Past is Prologue

I've been reading the fascinating Memoirs of a San Francisco Organ Builder by Louis Schoenstein. The book provides a very personal, albeit often non-chronological, look into the life of a very long lived bay area organ builder whose father, brother, and sons were also organ builders in a company which continues to bear their name (although not their ownership to the best of my knowledge). Although not a work of high literature, the book is still interesting from more than just an organ point of view. It is not often one is able to read a book published in 1977 which relates first hand recollections of the 1899 Naval celebrations on their return from the Philippines following the Spanish American war. Or recollections of the 1906 fires which ravaged San Francisco following the great earthquake (another due again sometime one must assume). Or of the author's boyhood memories of the tomb of a Unitarian preacher who helped convince civil war era 1860's San Francisco to side with the north. But just as importantly, it gives a no nonsense view of the pipe organ builder's trade.

Schoenstein's memoirs are divided into sections. The first part describes scores of organs which succumbed to the flames in 1906 and is something of a downer. The next deals with the mechanical workings of an orchestrion (a special interest of his father), and the section I am reading now is fascinating mainly in that it describes the many organs of the period that survived at least into the 1960's and possibly into the current day. My next project will be to actually see those organs that survived. More on this later hopefully.