The following tribute is based on “A Reminiscence”
offered by Thomas L. McCook at the John Thomas Widener, Jr. memorial concert on
February 4, 2005, at Grace United Methodist Church, Atlanta, Georgia.
Participants in the concert included Sue Goddard, Gregory Colson, Richard
Morris, Timothy Wissler, and David Fortner. The program included works by Cook,
Mozart, Gounod, Wagner, Moszkowski, Peeters, Stanley, Mendelssohn, Guilmant,
and Sullivan. The organ at Grace Church is a Schantz/Widener of four manuals
and 89 ranks.
John Thomas Widener, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia,
October 16, 1922, the only child of John Thomas Widener, a Baptist preacher and
Railway Express Agency employee, and Jesse Henry, one of the first female
graduates of what is now the State University of West Georgia in Carrollton. He
attended elementary school, middle school and tech high, where his favorite
classes were shop and drafting. In his youth, he built crystal radios and many
models of airplanes and ships from scratch and took them apart again—and
according to his cousins sometimes very unceremoniously. During and after high
school, he was a late night engineer for WSB radio, when it was in the Biltmore
Hotel, and knew all the personalities of that era. In the mid-1930s, he learned
to play brass instruments and joined the Atlanta Philharmonic conducted by
Enrico Leide. His trumpet stand-mate at one time was none other than Beverly
Wolff, who later became the leading mezzo-soprano for the New York City Opera
Co.
He entered Georgia Tech in early 1941 but left in 1942 to
enlist in the Army. As a member of the Signal Corps he never went overseas, but
non-commissioned officer Widener taught engineering drawing to commissioned
officers at St. Louis University. While in St. Louis, he happened to meet Mario
Salvador, the virtuoso organist of the Catholic Cathedral. This really began
his interest in pipe organs with the sound of a very large instrument in a
basilica with nine seconds reverberation.
After leaving the Army in 1946, he married his childhood
sweetheart, Mary Louise Browne, and they had two daughters, Janet and Patricia.
During this time, he was employed by AT&T and was involved in not only
laying out the route of their first long-line cables from Atlanta to
Jacksonville, Florida, but also in physically tromping through the south
Georgia swamps to install them.
John and his family had been longtime members of First
Baptist Church on Peachtree Street (where Ray Smathers was choir director for
so many years). When their old Pilcher organ began having action problems, Mr.
Smathers, knowing of John’s mechanical abilities and his interest in pipe
organs, asked John to see if he could do some repair work on it. Ray was so
impressed with the outcome he introduced John to Chester Raymond, who had a
well-known organ company in Princeton, New Jersey. Mr. Raymond offered John an
apprenticeship that involved a residency in Princeton. One of their maintenance
contracts was the large Skinner organ in the chapel of Princeton University.
Many afternoons John would see Albert Einstein walking alone on campus.
Because he was a quick learner, John returned to Atlanta in
the late 1940s as representative of Chester Raymond’s company. In 1950, he
decided to form his own business naming it Widener and Co., Ltd., with Mary as
the “and Co.” In the early years of the new business, living was difficult,
what with trying to get work and then doing all the work, raising two small
children, and literally living in a log cabin (with outhouse) on Osborne Road. From
1952–1954, he almost single handedly restored the 3-manual, 1873 Pilcher
organ at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Atlanta. Sadly, there are
no remnants of this landmark instrument, except for a couple of mono
recordings, as it was destroyed by a freak electrical fire in 1983.
But business progressed with John’s reputation for good
work, and he hired his first full-time employee, Breck Camp, who became his
partner when the company was incorporated in the early ’60s as Widener and
Company, Inc. In the late ’50s, John and Breck began the first restoration work
on the Möller organ in the Fox Theatre, spending many late hours in the pit
after the last show of the day. The cabling system they devised under the
console is the same type used today.
In the late 1940s, John had met Paul, Bruce, and John
Schantz, third generation principals in America’s oldest pipe organ building
family. This began a long association with the Schantz Organ Co. of Orrville,
Ohio, with installation and maintenance of their instruments just becoming
known in the South. To honor this long relationship, the entire management team
of Schantz Organ Company was present at John’s memorial concert.
The Atlanta area did not have as many pipe organs or the
number of large organs it has now, so when I joined the firm as a “go-fer” in
1967, maintenance and installation contracts stretched from Cape Hatteras to
Midland, Texas, to Miami, Florida. This meant lots of work in some very
interesting places, including the restoration of the 1916 organ with automatic
pneumatic player at Vizcaya, James Deering’s 75-room palazzo (now Dade County
Art Museum) in Miami. (Deering was the major stockholder of International
Harvester in the early years of the 20th century.)
John was a hard worker all his life. In 1984, while
recuperating from prostate surgery and still not even supposed to leave his
house, his work ethic would not let him be still. He had his living room
cleared and all the parts for a portable instrument he had designed brought to him,
and he assembled this one-manual, 4-stop organ right there.
Again, mainly because of John’s reputation, Widener and
Company was chosen to install and become the curator of the Fratelli Ruffatti
concert organ in Spivey Hall. This was the last new organ he completely
supervised and probably the crowning achievement of his career, even though he
oversaw maintenance contracts at such prestigious churches as the Catholic
Cathedral of Christ the King, the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Philip, the Greek
Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation, First Presbyterian, Peachtree Road
United Methodist, Northside Drive Baptist, and Grace United Methodist.
But his legacy is not limited to the instruments alone. He
designed many of the tools we use in our work. And he was a great teacher. In
the last 50 years, he trained several young organbuilders who now have their
own businesses or are in management at other major companies. And his
co-workers always knew where they stood with him. The anomaly that he did not
play the organ was balanced by the most remarkable pair of ears one could have
for listening and tuning.
John was a longtime member of the American Guild of
Organists and the American Institute of Organbuilders. Mary Widener passed away
from cancer in 1985, and in the last few years John suffered from chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease, probably brought on by many years of smoking,
but was in his shop every day until the last. It was from complications of this
disease that he passed away peacefully the evening of November 4, 2004.
