, You Need Room, Money, Skills

As a boy, Don Near used to go to his local roller rink in Southgate, not so much to skate, but to listen to the pipe organ.

He loved the sound of the instrument and was fascinated by its mechanics. So began a lifelong desire to do more than just listen; Don Near wanted a pipe organ of his very own.

Forty years later, he got what he wanted. All 900 pipes of it.

The object of his desire now sits in a specially built room in his North Tustin home. Not yet finished after two years of work, the project has taken up much of Near’s garage and more than a little of his wife’s patience.

“I think she wishes I’d never learned how to skate,” he laughs. “Then, I wouldn’t have gotten hooked on pipe organs in the first place.”

Near is one of only a handful of Orange County residents bold enough, enthusiastic enough and perhaps wacky enough to welcome a full-sized pipe organ into their homes. A few have gone to extraordinary lengths--and expense--to install the massive instruments.

A passion for pipes was the driving force behind John and Gail Pawson’s decision to buy their Huntington Beach home. The two-story structure fit their vintage 500-pipe, Wurlitzer-Morton theater organ.

“We were looking for a house that had a three-car garage attached to a two-story living room area,” Pawson recalls. “I needed the extra garage space so I could build a mixing chamber for the pipes.”

The high school science teacher also needed a common wall he could tear out so that the organ could speak into a large concert area--the two-story living room.

Pawson says their real estate agent had a tough time finding a house to fit their needs. His wife agrees.

“We used to drive our agent crazy. The first thing we’d do when she showed us a house was start measuring the garage to see if it was big enough to hold two cars and a pipe organ.”

Bob Trusdale never worried about trying to fit a jungle of pipes and apparatus inside his garage. Instead, he built a separate, 1,000-square-foot concert hall in the back yard of his Santa Ana home for the instrument destined to be the largest privately owned pipe organ in Orange County.

Begun with an investment of $2,000 in 1971 (not counting construction costs), Trusdale now values the 2,000-pipe instrument in excess of $75,000. After nearly 20 years, he is still adding pipes. Most have come from “tear-downs” of old theater organs, but, as Trusdale dryly notes while touring the crowded mixing chamber, “there are two brand new ranks of pipes in here--you just can’t find them.”

Old movie theater pipe organs are popular in-home instruments because they are relatively inexpensive to buy. Instruments of 500 or more pipes can sometimes be found for as little as $1,000. It is the extras that run up the sticker price.

The cost of transporting the instrument, installing it, fixing the multitude of things that often do not work on it, and tuning it can run many thousands of dollars or more, not to mention taking roughly the same number of man-hours to complete the task as were needed to dig a foot-and-a-half of the Panama Canal.

Theater pipe organs are notoriously nomadic instruments.

As the movie palaces that they graced were converted to sound motion pictures, or were torn down, pipe organs were often sold to churches and private enthusiasts. With the passing years, the huge instruments often changed owners--and locations--many times.

Don Near’s pipe organ is no exception. Built in New York by the Marr & Colton Co., it was originally installed in the Palace Theater in Indiana, Pa., in 1924. A restless instrument even then, it packed its pipes and skipped across town to another local movie house a few years later, staying long enough to be put out of work by Al Jolson and the talkies.

Evicted and without a theater, the instrument spent a decade or so in a storage attic before finding its way to a private home in Buffalo. Because Buffalo is a good place to be from but not in, it returned to Pennsylvania some years later, this time to the miniscule metropolis of Coudersport, where it uncharacteristically stayed put until Near purchased it from a private party in 1987 for $3,000.

Near’s quest for pipes did not stop there. He has embarked on a continuing musical scavenger hunt, buying bits and pieces of other pipe organs as he comes across them.

“I’ve added some surplus pipes which were once part of the pipe organ at the Fox Fullerton Theater,” he says. “And a couple months ago, I came across some tuned sleigh bells which I had to have.”

Because they provided not only music but also sound effects for the silent movies they accompanied, theater pipe organs like Near’s packed a bag full of audio tricks. Joining Near’s sleigh bells are bass and snare drums, symbols, chimes, a xylophone, glockenspiel, marimba, various bird whistles, even a car horn. The instrument can also cue a ringing telephone or the sound of a galloping horse.

To house this tonal assault force, Near, like John Pawson, has sealed off part of his garage into a mixing chamber. From here the hidden pipes and sound effects will speak into the living room through a screened opening. A 60-year-old theater console, now gathering dust in the garage, will operate the ensemble from dual keyboards.

Even after hundreds of hours of work, however, stacks of pipe organ paraphernalia still await transfer into permanent quarters.

“I don’t know how I’m going to get it all in here,” Near said, peering into the already-cluttered chamber. “I guess I’m going to cram it in a little bit at a time. The problem is, I don’t have enough ceiling height for the big pipes, which I’ve had to miter to fit.”

The 52-year-old insurance agent reflected a moment.

“And I don’t think my wife is ready to give up the room upstairs so I can expand.”

Oddly, performance has never been a motivating factor behind Near’s lust for pipes. He happily admits that he is far from being a pipe organ virtuoso. “I just tinker around. I’ll learn how to play later, after I get it all working.”

In the meantime, Near is hoping to buy state-of-the-art electronics to replace the mechanical controls and relays traditional in these instruments. How much will the entire project eventually cost? He laughs, then reveals a figure of possibly $10,000.

Cheap when compared to the $85,000 it would cost to buy a classic-type, Rodgers-Ruffatti pipe organ such as the one owned by Gene Roberson of San Clemente. And that does not include another $10,000 or so for installation and tuning.

This direct descendant of what composer Robert Schumann called the “King of Instruments” speaks in a traditional, near-baroque voice suited to the great works of Bach, whereas a theater pipe organ warbles in a sweet tremolo to more earthbound classics such as “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Unlike the nondecorative, mostly hidden piping of a theater organ, the 15 ranks of pipes of the Rodgers-Ruffatti visually dominate the French-style music room of Roberson’s hilltop home.

(A rank, or speaking voice, is usually made up of 61 individual pipes arranged in five octaves of 12 notes each, with a capping “C” thrown in. This is not always the case, but close enough to peg Roberson’s instrument at about 900 pipes, give or take half a hundred.)

“This is really overkill for this room,” admits the concert organist and owner of a music store called Gene Roberson’s Keyboard Stop in Laguna Hills.

Actually, there is more to Roberson’s pipe organ than meets the eye. Besides the polished magnificence of the exposed piping, speakers hidden behind a louvered wall augment the sound electronically.

Without electronic assist, according to Roberson, it would be necessary to literally fill the music room with pipes to match the organ’s current sound. And while electronics so far cannot duplicate the tonal brilliance and depth of real pipes, “in the low range, they come very close.”

Because of the large size and expense of these low-range pipes, augmentation can do more than increase sound--it can decrease the bottom line.

“For $350, I can electronically add a (rank of pipes) that might cost $35,000,” Roberson says. “And I don’t need a music room the size of a cathedral to do it.”

A pipe organ uses two types of pipes: flues and reeds. Flues are basically glorified tin whistles. Reeds use vibrating metal tongues to produce tone. Pipe sizes in a home model can range anywhere from 16 feet down to half an inch, although in a cathedral-size instrument, the largest pipes can stand as tall as a six-story building. Put enough flues and reeds together and you have a pipe organ.

But getting the thing to sound like a pipe organ is something else.

This is partly because pipes of the same size will differ in sound, depending on the materials used to make them. It is the same principle as tapping Waterford crystal or a tin plate with your finger. Each pings differently.

Pipes are usually made of both metal and wood. Box-like wood pipes sound breathy and smooth; cylindrical metal pipes brighter. Among the metal are various tin-lead alloys and zinc, each with a distinct sound.

The plot thickens as voicing (adjustments to the pipe itself), wind pressure and room acoustics add to the tonal brew. Heat and cold can also affect the way an organ sounds. As temperature swings, entire tonal divisions will drift away from each other like icebergs breaking loose from a glacier.

Roberson can adjust for these intonation problems electronically--up to a point.

“If it’s really cold in here, the pipes will be so far out of pitch, the electronics can’t match them,” he explains. At such times, Roberson will light the room’s two fireplaces to heat the air and bring the wayward pipes back into the tonal fold.

A pipe organ’s immense range of sound is created by mixing together ranks of pipes of varying tone and pitch. On a classic-type console, such as Roberson’s, dozens of wooden draw knobs called stops control air flow to the ranks.

(A theater organ console, on the other hand, sports a semi-circular row of multicolored tab stops, an arrangement often referred to by classical purists as “grinning teeth.”)

There is also a series of push buttons or pistons below the keyboards to work entire groups of stops, and, the final horror, foot pedals. Pound the keys, pull the stops, push the pistons and stomp the pedals, all while reading a page of music with more notes to it than a stuttering canary. Little wonder that a concert pipe organist needs both talent and coordination to play the device, not to mention self-abusive tendencies.

And then, there is Bob Trusdale’s automatic play system for the in-home plinker.

You may possess the musical ability of a lug nut, but it won’t matter. Trusdale can computerize any pipe organ to play professionally pre-programmed selections.

“The hard disk on my computer has dozens of different songs which I can call up on the screen and play automatically on the organ,” he explains. “Or I can do the same thing with a digitally recorded tape.”

Trusdale is a self-described research and development man whose in-home pipe organ is more than an indulgence; it is an experimental laboratory for the creation of advanced organ-control systems. He sells these and other electronic innovations to the in-home organ market and to churches and concert halls across the nation.

For most pipe organ fans, however, the joy of owning one of these instruments is in the playing--wrong notes and all.

It is also, especially for those who may lack musical acumen, the fascination of all the many hours of putting the darn thing together and keeping it running. And like all true obsessions, it can go on and on. It’s the musical world’s equivalent of model railroading.

Don Near agrees that such an enterprise can take on a life of its own; that the installation of one of these complex and mighty instruments just may be the ultimate home do-it-yourself project, one for which the neighbors will never look at you in quite the same way again.

“This pipe organ will never be complete,” beams Near, clearly pleased at the thought. “You keep finding more and more stuff to add to it. It’s something that’ll keep growing over the years.”