Page 25 - MLD Book

near the end! I still have David’s cue marked in my very well worn and tattered copy of the Widor. David went on to become a priest and is still Dean of the Cathedral in New Orleans, and married to his second wife. Could his mandate to a reluctant Karen have been a harbinger of the divorce that would follow years later?
A natural insert at this point would be many stories about weddings, like the one where a dog was the ring bearer, or the time the bride got cold feet before the ceremony and left Ben and me to tell the arriving guests that there was to be no wedding. In the course of what was to be 48 years as staff organist at Calvary, I played over 300 weddings. They are really not very enjoyable affairs, for the most part, as there are too many people with stubborn wills wanting too many different things. Mothers of the bride are usually the biggest challenges. However, that again would be another book. Someday I may get to the next one being Weddings and Funerals! But for now, lets move on to 1988, with a quick glance backwards to remember that Calvary was host in 1987 to a memorable rendition of all six of the Bach Brandenburg Concertos, a tribute to the ongoing music center that Calvary had once again become.
1988
The biggest “social event” for many years was the funeral of Barry Bingham, patriarch of the Bingham newspaper dynasty, on August 17,1988. Barry’s parents had been married at Calvary, and so it was fitting that the funeral be held there, although Mary Bingham at that time had migrated to St. James Pewee Valley, as that church promised her that the 1928 prayer book service would be celebrated there. Ben was on vacation and out of town for all the myriads of preparation that took place, leaving it all to me and the wonderful John Richards, Barry’s longtime assistant and also a member of Calvary. In my inevitable log of phone calls I always kept, I notice that over 50 calls a day were received, ranging from the highest of society to the poorest and all points in between. I especially remember an arrogant assistant of Governor John Y Brown who called ordering me to mark a front seat for him. I told her that he would have to sit with everyone else, that no one was more
important than the next one. I created quite a stir by that stand, but I held firm!
Mary knew that Calvary couldn’t hold all the mourners, even though the church seats 601, so she donated and arranged for a sound system to be installed in the Parish Hall and the funeral was piped in to that area as well. It served us for a number of years after that, too. Dignitaries came from everywhere. The Bach Society and Calvary Choir sang Brahms, I played everything possible, Ben came back in time to preside at the service that was mostly scriptureandsixhymns,1928style. Over700werethere,andCalvarycameoutwellinthe process.
In reading a notation in my 1988 diary, I noticed the appointment time for Eddie the Pool Man. So this might be a good time to mention our swimming pool that we inherited when we moved to Hanford in 1974. It mostly was a really nice thing to have when the girls were growing up, and even nicer to know that our girls could entertain here instead of running off somewhere else. We were also able to host a lot of choir and LBS swimming parties, important events for the socialization of both those organizations. The mechanisms of the pool were, however, something less than to be desired. The pool must have been installed when the house was built, for certainly the parts that kept it running seemed that old and that uncooperative. The pool was kept running by a very temperamental motor with a jar that had to be hand filled, with a reluctant top, and stuff was filtered off the top of the water by an evil little device called a skimmer. We spent literally hours kneeling down