Dear Mr. Kolbinson:-

First of all, please excuse the pencil. I am sitting under a willow tree in my garden at the back of my home - scribbling in a pad on my knee, so in that position, I find a pencil handier than a pen for my particular brand of calligraphy. Secondly, I must ask you to pardon me for not replying sooner to your nice newsy letter of March 14th, but time seems to run as fast with me (even though I am retired from active work) that I find each day all too short for me to do all I should do, or wish to do.

Answering your first question - Mrs. Stoot and my daughter (a registered nurse) are well and it is our intention, so far, to remain in Canada I have my own home here in St. Hyacinthe since 1950 and have very few family ties left in England - so why move when I am comfortable here? I fear that a trip in the West would be a bit beyond my physical powers at present. I have to be careful in matters of excitement and extra exertion. that is why I have not been to Bermuda this Spring. Those who are caring for me feared not the plane trip but the exertion of getting to the airport in Montreal and the attendant excitement would be too much. All the same, I am not too much of an invalid. I play the reed organ every Sunday morning in our little Anglican Church as I have done for the past 30 years, only now I do not have to pump it with my feet. Since Xmas I have had a small suction motor installed so I can sit and play "till all is blue" without any ill effect to my "ticker." We have no choir but we do a full congregational service with Venite, Responses, Te Deum, Benedictus, intoned Creed, and three hymns, and I can now sail through it without a tremor of the heart - thanks to the little blower which I had made for me at the factory.

I was interested to read about your brother and to learn of his enthusiasm for the old Dutch organs but can readily understand his lack of enthusiasm for tracker action. I love to play on any old tracker organ provided that I have only one manual coupler - a Swell to Great. I have, in my early days in England made (and helped to make) slider chests and I know only too well (from a tuner's standpoint) what they will and what they will not do - in comparison with a modern chest. Pipes certainly speak better on a chest with key-grooves and slides, but oh, how the tuning suffers from robbing. The slides also can be made to work noiselessly and fast, but in this country there is always trouble due to the table shrinking (or swelling) because of its grain running crosswise to the grain of the bars. This will always be so whilst our Churches and Auditoriums are subjected to the usual types of steam-heated systems in winter. Sam and J.C. Casavant discovered this fact many years ago. That is why they made their chests with the grain running all one way from rack-boards to the bottom boards, they knew that the chest would always shrink and swell, year after year - so they decided to work with Dame Nature and __(illegible)__ her method by placing rollers for the chest (and its pipes) to come and go upon.

Regarding the wooden roller for the key contacts to which you referred, that was not Casavant, but the idea of yours truly. I still have in my office the first model which I made with my own hands and gave to them. It still bears my name and date of 1915. I understand your allusion to the difficulty of setting a trying plane. I was between 18 and 19 before I could rely upon sharpening and setting the 2-1/4" wide blade so that it would finally make a silky shaving of mahogany 2 ins. wide and a little less than the length of the table of the chest. We apprentices need to drape such long shavings over a nail in the wall as a proof of our skill in sharpening and setting a trying plane.

Finally, to return to the subject of tracker organs, a Lutheran Church in Cleveland Ohio has just bought and had installed a 4 manual organ of 40 stops - all tracker action. It has been built and installed by a German Firm and took four months to erect and finish in the Church. Friends of mine who have inspected it say that the pipe-work and slider-chests are well made but the stop-action pulls the slider through the medium of wire cables running over grooved pulleys. There is not even a single piston or combination pedal in the job. The organist can just manage to operate the organ by hand registration for a Lutheran Service, but if he is giving a recital, he has to have two helpers (one in front of each stop jamb) to operate the drawstop action for him. It is almost like a "Ripley believe it or not," but such are the lengths to which faddists and disciples of tracker action will go in this year of our Lord 1957. It is really a throw-back to about 1800 and the amazing thing to me is that it is an American congregation which is taken in by this German sample of organ-building. One of their own home-spun philosophers once said "There is one (a fool) born every minute" and I have an idea that this saying could be just as well applied to organ committees as to individuals.

Well, hoping you can decipher my scrawl and with kindest regards
I remain
Sincerely yours
Stephen Stoot