The Phantum Harmonium

11-20-2021
D Vautier

A Moving Musical Experience (from the campfiles)

So in early 1964 the Salesian Western Province wanted its DBC clerics to come west for the summer and help work in the various boys camps because they were really short of people the year before.  So several of us made the trip.  My close friend Larry Mullaly and I wind up working at Camp St. Frances on the coast near Watsonville.  We had only the two of us to organize, plan and execute the entire eight week camp entertainment program.  Larry had a lot of stage skills and I had my guitar but otherwise there was no music.  But… I found out there was a harmonium.

The harmonium was a small portable manually operated parlor organ that was quite popular a hundred years ago or so, and in fact it became a long forgotten yet a fascinating item in American history.  It consisted of a keyboard with air driven reeds.  The air was generated by two bellows powered by your feet.  It usually could fold up into a large box and was easily transportable.  There are very few of them around today because an electronic keyboard can do much more with much less.

My first encounter with the fabled harmonium can be best described as frightening.  When I was at DBC, I worked at camp Don Bosco for two years.  We always had Mass for the kids each morning and our biggest problem was trying to keep the boys from fooling around during Mass, shooting spit wads, pushing, shoving, telling jokes between pews, and all the other more interesting things that young 11 and 12 year old boys like to do when they are shut up together and completely bored with some funny looking guy in a cape up front doing funny things.  Therefore music and singing during mass was very essential. The camp master, knowing of my limited musical background, assigned me the difficult privilege of setting up a music program for Mass.

“But...but” I protested, “We don’t have an organ?  We need some kind of accompaniment for the kids.”

“What do you need accompaniment for?”  He said. “We don’t have the kind of money for an organ.  This is just a camp so just sing loud and have the kids sing loud… oh, and by the way, if you’re really interested in musical accompaniment, there is an old music thing down in the back shed.  If you want to, maybe you can fix it up and make it work.”

“A what?” I said.

“You know, one of those little portable pump organs jobs.  I’m sure you can fix it, that is, if you really need accompaniment for mass.  Besides you have a reputation for being able to fix things I hear.” he said laconically.

To this barrage of pure unadulterated logic I could offer absolutely no response.  So I dutifully went down to the shed and began searching through the piles of discarded boxes, memorabilia, broken bikes, old tires, rat excrement and stacks of files and old papers.  I suddenly gasped, for there before me, standing out like the Ark-of-the-covenant, was an ordinary looking brown box with a keyboard on top of it.  All it needed was two golden rams’ heads on top.  There it was, a real live harmonium, a true piece of history, an echo of sound from the past, played by millions of our forbears, now nothing but a sad heap of discarded refuse.  I could see that it was crying out for a tender loving hand.

The reeds were all corroded, the vacuum box was inconveniently full of staples, pencil shavings and various unknown deposits of animal protein, the billows leaked, one billow strap was missing, and it was also missing several fairly necessary reeds including middle “C” and “G”.  Undaunted, I set to work.  I cleaned all the reads in alcohol sanded them and patched the billows.  I moved the reeds up a half tone to get a few complete scales. I didn’t really need all of them—just C, F and G major, and maybe E and A minor if we tried some gregorian. 

The harmonium finally worked.  I learned the pumping and the slight differences in key touch, and in a few short hours I got to be one flaming hot-ass first class harmonium player, ready for big time.  Bring it on, babe.

When Mass started the next morning I was in the back of the chapel banging out a wild hymn or two.  But I played with such gusto that during the middle of the first song the harmonium began creeping forward.  I had forgotten to block the wheels and my pumping action was pushing the instrument away from me and down the middle aisle of the chapel.  Somehow I finished the first hymn but I looked like something out of a Marx Brothers’ movie, hopping along on one leg singing away, while the other foot was pumping furiously on the one remaining billow, with hands glued to the keyboard trying to play.  All the while this runaway harmonium was relentlessly moving down the center aisle of the chapel.  As I moved passed each pew in turn, the kids burst out into uncontrollable laughter at this new and very interesting form of religion.  Hey, Mass wasn’t so bad after all they thought, especially when you had a real live hop-along organ player/singer.  Larry was in front leading and was doing all he could to contain the panda-harmonium.

The camp master definitely took a different view of things and we had no more music moving in chapel.  But we had lots of moving music after that.