GUITAR-MAKING: A FAMILY'S MUSICAL LABOR OF LOVE.

Byline: Jenifer Hanrahan Daily News Staff Writer

Tomas and Manuel Delgado see their father's presence in the sawdust, the fine film of exotic wood that swirls around their workbenches like billows in a folklorico dancer's skirt.

Swept upward by sturdy arms sanding, carried higher by a breeze through the open door, the haze of mahogany and ebony, rosewood and cypress clings to the cobwebs in ceiling corners too high to reach.

The powdery byproducts of a day's work - stirred up by nine hours of carving, cutting and shaping wood into guitars - settle like a veil on the shrine to the Virgen de Guadalupe.

Speckling their hair and eyelashes, the fresh sawdust mixes with the remains of 69 years of their family's labor, bits of the past overlooked by the swoosh of their grandfather's or father's broom at closing time.

Like their father before them, and their grandfather before him, Tomas, 28, and Manuel, 25, are luthiers - makers of guitars and guitarrons, vihuelas, bajo sextos, requintos and jarranas, the instruments that bring the music of Mexico to life.

When musicians drop by, infusing the shop with the sounds of mariachi and classical guitar, the brothers hear the echo of their father's voice:

Every piece of wood is different, even if it is from the same tree. To make a beautiful-sounding guitar, the wood must be worked by experienced hands.

Six days a week, Tomas and Manuel park across the street from a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant on Avenida Cesar Chavez, East Los Angeles' main thoroughfare choked with farmacias, zapaterias and carnicerias.

The sun-scorched sign over the display window on the stucco storefront reads simply ``Candelas Guitars,'' in black and beige block letters.

Candelario Delgado, the brothers' father, made the sign from sheet metal and lumber shortly after his father, Porfirio, and uncle, also named Candelario, opened the shop on the then-named Brooklyn Avenue in 1948.

The worn sign mirrors the shabby street in Boyle Heights, where a 99-cent store, a 98-cent store and an 89-cent store compete for business.

But the Delgados' reputation lures musicians and music-lovers alike from around the world.

The brothers build about 300 instruments a year. Costs range from a few hundred dollars for a beginner's design to $8,000 for custom-designed guitars inlaid with jewels.

Testimonials from famous clients hang on the walls: a snapshot of Los Lobos' Cesar Rojas playing a guitar in the showroom, a Guitar Player magazine interview with Jose Feliciano revealing that his two Candelas guitars are his ``pride and joy,'' a letter from the late premier classical guitarist Andres Segovia touting the younger Candelario Delgado as ``one of the best guitar makers in the country.''

From a metal file cabinet strewn with guitar strings and manila folders containing customer orders, Tomas takes out a scrapbook.

A customer from La Puente wrote that he was collecting cans and newspapers so he could afford to buy another Candelas.

``The language you use when describing your art is that of a humble servant of the wood,'' he wrote. ``I thank God for your art.''

A music teacher from Michigan, distraught after a car accident destroyed her Candelas, wondered if they could repair it.

``I am lost without her,'' the woman wrote. ``She is my life.''

Wrote a third man: ``The lightest touch brings clean, pure sounds. The deeper tones boom out like thunder. The guitar seems to be alive.''

The wood used to make a guitar should be of the best quality around. It should be aged at least 10 years in cool, dry air. Different combinations of wood produce different sounds. Brazilian rosewood is sturdy and durable and produces warm, deep tones. Cypress is brittle and lightweight and is best for a flamenco guitar.

The brothers' hands are calloused and rough like sandpaper, their knuckles nicked like their workbenches.

At lunchtime, Jesus Garibay, one of three employees, dumps raw meat for carne asada into an electric cooker.

Garibay has remained loyal to the shop for more than 30 years out of gratitude and friendship: Tomas and Manuel's great-uncle helped him buy his first house.

The newest worker, boxer Ruske Ramirez, has spent the last four months sanding wood eight hours a day, erasing the bumps and nicks of nature with a gritty cloth while perched on a milk crate, his back to a wall splattered with glue drippings.

A third helper, Jesus Alvarez, wearing his trademark folded-newspaper hat, touches a wire to a steel rod clamped to the workbench.

When the electricity makes the rod sizzle, he massages the wood along its length until the wood begins to curve for the guitar's arced sides.

Press too hard and the wood will crack. Move too slowly and the wood will burn. Alvarez then glues the sides to the top and bottom, wrapping twine around the body to seal it.

The aroma of simmering beef and hot sauce intermingles with the smell of heated wood and lacquer and baking tortillas from the tortilleria next door.

These are the smells of the brothers' childhood.

After school, they would come bounding into the shop, starched white shirts of their Catholic-school uniforms yanked out of their brown slacks.

On metal stools they would sit, chins on hands, elbows on knees, watching their father until he tossed them a piece of scrap wood.

They made boats, cars and miniature guitars, carved with their initials for their mother.

Manuel built his first guitar at age 12. Tomas finished his first guitar when he was 21.

It was an informal apprenticeship, a shrewd tactic by their father who wanted his sons to grow to love the wood.

``He knew that forcing the business on us wasn't going to work,'' Tomas said. ``It had to be something we wanted.''

Still, he was strict.

No one touched an instrument if he was working on it, and he always played newly built instruments first.

The brothers would hand over their guitars for inspection, watching anxiously as he slid his fingertips along every inch of the wood, peered down the neck, put his ear close to the face and tapped.

``It used to make me really nervous,'' Tomas said. ``He was the master.''

But their father didn't push when Tomas went to work at an auto-body shop and Manuel decided to become a police officer.

Their father, too, had considered another line of work. After a stint in the Army, he worked briefly in electronics.

Ultimately, they all were drawn back. Candelario used to say that making guitars was ``in his blood.'' The brothers agree: The shop is their home.

Because making guitars is more than a living, it's a calling. And in the shop is where they learned to become men.

``Every lesson my dad taught us had a hidden meaning,'' Tomas said.

When you start a guitar, always finish it. You have to keep the fire for the instrument all the way through. You have to try to keep making it better. You have to have a clear mind. If you are angry or frustrated, step away. Then come back.

Candelario Delgado was a big man, 6 feet, 4 inches, 220 pounds, who trained boxers for the Los Angeles Police Department's boxing team in a garage outfitted with punching bags and a mat around the corner from the shop.

When he had a cavity, he scraped out the decay with his knife made from sharpened pipe metal, packing his own filling with glue and dust from bone used for guitar bridges.

Never one for vacations, he kept working as the cancer that started in his colon spread to his liver.

``I can feel sick laying down just as easily as standing up,'' Tomas recalled him saying.

He went into the hospital one final time just after Thanksgiving. He died Dec. 18 at age 52.

``I lost my dad, my best friend, my mentor, my boss,'' Tomas said. ``Our dreams were the same. When I used to look up, I would see him. Now I see my brother.''

As Manuel's knife slices into the wood, a drop of sweat slips off his brow and is absorbed into the wood.

Tomas remembered the afternoon he and his brother, eager to please, spent hours cleaning the shop. They had just finished dusting and sweeping and stacking the wood when Candelario walked in and promptly went to work.

``Don't you notice?'' Tomas said.

``Notice what?'' Candelario said.

``Don't you notice I cleaned the whole shop?'' Tomas said.

``That must mean that you didn't want to build a guitar,'' he said. ``That must mean you had nothing else to do.''

The other workers laughed. Now, Tomas laughs about it, too, but the lesson stuck.

``If we keep the floor too clean, and one of the guitars were to fall, then it would break,'' Tomas said. ``If we're a mess and there's shavings on the floor, that means we're working hard. If we're too clean and too neat, that means we're not working.''

Before sealing the guitar, sign the inside. Write a message that can only be seen if the guitar is destroyed. Write your feelings. Wish the musician good luck. Then let the guitar sit for several days before delivering it to the customer. This will allow the wood to settle into new shape. Some guitars take several hours of playing before the sounds come out. The more a guitar is played, the better it sounds.

Manuel sits hunched on a metal stool, cradling a classical guitar.

The buffed spruce reflects his palm as his fingers play ``Asturias'' and ``Romance.''

He closes his eyes to listen, feeling the vibrations of the wood against his chest when Marcus McMillan, 18, gingerly pushes the door open, jingling its dusty bells.

``Hola, amigo,'' Manuel says, as he steps out from behind his workbench, wipes his hands on a crusty apron and greets his friend with a firm, double-fisted handshake.

McMillan discovered Candelas guitars when he and Manuel were neighbors. In the evenings, they jammed on Manuel's front porch. McMillan played blues. Manuel introduced him to classical.

When Manuel hands over the guitar, McMillan holds it as gently as if it were a newborn. He turns the guitar over, admiring the alternating dark- and light-colored wood inlay that outlines its curves and the multicolored mosaic burst that encirles the sound hole.

``It's beautiful, man, absolutely beautiful,'' McMillan says.

Each guitar has a unique design around the sound hole, called the rosette. To make the rosette, dye tiny logs of lemon tree many colors, then bundle and glue the strips. When the glue dries, slice the logs into chips as thin as When the chips are side by side, they should create a continuous pattern of stripes or zigzags or waves. Some musicians want the guitar to catch the eye, to reflect light like a pearl. For a flashy look, cut and file abalone shells into small pieces. Fit the pieces together so that they are a sheet of shimmering silver, blue, pink and white.

No one is quite sure of the whereabouts of the first Candelas guitar, because Porfirio and the elder Candelario Delgado promptly sold it.

But it certainly was a cruder design, made from pine and ``cat gut'' strings.

Back then, making guitars wasn't so much about art as about earning a living.

Yellowing photographs and magazine clippings taped to the shop's walls tell the story.

One of the earliest, from 1932, shows serious-looking young men in ties and collared shirts clutching a guitar painted black with white squiggles.

When Porfirio and Candelario were young boys in Torreon, Mexico, their parents died, leaving them orphans. A well-off family took in Candelario, older than Porfirio by two years, and encouraged him to learn music and math. A poor family that already had many children took in Porfirio and made him do most of the chores.

But like many families in Mexico rich and poor, Porfirio's adoptive parents also thought music was important. They bought a violin and a guitar and let the children take lessons; Porfirio was the only one of the brood who loved to play. His adoptive parents, realizing he was learning faster than their own children, took away the instruments and quickly sent him back to work.

When Candelario was 18, he grew angry at the way his brother, 16, was being treated. Candelario came quietly to Porfirio's window one night and they ran away together to Juarez, where they found work doing construction.

Urged by his brother, Porfirio made a guitar to replace the one taken away from him.

Candelario, whose outgoing personality and schooling made him a natural businessman, decided he and Porfirio should open a guitar shop. It was in that same shop in Juarez where Porfirio later baptized his only son and named him after his older brother.

Later, the brothers left their family in Mexico and moved to Los Angeles, opening the shop in Boyle Heights and sleeping on benches in the back of the store until they made enough money to rent a house and send for their families.

Like his namesake, the younger Candelario was also well-suited for business. Gregarious and strong-willed, he cultivated clients and the shop's reputation.

When he had sons of his own, he began to teach them the secrets of the trade.

Sometimes people want to know the secret to guitar-making. The secret is work. Give up your life. Start sweating. Start cutting yourself.

Customers and friends stop by throughout the day. They linger, sometimes for hours, drawn by the good-natured joking, the sounds and smells of the wood and something magical they cannot put into words.

``I spend three or four hours a day in here,'' said Leo Curie, owner of the bridal shop two doors down. ``Every time I come here, it relaxes me.''

A mustachioed mariachi sets his guitar on the counter top. His belly, straining against a white dress shirt, presses against the cracked glass.

``Where's your father?'' he asks. ``How's your grandfather?''

Several times a day, customers ask similar questions.

Porfirio Delgado retired a few years ago, already in his 80s.

Most of the time, Manuel and Tomas don't tell customers their father died.

Because as their knives slice into the wood, cutting with the flow of the grain so the edge is smooth, they feel their father's presence, guiding their movements.

``When I need to make a move - in making a guitar or in business or in my life - I listen to my conscience,'' Tomas said. ``I think that's my dad talking to me. I ask him what I should do.''

They sense their father's spirit, leaping and swirling in the air with the notes that spring from their guitars.

``There's a spirit alive in here, an energy,'' Tomas said. ``It's his spirit. The way I see it, my father is alive, in me and my brother, and in the shop.''

CAPTION(S):

7 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Viva la musica!

(2--Color) All portions of the guitars constructed at Candelas Guitars are handmade, including the decorative inlay and the frets.

(3--Color) The Candelas guitar shop is a fixture on Avenida Cesar Chavez in East Los Angeles, where it was first established in 1948.

(4--Color) Manuel, left, and Tomas Delgado carry on the guitar-making tradition of their father and grandfather.

(5--Color) Tomas, left, and Manuel Delgado build about 300 instruments a year. Costs range from a few hundred dollars for a beginner's design to $8,000 for a custom-designed guitar inlaid with jewels.

(6--Color) Photos of artists who use the Candelas' guitars include the late premier classical guitarist, Andres Segovia, top left.

(7--Color) Three generations of Delgados, clockwise from left: Manuel Delgado, Candelario Delgado, Porfirio Delgado and Tomas Delgado.

Tom Mendoza/Daily News