Donated organ from funeral home won't be singing the blues at Judge Memorial Catholic High School

IC photo/Linda Petersen

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Dr. Shannon Roberts, Judge Memorial Catholic High School music director, shows senior Sarah Cramer the controls on the organ recently donated to the school by Neil O'Donnell Funeral Home.

SALT LAKE CITY – An electric organ that has provided soothing music at a local funeral home for more than 25 years will soon be given new life at Judge Memorial Catholic High School. Neil O’Donnell Funeral Home is being renovated by the new owners, Shawn Wiscombe and Matthew Medford. As part of the project, the organ in the chapel is being replaced by a baby grand piano.

Wanting to donate the organ, Wiscombe contacted Deacon George Reade, chancellor of the Diocese of Salt Lake City.  

“I didn’t want to just toss it out,” Wiscombe said. “I wanted somebody who really felt like they could use it.”

Not long after, he received a call from Judge Memorial saying the school would love to have the organ.

Wiscombe and Medford shared an amusing story about the organ that came about as they prepared to move it.

When Katie O’Donnell Nilson, daughter of the funeral home’s former owner Mike O’Donnell, first showed the two men the organ, she pointed out pipes on the wall that she said were a working part of it. It was only later, when Wiscombe climbed up to inspect the pipes before the renovation, that he discovered they were nothing more than carved wood.

The men had to tease O’Donnell Nilson about it next time they saw her and her father, Medford said.

“All this time we thought they worked,” Wiscombe said. “Well, she did, too.”

O’Donnell Nilson inspected the “pipes” herself before she was convinced they weren’t real, Medford said.

“‘My whole life, I thought those pipes were real,’’ she said, according to Medford. “Mike just looked at her and laughed. ‘What are you talking about? They’re just wood carving,’ he said.”

While the artificial pipes didn’t accompany the organ to Judge Memorial, the school’s music director Dr. Shannon Roberts is excited at the prospect of having the organ.

“That’s just absolutely wonderful,” said Roberts, who is hoping the organ, a Hammond, will have settings that will allow it to be used for jazz and pop performances.

The Hammond B-3 has a set of Leslie speakers with an internal set of rotating cones that make a vibrato sound, that is “fantastic for jazz and improvisation, for pop stuff,” he said. “In fact, bands in the ’60s, like Blood Sweat & Tears, used that a lot.”

Most of the school’s piano students should be able to easily play the organ, he said. “We are so grateful; it’s a vintage, wonderful instrument.”

While the organ went to Judge Memorial CHS, Medford and Wiscombe donated pews from the funeral home’s chapel to St. Joseph Catholic High School in Ogden.