I met David in 1979 when he moved out to Southern California to install
the Reginald Foort Traveling Moeller organ, donated by J.B. Nethercutt,
in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, which was built with organ chambers
in the early 1930's but never had a pipe organ.  We became good friends,
and you cannot imagine two people more different in background and
upbringing.

I was from West Los Angeles, raised by Democrats, married.  He was from
Sherrard, Illinois, population 2000 or 2500 or so, upper Midwest, of
German descent, raised by Republicans, no interest in marriage.  None
of that, however, was the central part of our make-up.  What mattered
to us was the music, the theatre pipe organs, roll played instruments,
the old-time music, the people who had played it, the people who played
it now, and the servicing and restoration of these wonderful old
machines.  It is not that we never discussed our backgrounds; we did,
often to laugh about how the people of our respective backgrounds
looked askance at what we loved.

David's college degree work was actually electrical engineering.
He was equally at home working on theatre pipe organs and pneumatic
roll playing instruments, and deeply versed in solid state technology.
He was one of the earliest developers of, and advocate of, what we now
know as pipe organ solid state relays, with their circuit boards and
computer chips.

David was actually not in love with pipe organ shop work, but rightly
felt that his real forte was voicing organs and rehabilitating sick
organ pipes.  On my little Wurlitzer organ he also demonstrated the
ability to bring something from non-functional or awful-sounding to
quite good in a short period of time.

We discovered that we both had the hereditary trait of tonal memory,
often referred to informally as "perfect pitch".  It is best thought
of as photographic memory for sound, or as I facetiously called it,
"phonographic memory."  What people don't realize is that you cannot
only identify the pitch of a note you are hearing, but one you merely
recall in your mind's ear.

Once we both decided to test this.  As we had both grown up as kids
and teens listening to the same commercial major label theatre organ
recordings, we tried this on the LP album, "George Wright's Showtime."
The goal was, without hearing the record again, to identify the pitch
of each selection on both sides of the record.  We went into different
rooms and, of course, came back with identical answers.

Dave's tastes ran from exquisite classical organ and classical music to
loud, raucous band organs, calliopes and orchestrions, and 1920s dance
bands, all with equal pleasure and zest.  So did mine.

We would also get laughs out of some of the less than stellar
performances of various organists on both commonplace and obscure
theatre organ records: their uncorrected clams, departures from the
printed melody or harmony, or lapses in registration, phrasing, use of
the swell pedal, or other departures from musicianship and/or taste.
There was plenty of this to go around, and David found it all.

I was a substitute teacher contemplating life when we met.  I used to
say that I owed my success to him, because he was going to charge me so
much money for the rebuild of my baby Wurlitzer that he forced me to
find a way to make money.

It turned out that our rebuild was his last completed instrument.
David would work on our organ for a few days, then spend a few days
"working on the book."  I found out later that he was sometimes
spending those few days in bed.  David simply kept going, and if he
knew then what was wrong, he didn't tell me, and I don't think he told
anyone else.

When our organ was up and playing, David moved back to Illinois to
begin work on what would be the largest privately owned theatre organ
on the planet, in the huge building owned by Jasper Sanfilippo.  He
never lived to see it finished, succumbing to colon cancer in 1991.

In 1996 we moved our Wurlitzer organ to a larger studio.  Greg Rister,
of Duane Hanks and Associates, and I spent a year of Saturdays
reinstalling it, but made no changes in the ranks, stop layout, or
specifications.  It is still suffused with David's work.  There is a
picture of Dave on the wall, and hardly a day goes by that something
doesn't remind me of him at least once.  He was one of a kind.

Ken Rosen, Chatsworth, Calif.