Post date: Aug 10, 2014 3:30:25 PM
21 July 1964
I just returned from an interesting weekend in Calabar, one of the oldest towns in Nigeria or West Africa. I traveled in the rain, over mud roads, on a Honda. Boy, was that a mess! Not impossible, but uncomfortable and quite slow. No mishaps.
I went for the purpose of seeing a pipe organ, which I have decided to repair for my vacation project in August. It is in the Duke Town Presbyterian Church. It was made in England about 1929, a period when pipe organs were BAD, but for some unknown reason this one is very good, tho small. It has mechanical action and a hand bellows. Getting boys to blow the organ is a problem. The pastor thinks they can afford an electric blower. I tuned part of the organ on Saturday and the congregation noticed it right away. They should have, it was really horrible before. The other part of the organ cannot be tuned until it is repaired. When one key is pressed, two or three surrounding notes all sound simultaneously! I hope it can be fixed. None of the bass pipes play as some idiot has cut all 45 of the lead tubes which control those notes, and besides all the glue has dried out of the joints in the pipes. There are three other pipe organs in Calabar. I saw one of them at Hope Waddell school. It is a horrible theatre-type organ, which has recently undergone a bad job of electrification. The man responsible is on leave now; but I will see him about some tonal revision in September. Should be possible to help that one just by cutting off a few pipes.
Thank you, Dad, for the draft card. This one should finish my business with the draft board. I'll be too old after I get out of the Kennedy Army. [I wasn’t. My draft board drafted an active PCV. I wrote a letter of protest to the local newspaper, which the editor published in full within an editorial—omitting my name.]
After I get out, if I ever do, I would like to go to Germany. I can take a Goethe Institute course in the language, while living in a local home. If that doesn't teach me the language [it did], l’m hopeless. Then I‘d like to get a job in a pipe organ factory for about four months to learn the trade language [I did, for a year]. After all this preparation I want to take a course in pipe organ building, for 15 weeks, at the technische hochschule just outside Stuttgart [I did not]. The course will cost about $50 plus room and board (which I can get cheap thru the school) and is the best course for organ-building in the world. That will leave me with one year at UoW to finish a Master's Degree [I did, after registering for one course in the German short story—they changed the requirements for the degree] if I still feel the need. I should have enough money saved up from Uncle Sam to pay for the jaunt in Germany.
After I get back to the States I would like to go into the organ-building business. I hear rumor that Dave Dahl has skipped out to Germany. He is an excellent organist. Glenn White is an acoustical engineer, now working for the City of Seattle in that capacity. If I become a trained master orgelbauer [organ builder], we will be a formidable company. Never thought I would go into business, did you? well neither did I.
My plans for Christmas vacation are changing with the troubles in the Congo [and south Sudan]. I will probably not be able to get a visa to go to Stanleyville, so will take a leisurely trip thru Cameroon to Bangui in Central African Republic, then north from there thru northern Cameroon (where the women still put discs in their lips) to Fort Lamy and Lake Chad, returning thru Northern Nigeria. That should give me a fair view of equatorial Africa and a good view of the savanna. Then if I travel to Europe via ship I will see (at least the coast) the rest of West Africa, which I gather is just like Nigeria, except more corrupt.
The native market and most local stores are open from dawn to dark, but the European stores open 8-12 and 2-4. Pretty soft working hours, and very annoying when it takes three hours of driving to get to the town, only to find the stores have closed for lunch and will only open for two hours more. Especially bad are the garages, which take an hour or so to get started an a repair job. But the bush mechanics are so bad that I would rather repair anything myself than take it to one of those butchers.
A new man came to Aro advertising himself as a radio, electronic, and watch mechanic. Mick asked him what electronic meant. Hah! These boys are pros at the five minute repairs—it works for five minutes, then is worse than before.