Word: organisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Generations of U.S. generals and lesser officers can still hear the thunder of that West Point organ-the thunder and sweetness that greeted them on their first tour of the Point and each Sunday in chapel. Braided veterans come back again and again to hear it and to talk to the thunderer himself. He is Organist and Choirmaster Frederick C. (for Christian) Mayer, one of West Point's major institutions. For 43 years, regardless of what changing taste in church music might dictate, Mayer chose such rousing processionals as Onward, Christian Soldiers and America, the Beautiful so that...
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...
...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 of his organ-but last week the blow fell: on the recommendation of the Army, President Eisenhower announced in Denver that Mayer's retirement would become effective...
...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...