Word: organists
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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...
...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...
...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 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...
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...
...Organist Mayer is a slight, white-married little old man who trots about West Point as if he owned it, lovingly patting each cannon. He can still set the "battle-thunder" stop and play his rousing "military paraphrase" on the West Point Alma Mater, which is a whole musical war, including artillery, heavy bombers and bugles. But Mayer's own losing battle is with the hard facts of Government service. "I sometimes wonder," he reflects on his past, "how an artist came to spend his entire life on a military post...