Page 43 - MLD Book

Of course that didn’t stick, as people were horrified at that. He scribbled a note saying that the parish allowed some to get away with obnoxious behavior. He, unbeknownst to the search committee or the congregation, had been in therapy for years, and had continued it when arriving in Louisville with Dr. Stan Frager of U of L. In November, he announced to me that he had made an appointment with Dr. Frager jointly with ME! Both Melvin and I were horrified at that. He forced me to go through with it, so on November 16, I faced Dr. Frager with Polk. I took notes and documented the whole thing later.(It can be found in my 2001 stack.) About five minutes into the session, Dr. F read my job description and was impressed at how much I was doing and said I was sort of on a CEO level with Polk, but that Polk didn’t want to admit that. Then he said he was a colleague of Melvin’s and had served on committees with him. So Polk started squirming and realized that he had made a mistake dragging me into see HIS shrink! Although I definitely won that battle, it only served to heighten the tension.
In other 2001 happenings, we were particularly saddened to lose the Rev. Al Kershaw, who had retired to Louisville with delightful wife Doris from Emmanuel Church in Boston. He was of the firm opinion that an inner city church needed to have something unique to attract people, so in Boston, he had instituted a Bach Cantata series every Sunday morning in conjunction with the liturgy. This practice continued after he left Boston and was still going strong the last I heard. So he was in full support of our using music to attract people to Calvary. Doris remained in Louisville until her death some years later, and I am still on close contact with their lovely daughter Ellen, who now lives in Puerto Rico.
2001 was also the year that Melvin decided to retire from the University of Louisville after 42 years of teaching there. He had garnered all sorts of awards for distinguished teaching, and was gratified to know that his organ students now held responsible positions all over the country, even stretching to Singapore, Ireland, and Germany. We had stored all of the Bach Society music, as well as his own organ music, in his organ studio and office, spilling out to another room in the school as well. One day the Dean came in and asked him what was he going to do with all that stuff?? I think we both thought we could leave it there, as the LBS was still in full operation and would be for another 10 years! But the Dean said it all had to go! One night we had Dottie and Norman Berry over for dinner and half jokingly we asked Norman if he thought our back yard would be big enough for another building to house all that. He went outside, measured, as architects do, and came back in and said to GO FOR IT! Before the evening was over, we had called Gottfried Reck and got the ball rolling for a pipe organ; John Campbell for construction ideas; and Norman agreed to design it! Wow, what a dinner party. It was all done by March 21 (Bach’s birthday!), 2003!!!!
2002
A year I mostly want to forget! Things got worse and worse with Polk. He would wait until nobody else was in the building and then literally back me up against the parish hall wall and start saying nasty things. Of course nobody was around to hear all that tripe that came out of his mouth about how I was ruining his life. Polk was a large man, and while I never really thought he would attack me up against a wall, I was certainly uncomfortable in that
behavior. Imagine such behavior today!
Polk had pretty well established the theory by now that everything was my fault, I was counseling people he should have been ministering to, I had all the power and he had none. To a certain extent, this was true, but only because he could not or would not win the trust, let alone the affection, of most parishioners. Somebody had to do it. The music program