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Organ Surgery By KIERNAN MALETSKY On his business cards, Jerry Deck calls himself the Piano Doctor. He does not call himself the Piano Doctor Frankenstein, nor certainly the Organ Doctor Frankenstein. So when Marilyn McCarty brought him the remains of an old reed organ — shoeboxes full of wood scraps, felt and leather innards, Tupperware containing mistreated metal reeds and “a wobbly wooden box” of a frame — the smart move probably would have been to let the dead lie. But Deck didn’t do that, because it’s hardly in the spirit of his motto: “I’ll figure it out.” Rather than turn her away, he said, “Yeah. I can do this. Piece of cake.” Left alone with the wreckage, Deck began to wonder whether he’d spoken too soon. Pieces were missing. Water and mice had eaten away at many of those still left. Hornets had called the organ home, leaving nests in the frame. What he didn’t think, however, was, “I can’t fix this.” He has unquestioning confidence in his ability to solve the problem in front of him. Deck works alone now, though he hasn’t always done so, and the change is welcome. He claims he can go days without speaking a single word. But he doesn’t work in silence. Bach, Pink Floyd, The White Stripes — all kinds of music regularly pipe through his home stereo system at a thundering decibel level. Music is as entrenched in Deck’s personal life as it is in his profession of tuning and repairing pianos during the day and restoring them at night. “My favorite music to listen to is something I’ve never heard before,” Deck said. Maybe that’s why he entered the uncharted territory of restoring McCarty’s organ in October of 2006. The huge task of resurrecting the instrument was broken into two basic categories: the work to be done on the outside and the surgical reconstruction required within the organ. Deck worked on them simultaneously. For each of the organ’s keys, there are two corresponding metal reeds. The size difference separating the reeds from one another is miniscule even when they’re in good condition, and the abuse of time left him with a jumbled heap of indiscernible metal strips. It took until June or July before Deck saw the first major breakthrough in his work; he finally got the reeds in the correct order and bent to the angle that would allow them to sound again. It had taken about eight months, but he was beginning to piece together the impossible puzzle. Ken Zahringer, who has worked on reed organs for 15 years, knows exactly what Deck went through. “You have to be on really good terms with tedium, with doing one little thing with very high precision, repeated 60 times or so,” Zahringer said.
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