Organ builders John Schechter (left) and Charlie Potter with Father Ty Tomson at Bremen St. Mary Church. 

Friends reunite to fix second organ, this one at Bremen church

By Tim Puet
Catholic Times Reporter

About a half-century ago, boyhood friends John Schechter and Charlie Potter decided to rebuild a small pipe organ inside the garage of Schechter’s family home in Monroe in southwest Ohio. 

It took two years of sporadic work before the project was completed in 1973. Nearly 50 years later, they have combined to rebuild a second organ – this one at Bremen St. Mary Church.

The opportunity for the two to duplicate their long-ago effort began in March with a conversation at the diocesan Rite of Election in Westerville St. Paul the Apostle Church between Schechter’s wife, Lisa, and Father Ty Tomson, pastor of Bremen St. Mary Church, whom she had known when he was parochial vicar at Columbus St. Andrew Church.

“I mentioned that John would be retiring from AEP (American Electric Power) in April, and John needed a project to get him out of the house,” Lisa said. “Father Ty said he had a pipe organ in need of repair that had been sitting silent in his church and jokingly asked if John knew anything about organs. ‘As a matter of fact, he does,’ I told him.”

The organ to which Father Tomson was referring was built in 1964 and had two previous owners. It was built for a church in the Philadelphia area, and then was sold to an organist who wanted to install it in his home. That installation never took place, so it was placed on the secondary market, and Father Tomson bought it.

“Father Ty contacted me in early May, and Charlie and I went to Bremen to look at the organ,” John Schechter said. “I don’t want to sound overconfident, but I felt pretty sure we could help because it was made by the Moller Company of Hagerstown, Maryland, which built church organs for more than a century.  

“The organ we rebuilt in Monroe was a Moller, and the technology was pretty similar, so we felt comfortable about the work.”

Schechter said he and Potter made the two-hour round trip to Bremen from Columbus about 75 times over the next six months and spent 15-25 hours a week on the restoration before completing it in late October. The instrument was dedicated on Sunday, Nov. 1. There will be a dedication concert at 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 22, the Feast of Christ the King and the feast day of St. Cecilia, patron of music, featuring Columbus St. Joseph Cathedral organist Nicole Simental.

“The biggest problem we had was with the organ’s wind system,” Schechter said. “It had structural issues which caused us to remove all the pipes from one of the chambers and replace the wind blower with a new model. If things had stayed as they were, the organ would have been far too noisy for a small church and would have distracted from an organ’s central purpose of adding beauty to worship.

“We went online and found a blower which came from Germany and was bought from a stateside supplier. Taking the organ apart meant we had to find a place to put the pipes and the other parts of the mechanism, but the pandemic provided a serendipitous answer to that problem. Since no activities were going on, we were able to commandeer the parish hall as a staging and storage area,” he said.

“We also put in a new electrical system for the organ, wiring about 2,000 electric connections. The pipe mechanism has about 750 pipes, and they were in pretty good shape. Deacon Jeff Carpenter is an engineer and was a big help in getting the organ’s digital control system programmed. We got to know parishioners and the parish staff very well, and we thank them for their forbearance,” Schechter said.

The organ sang its first note on Aug. 5, but it took until late October to get all the wiring done and complete the rebuilding. It will take the place of a Yamaha keyboard that had been the church’s only source of instrumental music.

Schechter said an incomplete attempt to install the two-manual, nine-rank organ had been made by Father Tomson; Father Thomas Buffer, pastor of Marion St. Mary and Cardington Sacred Hearts churches; and Shawn Kenney, director of the Jubilee Museum of Catholic artifacts in Columbus and organist at Columbus Holy Family Church. “They didn’t have enough time to finish their work, so it had been sitting voiceless for nearly two years” until Schechter and Potter did their restoration work, Schechter said.The first organ Schechter and Potter restored also was a used instrument. It was built as a church organ in 1926 and was purchased by a family in Cincinnati in the late 1950s before being brought to the Schechter home in Monroe, where it remained for a while before being sold to a buyer in California.

After rebuilding the organ, the friends lost touch. Schechter went to Sterling College in Kansas to study music, and Potter headed to Columbus to work for an organ maintenance company. 

After a semester at the Kansas school, Schechter decided he wanted to be an engineer and transferred to the University of Cincinnati, where he received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He was awarded a master’s degree in the same subject by Ohio State University. He worked for AEP in Fort Wayne and South Bend, Indiana for 19 years before being transferred in 2000 to Columbus, where he reconnected with his old friend.

Schechter never tried to rebuild another organ until this year but retained the knowledge of the instrument he picked up as a result of the rebuild and a summer job with John Brombaugh and Associates, an organ builder near his boyhood home. 

He said his interest in the organ probably stems from his being the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers. “I’m proud and grateful for my Presbyterian background,” he said. “After starting with AEP, I became a Methodist, then a Lutheran, then joined an Episcopal church in Fort Wayne, which I attended for 10 years and where I was a member of the vestry,” the congregation’s lay governing board.

“Lisa was a cradle Catholic, and we agreed to raise our children Catholic. There were a lot of roadblocks to my becoming Catholic, but as I learned more about the faith through asking about it and through Lisa’s example, those roadblocks came down one by one,” Schechter said.

He entered into full communion with the Catholic Church in 1998 in Fort Wayne. After coming to Columbus, he became involved in several Catholic ministries. He is a board member and past president of the Catholic Men’s Luncheon Club and a member of the planning team for the 2021 diocesan Catholic Men’s Conference, and has been co-chair of several previous conferences.

He also facilitates a weekly men’s Bible group at Columbus St. Andrew Church that now is meeting online; helped form the parish’s monthly men’s breakfast fellowship; is a past grand knight of Knights of Columbus Council 11275; has been involved in the That Man Is You! program at Columbus St. Agatha and St. Timothy churches; is both a lector and a lector trainer and coordinator; and served as chair of the diocesan music subcommission for about five years.

“Becoming a Catholic has totally changed my life,” he said. “The more I learn about the Church, the more I want to know about it. I attended the men’s conference for about five years, then got involved in the leadership team, and it’s been a great honor to help put the event together every year and see how it has affected the lives of thousands of Catholic men.”