without smartphones and the Internet? Eric Doescher, whom I wrote about in the last post, reminded me of the summer of 1999 when Carl Crosier attended Dennis Keane’s workshop on Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in preparation for the Honolulu performances. His workshop was scheduled to be held in Kent, CT to be followed by a performance in Alice Tully Hall in New York City.

I, on the other hand, wanted to attend the national conference of the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians (ALCM) in Richmond, VA. The plan was that following my conference, I would meet Carl in Kent, CT and we would both travel together to New York City for the public concert.

As I recall, Carl was to stay in the dormitories at the Kent School during his workshop, but I was tasked with finding a hotel for him to stay in prior to the workshop. Alas, when Carl got off the train in Connecticut, he discovered that the hotel I had booked for him was many miles away from the school, in fact, he paid more than $100 for a taxi ride to get there! So he had to get word to me to go directly to New York after my conference and not bother going to Connecticut after all. But how to get the word to me? We did not have cell phones back then, so he could not pick up the phone to call me.

Worse yet, the dilemma was that Carl didn’t even know what hotel I was staying in! And so who does he call? Eric Doescher in Honolulu! Well, Eric didn’t know where I was staying either, but he happened to see an ad in a magazine for the ALCM conference in the office. After a few phone calls, he was able to get in touch with the conference planners.

Meanwhile I was enjoying my time at the conference (in fact, that’s where I met Karl Bachman, who then moved to Honolulu on my invitation). I especially enjoyed playing the Beckerath organ there at the University of Richmond, which you can read about by clicking here. There was one day where the conference had a field trip to Washington, DC for some sightseeing. I had just visited the Holocaust Museum and had returned to the bus, and someone called out: Is Katherine Crosier on this bus? Call Eric in Honolulu. This story is so unbelievable, even now, especially considering we had no cell phones and no ready access to the internet. It was amazing that Eric found me, and on a bus yet!

The other story Eric updated me on was the time we had to ship a lot of Ionian Arts music (our publishing company) to Seattle. I made mention of it in the earlier post, but Eric supplied me with more details. We had the audacity to take off on one of our many trips, leaving Eric with the task of shipping 20 cases of music to Seattle. (He had already helped to pack the boxes.) Here’s what Eric remembered: Before you left, you gave me some Ionian Arts mailing labels to put on the boxes.  But I,  feeling mischievous, went home and recreated the labels, carefully copying the typefaces, but changing the sender’s name to “Draconian Fahrts.”  The guy at the post office paid no attention, but I don’t ever remember hearing a comment from Crosiers thereafter.  I could often imagine Carl saying, “We are not amused.”

Dear Eric, dear memories.