By Dan Church
Staff Writer
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Carl Shannon stopped counting his collection when it reached 100. "I only have room now for outdoor organs," he says.

NOCKAMIXON —Should J.S. Bach choose to concertize tonight on Allhallowmas with his musical brood, the late cantor of Leipzig and his children need look no farther than Carl Shannon's barn packed with parlor organs.

But Bach might prefer the mighty three-manual Masson and Hamlin reed organ, rising nearly two floors, inside Shannon's home. Neighbors had thought the previous owner, renowned for lonely concerts memorializing his late wife, left for Florida when the music suddenly stopped. His body was found some months later, at home beside the organ console.

Shannon has lots of organs and lots of stories. Perhaps too many of the former, he acknowledges.

"I lost track at 100," he says. "I've given up collecting, though. I have them in my chicken coop, I have them in my barn. I only have room now for outdoor organs."

Beyond tending his collection, Shannon holds a day job: director of pupil services at Upper Bucks County Area Vocational Technical School. For open houses at the school, on occasion he brings over a calliope.

As a seventh-grader in central New Jersey, he purchased his first organ. He had seen it before in a junk shop for $35. Saving money from his paper route, he purchased the organ a year later —when the price had dropped by $10.

His father, a Methodist minister, had made it a precondition that Shannon learn to play "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" before bringing the organ home.

The milkman, on his rounds, spotted the parlor organ and asked if Shannon could locate another for him.

"I got it, but never told him. I was hooked," Shannon recalls.

Shannon's father, now deceased, must have been an understanding man. Some years later when the minister answered a call from a parish just over the New York state line, his son's collection had swollen to 18 organs. Rather than pay movers $50 each, the family made 18 extra trips with the station wagon.

Meanwhile, Shannon's interest in music was developing and would include lessons at Westminster Choir College near Princeton. In recent years, he has worked as both organist and choir director at area churches, though at present he is taking a short sabbatical.

For a major at Lycoming College in Williamsport, though, Shannon selected psychology. By the time he met wife, Chris, also a psych major, he had sold much of his collection to pay for schooling, first there and later at Penn State.

Could she have known that some day, 6-inch flexible ductwork would snake up stairways to power the half-dozen organs in her home? "I used to play organ in the chapel, so she had a clue, but didn't have the full picture," her husband says.

In 1974, after graduation, he began rebuilding the collection —limited only by space in his one-room apartment. As his holdings grew, so did his involvement with other organ-lovers.

As with many collectors, indulging his obsession has required a measure of guile. Like the time when he invited friend Larry Benner on a fall foliage trip to New England.

When Benner, an administrator with the Quakertown schools, left from Shannon's home he was surprise to find himself heading northward in a Ryder rental truck. Shannon had sworn his own car had broken down suddenly.

"He's a piece of work," Benner groans in recollection. "And his wife was part of it."

Like an arrow, the truck sped down rain-slicked roads straight to someone's home.

"There he stopped and asked, 'Can you help me move an organ?' That passes as his sense of humor."

For years, Shannon has been an officer with the Reed Organ Society, which now has 900 members. For several days earlier this year, for instance, he hosted a delegation of musicians from Japan that included the court musician from the Imperial Palace. When one of the visitors needed an organ for a recital at St. James Chapel, Union Theological Seminary, he found a friend willing to transport the instrument in his limousine.

Some items in Shannon's collection were built to travel, like a 1920s calliope from an Ohio River boat, or a wheeled thingamabob that plays music (of sorts) on 56 tuned cowbells.

Among his prized possessions is a stationary parlor organ, though one with a larcenous history.

The original owner, Shannon learned from a grandson, had hauled organs from the many manufacturers in Washington, N.J., to the railroad depot. Besides the authorized pickups, the pair purloined miscellaneous organ parts, from which they assembled entire organs for resale.

Shannon's organ, found on the upper floor of an old barn, proudly bears the pilfering pair's logo —as well as that of the actual builder below through an oversight.

With a moratorium on organ collection, Shannon has turned his attention to the elaborately illustrated sheet music common to the period. The music is easier to store and should, he believes, present no problems as long as his wife exercises some restraint.

"She collects books," he reports. "I tell her again and again that they really take up too much room."

Sunday, October 31, 1999