Murray Albert Burfeind, 89, died December 16 in Red Wing, Minnesota. Born May 8, 1931, in Belvidere Township, rural Lake City, Minnesota, he grew up on the family farm. As a young boy he learned to play piano. By age 12 he started to play the pipe organ, and soon began playing for various churches. Burfeind graduated from Lake City High School in 1949, and went on to study at Bethany College, Mankato, Minnesota, and Concordia College, St. Paul, Minnesota. He graduated as a parochial school teacher and taught elementary school in Fond du Lac and Appleton, Wisconsin. At Fond du Lac, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church was buying a new organ, and as the church organist he served on the selection committee. After visiting Wicks Organ Company in Highland, Illinois, and recommending purchase of a pipe organ from that firm, he found his lifelong interest in organ construction. After one last year of teaching, he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to apprentice for United Organ Company, representative for Wicks in that region. He always referred to that day at the organ factory as the single day that changed his life.
In Milwaukee, he met and married his wife of 60 plus years, Flora Olm, a teacher and later a newspaper reporter and librarian. Together they followed the lure of building and designing new pipe organs, completing installations, and providing service and tuning to organs in churches throughout the country with the Murray Burfeind Pipe Organ Company. From Milwaukee they moved first to Louisville, Kentucky, where their two oldest sons, Philip and Andrew, were born. They relocated to Arlington Heights, Illinois, to serve churches in Illinois and Indiana. Their third son, Steven, and daughter, Ann, were born while in Illinois.
After 15 years of travel and nights away from home, the family relocated to Minnesota near his family, living in the country near Goodhue, where Burfeind had his shop and continued his organ work, completing installations from Pierce, Nebraska, to California and Maine, in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and nearby areas.
Burfeind achieved his most satisfying goal of designing and completing the reinstallation of the Kilgen pipe organ at the Sheldon Theatre in Red Wing. He installed bird calls, truck horns, and bass drums in the upper reaches of the theatre above the proscenium arch.
His last installation was the Burfeind designed and built organ at St. Norbert College in DePere, Wisconsin. That organ featured Subczyk and Meyer pipes built to order in Milwaukee. Originally it was installed in the La Crosse home of Betty Mittlestadt, and later purchased and moved to St. Norbert College in 2012 and 2013.
Murray Albert Burfeind is survived by his wife Flora of rural Goodhue. He is also survived by his children Philip (Kimberly) of New Brighton, Minnesota; Andrew (Jacqueline) of St. Paul, Minnesota; Steven (Brenda) of Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and the Rev. Ann Burfeind (Florian) of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; as well as six grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. A celebration of his life will be held at a later date.
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