Page 3 - MLD Book

months, I returned often to the pew at Calvary, ever more believing that it was bound to happen. But how? Calvary already had an organist – in fact, they had had FIVE in the five years since Ruth Ewing had retired after 30 some years on the job.
Besides, I had a job I loved playing the organ and directing a choir in Lexington at the Church of the Good Shepherd. I had taken this job when Melvin and I were married in August of 1961 (he was Music Director at the Church of the Ascension in Frankfort after returning in 1960 from two years in Germany.) Maria was born in December, 1962, and the trips to Louisville with Melvin when I could commune with my Calvary dream ceased.
More months went by. Our lives settled into a rather frantic routine, with Melvin getting more and more organ students, expanding his teaching to two full days in Louisville. Thursdays were especially hectic, for we had only one car and I had to be in Lexington by 4 pm for the first of two choir rehearsals. There were occasions when he would come careening in at 3 pm after being in a traffic jam, and I would shove Maria at him and rush off to Lexington, shouting diaper and feeding instructions from the car window as I took off. Sundays were just as adventuresome except Melvin could walk to his church, while I either had to bundle up Maria and take her with me, or we got a babysitter if they were available, which was not always the case. (Babysitter adventures will be worthy of a separate epistle someday – suffice to say that the most outstanding one was 80 year old Viola Wells, who ate all our ice cream until I put a plastic mouse in the container! She also went to sleep in the house once and left Maria outside in a baby buggy by the edge of the Kentucky River that bordered on our rented house!).
By 1964, Melvin and I had to make a decision. He finally went to Dean Robert Whitney during the spring semester and said that there were too many organ students now to fit into two days a week. Whitney responded by offering him a full time job beginning in the fall of
1964 – if he would teach beginning theory too. Melvin said he could, would, and did! The reclining blue chair in which he reluctantly graded theory papers still sits in our present living room, anointed now by more that one dog pee accident.
Of course, this necessitated an eventual move to Louisville, and made my continuing to commute to Good Shepherd all the way in Lexington not a viable option. Via the organists’ grapevine, Melvin had heard that the church of my dreams, Calvary Episcopal Church, was dissatisfied with their present organist, Hazel Ferguson. Melvin was never shy, especially when it came to singing my praises as an accomplished musician (how lucky I was to have a husband like that – we were never rivals but always true colleagues), and so one day he marched into the Reverend
Wilfred Waterhouse’s office and declared that he should hire his wife, “the best organist anywhere!” Mr. Waterhouse (he never wanted to be called FATHER, as he thought that was