One part of Jim Campbell's basement is the workshop where he's putting together a harpsichord for Southern Hills United Methodist Church in Lexington. It's this harpsichord and others that I wanted to know about when I visited Jim this spring. However, another part of the basement is given over to the most elaborate N gauge, model railroad I've ever seen. I'll start with the railroad.
N gauge trains are 1/160th of the size of the real thing, about a quarter of the size of the trains we played with as children. You need the eyes and hands of a watchmaker even to put the wheels on the 9-millimeter track.
The focus of the layout is an Appalachian town served by two railroads.†
The engines and their cars are fascinating, but the town's buildings drew my attention. By the track is a coaling station modeled after one that was used at Lebanon Junction, Ky. The passenger station is a replica of the one in Maysville. There are two churches; one is an Episcopal Church-formally, Jim is the Rev. James Campbell, retired, sort of. It's named St. Pelagius after an early church heretic. The other church, a white clapboard building, he created from photos of Bethel Christian Church in Indiana where his father was once pastor.
Last year he visited towns in Indiana and Ohio where he once lived and took photos of houses he intends to recreate. All the streets are named after places he lived until he was a teenager. Many of the buildings are from kits, and he modifies those. But a number of structures are models of real places that have to do with his childhood. He built those from scratch.
On a corner of the main street Jim pointed out a restaurant, very detailed. Then he lifted the top and showed the interior, with tables and chairs and pictures on the walls. Jim's hands always want to work. Some people play with trains and layouts. Jim creates them.
Upstairs we get down to the business of the harpsichords. In a room of its own is the instrument he built for himself. It's a beautiful thing just to look at, but when Jim sat down and played a little Bach it became that for which it was created. And there's a story behind it.
Jim built his first harpsichord in 1963 in California. "It was so much fun I decided I'd like to build another one some day." He gathered information and studied how to build a French, two-hand harpsichord. He built it in 1972 in Cincinnati and kept it until 1986 when he went to seminary to prepare for ordination.
"Once you've built an instrument like that, it sparks interest on the part of people and they say, won't you build me one? That's how I got into it."
Jim worked at various jobs until 1977 when he apprenticed himself to the piano technician's school to learn to tune pianos, and he supported his family by doing that and creating custom-built instruments on commission.†
His own harpsichord was the result of a job he did restoring an instrument built in 1770 in London. It was brought to this country by a man who had an estate on an island in the Ohio River at Parkersburg, W.Va. He was connected with Aaron Burr, and Burr's dreams of empire in what was then the west. The result was that he lost everything. Somehow the harpsichord made its way over the years to the Winters family in Dayton, Ohio, and then to an antique mall in Cincinnati. Its new owner asked Jim to restore it.†
Consulting with a restorer in Boston, Jim worked for several months rebuilding the harpsichord so it played. "I restored it completely and got it workingÖand it was quite a moving experience when I first began to get music out of it.
"You wonder about the person who made this, and how many people have worked on it. What kind of person was Baker Harris who built the instrument? I wonder who's played this? There's got to be a story there if you only knew what it was. It hadn't been played for at least a hundred years. Some of the action parts were inoperable and had been that way for a long time. I had to very carefully repair cracks in the soundboard and re-glue the bridge down in places and put tiny screws in where they wouldn't show because you want to keep the antique value of the instrument.
"Working with all the little pieces made me feel I was in touch with something from the past and when I actually got it strung and brought up to pitch and got it tuned so it had a voice again, it was quite something, very moving."
While he had the instrument in his shop he made measurements and drawings of it and recreated the instrument from scratch in 1995-96 in Pennsylvania where he was rector of a church. That is the harpsichord he has today.
It was the last one he had built until recently. "I've done some piano tuning, a skill I'd like to keep active so I don't lose it." Two people in Lexington have brought him harpsichords in the last year or two for refurbishing. Now he's building a two-manual Flemish harpsichord for the Methodist church. "What I used to do I'm doing again."
Jim has been a teacher, worked for Douglas Aircraft, was a technical writer, and editor of adult Sunday school materials before going into business for himself. As many of us did, for several years he resisted a call to ordained ministry. He graduated from Seabury-Western Seminary in Chicago and was ordained in the Diocese of Chicago.
Now retired, three days a week Jim is priest associate for pastoral care at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Lexington. He is also an adjunct teacher at Midway College in the School for Career Development. He has taught courses on world religion, and the Old and New Testaments.
"I just don't know how to retire. I don't think I'd be happy if I really did."