PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : Where Unsung Heroes Mend the Broken Muse

Behind Central Avenue, behind the wholesale warehouses and shabby storefronts, life seems bare, shut away behind chain-link fences and metal shutters. It is not so much threatening as lonely--which is why the three-story brick building on Naomi Avenue comes as a surprise. The redness of the brick stands as a slash of color in this gray and empty setting. There is a whiff about it of other days when people lived here, when children played in the streets and school bells marked their days in this building.

The auditorium upstairs has old wooden beams running across the high ceiling. Beneath them, men in overalls sit at large, old-fashioned desks piled with screws, glue, tools and bits of things. Santa Claus’ workshop might have this feel to it; indeed, the round cheeks and owlish faces peering over the desks have an other-worldly look.

There are 70,000 musical items scattered across the Los Angeles Unified School District--7,000 violins, nearly 3,000 flutes and many more clarinets. The musical instrument repair shop here takes care of them all. Saxophones made years ago in Paris and Indiana have lost their keys, a double bass from 1938 Germany has its belly off. Small concert grands with broken legs, uprights in tatters waiting for a new voice and, nearby, the pride of the instrument shop, a gleaming Bosendorfer grand piano drawing the eye like a black racing thoroughbred in a broken-down stable.

Craftsmen work here, painstakingly, quickly, shyly. They make their own tools, forage among old instruments to save tiny pieces missing elsewhere, improvising like surgeons on a battlefield. One man worries over a flute: Four children share it, so each day that it is out of service, four voices stay silent. A clarinet limps through a scale in one corner, a battered and aged piano slowly comes back to life in another.

What is not here? Radios, grating music, raised voices, the tightness of impatient, everyday life. Who would believe that such pride and handiwork exists in this mammoth institution? That in an age of scarred and barren playgrounds, overcrowding and vandalism, men still work on this small and loving scale?

The shop is quiet: rumbling trucks, speeding cars, the old and unsafe walls absorb them all. These men spend their days with the mystery of sound that exists only in the air, elusive and yet with a truth of its own.

Of course, these instruments change the men who work on them--as, they believe, they change the children who play them.

Medical benefits, pension rights, the orderliness of bureaucracy--these draw men to work here. But there is more: Barney dreams of seeing one day the great “Messiah” violin in an Oxford museum. David has books about Stradivarius tucked into his desk. James, dark glasses and drooping mustache hiding his gentle smile, plays a sweet, rich jazz flute. Mike played trombone with Stan Kenton; Mel talks of music “touching the heart” and sits in the break at the Bosendorfer, gladdening the day with Chopin and Schumann.

Sons of railroad men, of elevator operators, musicians and carpenters, those with college degrees, those who knew only night school--music brings many men together. James Benson remembers “mean ol’ Jim Crow” from his days on tour in the South; Manny knew dark days in the Soviet Union. And yet in their mind’s ear, always the distant children--the ones who are rough, the ones who are tender.

It is against such mighty odds that children hear the call of Schubert or Mozart over that of the streets. So when we talk of violence and ignorance, of gangs who care and teachers who don’t, we should talk, too, of the magic of men taking scraps of old metal, shards of old wood, and painstakingly putting things back together in a throwaway age. Songs without words.