Ruth E. Brunner died on November 6, 2003, after a two and one-half year illness with breast cancer. She was 45. From 1984 until her death, she worked with her husband Raymond J. Brunner at their organ business in Silver Spring, Pennsylvania. She was an active member of the Organ Historical Society for more than 20 years, as well as a member of the American Guild of Organists and the American Institute of Organ Builders.
Born in Middletown, she earned a bachelor’s degree in church music from Susquehanna University, studying organ with Susan Hegberg. While still in college, she began her involvement with old pipe organs by working at the Andover Organ Company as a summer job. After graduation in 1982, she worked for James R. McFarland in Millersville, Pennsylvania. An accomplished organist, Mrs. Brunner held church positions at First English Lutheran Church, Columbia, and St. Andrew United Church of Christ.
She married Ray Brunner in 1984, and subsequently worked with her husband building and restoring organs, as well as managing their service business and office tasks. She did restoration work on numerous organs, including four of the nine extant David Tannenberg organs, and other Pennsylvania German instruments built by George Krauss, Conrad Doll, John Wind, Charles E. and Charles F. Durner, and Samuel Bohler. Among the notable historic organs for which she did much of the restoration work are the Samuel Green chamber organ owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (on loan to Moravian College), the 1776 David Tannenberg positive organ at the Moravian Museum in Nazareth, and the circa 1804 Conrad Doll chamber organ at the Heritage Center Museum in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Ruth Brunner was one of the organizers of the 2003 OHS convention in South-Central Pennsylvania. [See the report on the convention by Malcolm Wechsler in this issue, pages 20–26.] At the convention she was honored with the OHS Distinguished Service Award, presently jointly to her and her husband Ray. In addition to her husband and her mother, she is survived by a son, two daughters, two sisters, and a brother.
