Organ Day in Fort Worth - The Biggest Cahoona (organ-wise) / Coincidence #1, The Organist

This guy is the biggest organ that Garland built and installed.  After playing on the manuals and pretending to be real organ players we spent time crawling up into the guts of the thing to see how it was all put together.  Really an amazing sight...very intricate and modern, with lots of computers and electronics behind the scenes.  And huge.  One ladder went up a full forty feet, the height of some of the wooden pipes producing the lowest frequencies.
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I cannot be in a place like this without thinking about something that happened a while ago, when I was a teenager.  My family in Beaumont attended the Trinity United Methodist Church on Harrison Street, near the Longfellow Apartments where we lived.  In the fall of 1976 the church decided to broadcast the Sunday morning service on KFDM, Channel 6.  They installed a microwave unit in the belfry to throw the signal over to the station a mile or so away, converted a closet to house the switcher, and positioned three broadcast cameras in the sanctuary - camera 1 was in the back balcony that could capture what was going on in the front of the sanctuary; camera 2 was in another balcony above and behind the pulpit, smack dab in the middle of the organ pipes and directly across from the balcony where the organ and choir were; and camera 3 was a remote (not manned by a camera guy) off to the side for another view of the pulpit.

I volunteered to be part of the effort and was very fortunate to get camera 2 as my assignment.  During the service it was my job to capture what went on below when the acolytes did their thing, when communion was being served, etc., and also to capture the organist at the right time, panning across the choir while they sang.  Always loved organ music, and to be in the middle of all those pipes while everything was going on was awesome.  And I liked the organist's style - deliberate, determined, and not shy about cranking up the volume when it was time.  His name was David, a gentleman in his late 30's or early 40's at the time, I would guess.

But that's not the story.  In 2002 I got a job with an outfit in Greenway Plaza here in Houston, and was assigned a place in a cubicle farm on the fourth floor of one of the buildings in the area.  Guess who ended up in the very cubicle next to me...David the organist from Beaumont!  We'd both gone through life and changes in circumstance and careers, and here we were in a different city - Houston no less - next door to each other.  David had retired after 41 years playing the organ and moved on to other endeavors, eventually landing at the same agency where I'd found a job that spring.

See pic below of yours truly, age 18:

   
Small world, many would say...