Vital Organs

by: Joan Hitz


Jo Ellen Elsener likes high places. At age 44, she scaled Kilimanjaro--19,341 feet. At age 4, she scaled a piano bench--20 inches. 

“I saw the keys ... I had to play.”

A love for song propelled Jo Ellen through a college music major, a stint at composing, and twenty-five years as a church organist. During one of those years, the climbing mood struck again. 

“How can I do this?” she asked the pipe organ repairman as they chatted in the church. 

“You become an apprentice,” he said.

So she did. Beginning as a runner for coffee and tools--three sugars, wouldja get me that red-handled screwdriver?--Jo Ellen “did” time pressing down keys while the masters tuned the grand instruments. 

One day, finally, she was invited to climb into an organ and learn the craft herself.

Twenty-eight years later and counting, she’s still at it. “When the company I worked for dissolved, I bought the equipment and set up shop,” she says.   

“Shop” is Elsener Organ Works, a massive warehouse in Deer Park crammed with machines, pipes, hardware, four cats, two rabbits, and a tiny field mouse named Fred. The cats, like Jo Ellen, are climbers. “Teeter” got his name by getting lost, then found, atop a skyscraping stack of boxes. One-inch tall Fred, rescued near a garage this December, seems plumply unconcerned to find himself safe and well-fed among a scattering of cats and organ pipes.       

“A pipe organ’s a simple thing,” says Jo Ellen, perched inside one, peeking through a cityscape of squared and rounded tubes. She waves her silver tuning stick like a wand, and continues: “The organist presses a key causing a cover below the pipe to open. A bellows underneath blows air up that particular pipe. And you get a tone.” 

The pipes come in groups of columns called ranks. Each rank makes a certain kind of sound to mimic instruments such as flutes, trombones, and trumpets.

And that’s it.

Jo Ellen exits the organ, then tickles a tune on the keyboard like she’s done it all her life. Oh ... yeah ... she has.  One down, on to the next. 

The life of a pipe organ installer-repairer-builder is complicated. Housed in churches across Long Island and the tri-state area, each organ presents unique quirky demands. Some organs are over a hundred years old. When one malfunctions, there aren’t any home improvement stores for replacement parts. Every broken piece must be analyzed, considered, custom-built in the shop using a clever mix of skill and imagination.

The hours are long. There’s no such thing as a “routine” day.

“Sometimes it’s so hard,” says Jo Ellen. “I think: just walk away, get a relaxing job ... rest.” 

But she smiles, envisioning dozens of organs across Long Island. Surely she’s seeing faces, too, of unknown people who file into churches every week to have hymns poured into their souls. 

“They have no idea,” she says. “They hear music, appreciate it, think about it maybe, but they’ve no idea what goes into making it possible.”

Or, who. 

Who wrestles open a small entry door, scrambles sideways in her trademark purple sweatshirt, scuttles up ladders to wooden perches like a Kilimanjaro climber, taps a pipe--down or up--tap tap tap--poised, listening, for the smoothing out of vibrating air that signifies a note in tune, a tube ready to deliver its mellow, sweet resonance into the beaded gaps of time that form a song.

“That’s why I keep doing it,” says Jo Ellen. “They’re like my babies. I know them. Each of these organs has secrets. You’ve got to know what they need to stay whole, to function purely.

“Few people do this work anymore. If I stop, that’s one less. Who’ll care for them? The music will suffer, the songs won’t sound rich. People will lose this experience ...”

So, Jo Ellen stays. Logging sixteen-hour days, she sweats it out at a job that both fulfills and consumes her. Travels from the furthest tip of Long Island to all the way upstate. Wields a hundred different decisions daily. Chomps dozens of Swiss cheese and lettuce sandwiches on the go. 

And commits herself to late nights tapping on dusty pipes in the dark holy air of empty churches.

These days, instead of playing the keyboard, Jo Ellen’s music is the unheralded labor she performs inside complex instruments that spin simple air molecules into magic. It’s all done for the ears, and hearts, of people she’ll never meet, songs she’ll never hear.

Because Jo Ellen, a natural-born climber, is by nature down-to-earth.

Tucked in his tank among the towering pipes at Elsener Organ Works, Long Island’s tiniest parishioner, Fred the rescued field mouse, would agree.

(first published April 27, 2011, in South Bay's Neighbor)