Word: mayer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week at 72, Organist Mayer found himself the center of a major ruckus that involved socialites and Senators, a fair share of Army brass and two Presidents of the U.S. The crux of the matter: Mayer is past the compulsory retirement age for civil servants, and he is not ready to retire...
Executive Order. The Ohio-born or ganist and his organ arrived at West Point simultaneously in 1911. The instrument was a three-manual affair that cost $11,500. It was a fine organ for its day, but before long, Fritz Mayer began to hanker for new tone colors and started a drive to get new stops. Families of old grads began to donate memorial stops-a double open diapason here, a contra bombard there, a tuba sonora, a tromba batalla or a vox angelica...
...expanding organ had more stops than the console could handle easily, and a new, four-manual console was installed. The chapel organ became one of West Point's points of interest. Organist Mayer's baby kept on growing. Thousands of pipes were crowded into the organ lofts, and the three basement rooms became filled with the complex wind and control machinery, e.g., five electric motors, coupler relays, etc. Besides the ordinary stops, Mayer acquired such theatrical effects as a cymbal crash, a tympani roll, a drum stroke. In 1950, a wealthy alumnus gave Mayer a second new console...
When Fritz Mayer reached his retirement age two years ago, his magnificent instrument (current value: $350,000) was still incomplete: the highly complicated piston controls-for quick changing of the 757 stop keys-were not hooked up. Under the energetic leadership of Manhattan's Mrs. Courtney Campbell, veteran of Washington politics, Mayer's friends went to work, lobbied through Congress and right up to the White House. Result: President Truman's Executive Order 10,334, exempting Mayer from compulsory retirement "in the public interest . . . for an indefinite period." Organist Mayer went right on supervising the completion...
Military Paraphrase. So far, production has started on only a few of the prize "adjustable combinations,"* with their 34,000 contact points. Bugs still had to be ironed out. Organist Mayer and his friends, who had formed the Committee for Retention of Present Organist Until Completion of the Cadet Chapel Organ, pleaded that only under his guidance could the job be finished. President Eisenhower, who remembers Mayer from his own days at the Point (and whose son John sang in Mayer's cadet choir), ordered that the organist be kept on as a paid consultant...