It happened last week, when Mark Wong came to play the service for the Lutheran Church of Honolulu, and there seemed to be a cipher (a note which sounds without being pushed down).

A further investigation by Roy Helms, a member of the choir who once worked with organbuilder Paul Fritts, resulted in the discovery of rat feces on the tracker.

Another way to put it was that he found a “turd,” from Middle English toord, tord, from Old English tord (“piece of dung, excrement, filth”), from Proto-Germanic *turdą (“manure, mud”), from Proto-Indo-European *der- (“to split, flay”).

Ewww!

When he opened the case, he indeed found more droppings on the floor. However, aside from inside the floor of the organ, there were no more droppings in the Swell, Great or Pedal divisions. Guess the rat didn’t want to climb that high! However, the creature was nowhere to be seen.

The question was how the critter got inside the organ—and the only opening he could think of was the Swell pedal. So now when you open the organ, you’ll find this:

All of this reminded me of a similar story at St. Andrew’s Cathedral years ago, and I called Betsy McCreary to verify my memories. She remembers a cat giving birth to kittens, but couldn’t remember the details except it was in the organ console. I then remembered John telling us it was the opening in the swell pedals where the cat found a place to make a nest!

Betsy did remember, however, the memorable Easter Day (1986) that President Ronald Reagan attended the service at St. Andrew’s along with a lot of Secret Service men and dogs (!). At one point in the service, her husband John heard a rustling noise. He opened the bench slowly and he was horrified to see a rat! He then picked up a mallet to strike it (because that day, there apparently was a timpanist playing) but didn’t realize that there were pedal organ stops drawn, and there was a horrible CRASH and noise as his foot came down on the pedals. Unfortunately, he missed, but Betsy still remembers the embarrassment caused by the ensuing noise that happened in front of the Reagans.

Look what I found on the internet—a story of a rat AND a cat in the organ at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland. “Another of the cathedral’s more intriguing inhabitants are the mummified remains of a cat and rat. According to church lore, the cat chased the rat into a pipe of an organ and both became stuck. James Joyce used both cat and rat as a simile in Finnegan’s Wake when he described someone as being “…As stuck as that cat to that mouse in that tube of that Christchurch organ…” The cat is chasing the rat in perpetuity behind glass in the crypt of the church.”

Just today, though, we received a letter from Pastor Jeff Lilley, with the following statement: All in-person activities held on the LCH campus including worship, bible study, meetings, performances, rehearsals, tutoring, and music lessons will be suspended through April 5, 2020 (Palm Sunday).

I had already conveyed the message to the church office that I was suspending organ lessons for the foreseeable future.

That means the Beckerath organ won’t be played for some time, and the rat has it all to himself!