Father and Son Pull Out All the Stops

The organ pipes spill from Mission San Juan Capistrano’s Serra Chapel like handkerchiefs out of an old vaudevillian’s sleeve, one leading to another and then another until a whole river of fabric tumbles out.

In this case, the pipes emerge from a 12-by-8-foot room in the loft at the rear of the high, narrow chapel. There are more than 500 pipes in all, the smallest the size of a pencil and the largest 8 feet tall and 10 inches across.

Some are made of wood, but most are metal. Lined up in the half a dozen flat pine boxes that Frank Kieran and his son Shaun use to carry them outside for cleaning, the pipes look like a delivery from a weapons smuggler. But these weapons sing. And the Kierans are here to restore their voices.

“I feel that this is a kind of higher calling in my life,” said Shaun Kieran, 30, of San Clemente. “If the organist does her job and I do my job, then people worship God.”

In an effort fueled as much by personal passion as business, the father-and-son organ restorers will spend three weeks cleaning and adjusting the pipes, retooling the 42-year-old organ’s electronic heart and resealing the wood-and-leather chambers that form the instrument’s lungs.

The Kierans have installed, serviced and disassembled pipe organs across Ventura County for years, including an aging 1928 Austin sitting in the Mission San Buenaventura.

The team services 15 pipe organs in Mormon churches countywide and recently worked on two instruments at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo. The men also installed an organ with more than 1,500 pipes at St. Paschal Baylon Catholic church in Thousand Oaks.

Two decades ago, Frank Kieran refurbished the pipe organ at the Ventura mission. Its leather was blown, the electrical system was shot and all the pipes had to come out, he said.

“I was very pleased with [the] effort,” recalled Msgr. Patrick O’Brien, the mission’s pastor. “The people love to hear the sweet, wafting sound of the organ.”

Kieran said the organ will probably outlast the life of the building.

“The Austins are the most reliable organs on the market,” he said. Ventura’s organ cost $6,800 when purchased and is probably worth $160,000 today, he said.

In a way, the Kierans’ work is rooted in the past, bringing fresh life to musical instruments built in different eras. Pipe organs need to be refurbished every 50 years or so, experts say. Changing temperatures and humidity, plus buildups of dust and pollutants, affect everything from how air moves through the pipes to create sound, to how the keys respond to the organist’s touch.

It can be expensive work. Mission San Juan Capistrano will spend about $18,000 restoring the Serra Chapel organ, which cost $8,500 to install decades ago. It would cost more than $100,000, though, to replace it, said Chris Leaver, vice president of marketing and sales for Reuter Organ Co. of Lawrence, Kan., which built the instrument.

Restoring the organ will also be faster than replacing it. Experts say the pipe organ industry has been reeling lately under the weight of its own success. After a crunch in the early 1990s in which a number of organ makers closed down, demand for new pipe organs has outpaced the small industry’s ability to deliver.

Some companies have backlogs of more than two years, said Robert Ebert, the author of annual reports on the pipe organ industry.

A native of New Jersey, Frank Kieran was raised in state homes after the car-crash deaths of his parents when he was 7, he said. After high school he enrolled in a Bible college in South Carolina, contemplating the ministry. Short of money, he moved to Boston to work and save up to continue his education.

Chance derailed his plans, though.

“Oftentimes our lives take different turns, and when it’s happening you can be confused and not understand it,” Kieran said. “Later on, you feel it was the hand of God.”

Kieran joined Raytheon as a courier and began attending Plymouth Congregational Church in Framingham, outside of Boston. He volunteered one week to help unload the church’s new pipe organ and met the builder, who invited him to his shop.

“I went just to see a pipe organ, and he handed me a screwdriver,” Kieran said, describing his shift from Bible college to organ rebuilding as a change in ministries. “It just seemed to all fall together for me to do that. I was just intrigued to be in a whole world that I never knew existed.”

There’s more to the trade, though, than simply picking up a screwdriver. The core of the instrument is simple--the first organs were devised in ancient Greece, using bellows to push air through pipes. But the evolution of the instrument added complexities.

Kieran said it used to take about seven years for a newcomer to develop the skill to restore an organ, and the ear to tune one. Now, with the increased use of electronics even in pipe organs--low-voltage charges open and shut valves--it takes 12 years to become adept.

“It’s a traditional business but also a changing business, ever evolving,” Kieran said. “There’s always something to learn and always a skill to refine.”

Kieran moved to Southern California in the late 1970s to work as a regional representative for an organ manufacturer before stepping out on his own about 15 years ago. His son has been working with him about eight years in the San Clemente-based business. His daughter used to work in the firm too.

Kieran likes to think that each instrument he and his son restore carries the whisper of their own voices, a deeply personal but invisible legacy.

“We feel like we leave a little bit of ourselves behind in that organ,” he said.

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Times staff writer David Kelly contributed to this story.