Say Hello to the New Parish Hall Organ

Friends, peace be with you.

If you walk into the parish hall, you may notice something new sitting in one of the corners. It is a 1972 Wicks practice pipe organ. I was able to purchase it in a recent auction for Iowa Wesleyan University. We were hoping to get an organ for the chapel when we celebrate First Saturday Mass and, at first, we thought this would work there. I put a very low bid ($25) on the website and contacted an organ tuning and building company I trust out of Chicago called Bogue Services. Aaron, one of the technicians with whom I worked in Bellevue, called me and told me he had seen similar organs sell for anywhere from $5000-$8000. In the following days, I kept an eye on it to see how much it would go for. Normally, I would have convened a meeting with the finance council to get advice for how much we would spend but this all went rather quickly and I didn’t think anyone on the council would have particular expertise when it comes to the price of organs. Therefore, I stuck with the experts and decided not to spend more than $5000. In the end, I was able to acquire it for $2500 and I got Aaron and his brother to move the organ from Mount Pleasant to Cedar Rapids, clean it up, and tune it. They are working on designing a possible moveable platform under it in case we’d want to move it closer to the chapel for First Saturday. Its footprint and height make it impossible to to actually move into the chapel but it could sit in the hallway outside the parish hall with the doors open between there and the chapel to lead us in song.

In its current place, it will be useful for choir practice and as a warm-up site for musicians before Masses. Currently, the musicians have to climb the stairs next to my apartment to a second-floor room with a keyboard in it. My hope is that, in the not too distant future, this room will become part of my living space so that a guest or a summer seminarian would have a place to watch TV or read a book that is separate from the living room. Currently, having a guest is quite challenging for me because there isn’t much privacy up there.

I could also see it being used for the CGS Christmas pageant instead of having it in the church. Connor Miller, our liturgist, may use it to help future organists learn how to play. And I would love to see it used by local musicians to have concerts or recitals in our social hall. I intend to invite the Mt. Mercy choir to come and do a concert in our social hall using it. The hope is to bless it as part of our upcoming parish picnic.

One request I have is for everyone, not just the kids, to refrain from playing around with it. It may be tempting to touch the pipes or even turn it on and start to play it but it is a fairly sensitive instrument. Moving the pipes affects their tuning. There are also all kinds of small wires that affect how much air goes where and, if they break or get pulled out, we have to call Chicago to come fix them. Connor Miller is in charge of that little machine and gets to determine who plays it. If you want to learn how to play it, he may even be willing to do so.