Serious fire damage to the pipe organ at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church has a number of city residents and former residents mourning its loss.

They’re remembering the effort made across borders and throughout the community to get the organ to the Strickland Street church.

“Total devastation,” Bill Miller said from his B.C. home this morning of his reaction to learning of the March 29 fire.

Miller was living in Whitehorse and was the church’s organist in the 1980s.

He led the effort to bring the organ up from Pennsylvania after seeing the 53-year-old instrument was for sale by St. James Lutheran Church in Altoona, Penn. He contacted the church, which agreed to sell it for $1.

The organ was later dedicated to the memory of Miller and Dianne Morgan’s (formally Miller) daughter, Cheryl, who was killed in a vehicle collision in October 1980. That was the same year the church bought the organ and was working on its installation.

As Miller explained, though he had never played a pipe organ, he had always enjoyed the music of the organ, an instrument where the pipes are designed to represent an orchestra.

While the organ itself cost next to nothing, Miller said the church had to hire professionals to disassemble it.

As it turned out, he said, it was $5,000 well-spent.

Cables were cut in exactly the right place, pipes were taken out properly and, as luck would have it, the original blueprints for the organ were found during that process. That made things easier when it was reassembled in Whitehorse.

Efforts to fundraise and get the organ to Whitehorse were soon in full swing.

“It took off quite quick,” Morgan told the Star.

As it was highlighted in a book published for the church’s 50th anniversary in 2011:

“Len Imrie and Jose Ariza flew to Montreal on tickets donated by a travel agency. Once in Altoona, 843 individual pipes had to be packed on a truck which the two men had picked up in Montreal for delivery to Whitehorse for a local businessman.

As Miller recalled today, Norcan was planning to buy a truck. It offered the use of the vehicle to go from Montreal down to Pennsylvania and back to Whitehorse.

Meanwhile, the work was becoming an international effort as well.

As it was noted in Trinity’s anniversary book: “Fortunately, our former pastor, Paul Manrodt, was a pastor in nearby Bernville, Pennsylvania, and came to our help.

“His congregation donated old coats, blankets and foam rubber for packing, and Pastor Manrodt helped with the packing of the organ, giving many hours of volunteer labour.”

American sentiments toward Canada were extremely high at that time, Miller noted, recalling the Canadian involvement in sheltering American hostages in Iran at the time.

A number of businesses on the U.S. side of the border – gas stations, hotels, restaurants – provided their services for free along the route to the drivers bringing the organ to its new Whitehorse home.

After the organ was packed, Imrie and Ariza travelled for two weeks and more than 4,000 miles – including through two major snowstorms – back to Whitehorse.

Many members of the church’s congregation helped unpack the instrument.

“In order to accommodate the organ, a three-metre extension to the church building had to be constructed behind the altar,” it was noted in the church’s anniversary book.

“All of the labour and most of the materials were donated, not only by members of the congregation, but also by non-members and local businesses.”

Miller noted everything from additional storage space for the wooden pipes (to help ensure they wouldn’t be impacted by the change in temperature) to work on the cables to volunteer labour in setting it up all proved useful.

Everybody in Whitehorse knew about it, many wanting to be part of the effort, Morgan said.

Evenings and weekends were spent installing and tuning the organ over a series of many weeks. The church ordered books on refurbishing and tuning, with Miller and others learning about its care as they went.

As Miller also recalled, he took out ads in local newspapers looking for anyone who knew something about pipe organs who wanted to help out.

A member of the Catholic church, a trapper, even an inmate at the Whitehorse Correctional Centre (WCC) came on board, responding to the ad. Miller had to work with the WCC to have the prisoner come help.

“It just shows you never know who’s around,” Miller said.

He recalled another night when he was working on the organ alone, found he needed an extra hand and managed to flag down an RCMP officer who was driving by to help.

“All you have to do is ask,” he said.

Then came the dedication of the organ.

“The first major concert and dedication of the organ took place on May 18, 1981, when the famous organist Dr. Paul Manz, who was Cantor at the Mount Olive Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, Minn., came to Whitehorse to give a concert of Bach’s and Handel’s music,” it was noted, before highlighting church records showing donations to the $7,416 for the organ fund as of June 1980.

Once again, generosity came through. Manz volunteered to do the dedication at no charge, and the managers of the Westmark Whitehorse Hotel provided Manz a room free of charge during his four-day stay.

A donation of one hour of long distance phone service (at a time when long distance charges from the Yukon to Pennsylvania were much more expensive) from Northwestel Inc. meant that parishioners in Pennsylvania also got to take in the sounds of the dedication in the organ’s new home.

“The very extensive co-operation between members which was necessary to bring a project of this magnitude to completion, was very beneficial in many other ways,” it’s noted in the church’s anniversary book.

“It brought us closer together and strengthened our commitment to our congregation.”

As Miller noted, it was an effort that took a lot of organizing and work.

When it was in, Miller was able to finally play the instrument he had enjoyed listening to for years.

“It was a joy to play,” he said.

While he has since retired and moved away from the Yukon, he said, he still visited every few years, making sure he got to the church to play the organ.

Amid all the work to bring the instrument to Whitehorse, tragedy struck when 16-year-old Cheryl, a student at F.H. Collins Secondary School, was killed in a traffic collision.

As her mother recalled, she had been secretly learning to play the organ to surprise her dad.

The organ was dedicated in Cheryl’s memory. The students and staff from her high school raised money to establish a fund in her memory to assist with any remaining costs for the organ’s installation and ongoing maintenance.

Miller noted many gave to the fund in Cheryl’s memory, donations that contributed to its care.

The organ would continue to be a major part of the church’s music over the years, with Miller playing at many services and events.

Over the years, Miller said, visitors travelling from the Lower 48 to Alaska would stop by the church to see the organ, particularly if they had a connection to it.

One such visit saw parishioners from the Pennsylvania church share a story about a former organist there who had a habit of taking a little bit of snuff before a service.

As he’d start to play, he’d inevitably sneeze, then wipe it up with his hanky. Though the story was years old by that time, members of the church decided to give the ivories a good clean after hearing it.

Learning about the fire last week, Miller said it was devastating. That organ, he said, is a part of him.

It would seem others feel connected to the organ as well, with many mourning its loss and reconjuring their own memories of its arrival in comments on social media.

While it’s unknown how the church will deal with the loss, Miller said he’d like to see it look at the possibility of purchasing a new organ consol, as that was the piece that was damaged by the fire. It’s his understanding, he said, that the pipes weren’t significantly damaged.

He acknowledged, though, that technology has likely changed, and that it may not be easy to find an organ consol for the pipes.