Do you remember Blue Light Specials at K-Mart? Here’s a description to refresh your memory:

Kmart® is a discount department store best known for its iconic blue light special sales gimmick, consisting of surprise announcements when price-cuts were offered for a limited time on specific merchandise. At the beginning of each random sales blitz, the phrase “Attention Kmart® shoppers…” heard over the store’s loudspeaker generally preceded a proclamation of the bargain item. Concurrently, a flashing blue siren light, similar to the one atop many police cars, illuminated the area. Customers then flocked to the designated department to take advantage of the sale. During the height of its popularity, the campaign was often successful in eliciting a shopping frenzy, especially since the discount typically lasts no more than 15 minutes.

The talk of “Blue Light Specials” reminded me that I’ve never written about the “Crosier Specials…”

Ever since 2013, the Hawaii Chapter American Guild of Organists has offered a “Crosier Special,” a scholarship fund that was set up almost ten years ago (!) at a party held at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu to celebrate my nearly thirty-five years as organist. You can go back to my posts for that day to read all about it:

• 04/16 | Those little black marks! Some people have asked that I share with you a poem by…
• 04/15 | When in our music . . . About ten days ago, a crazy thought occurred to me, so…
• 04/14 | Not another boring musical bio It was only because of pressure exerted by my husband,…
• 04/14 | It was Kathy Day! Today was the day that the Lutheran Church of Honolulu…

(My apologies that some of the photos have “disappeared” … I’m working on retrieving them!)

BIll Potter tells me that over $2,500 was raised at my “retirement” celebration, which was given to the AGO for scholarships. At first, I wasn’t sure why, if people were going to give money, that the church would just give it away to the AGO in my honor. My thought was, “Now I’m going to have to work for that money?”

But, as it turned out, this fund has been like my “discretionary” fund, a fund which I’ve used for special projects and for students with particular needs. For example, the Hawaii Chapter AGO’s regular scholarship fund, called the Donald L. “Don” Conover Fund, offers $1200 worth of scholarship assistance for organ students with the premise that the fund be used for HALF of the cost of the organ lessons, with the parents or students footing the other half, over a period of three years. However, even the balance due from this generous assistance is too much for some people to pay, and so I’ve used the Crosier Special fund to pay for the other half of the lesson costs.

I also dipped into this fund to help pay for the cost of moving an electronic organ to Kauai for practice purposes. When I started teaching on Kauai more than two years ago, there was only one electronic organ on the island with a full pedalboard, but that church made it prohibitively expensive for anyone to practice there.

Here’s what I wrote in December 2019:

I had arranged for the shipment of an old Baldwin organ to Kauai—the organ had been used as a practice instrument for Joshua, Daniel and Naomi Yuen-Schat from the time the youngest, Naomi, was in first grade. Now Naomi is a sophomore in college and their mom was eager to have the organ out of the house to have more space. In a way, this organ is like the Prodigal Son: it was originally purchased by AGO member, Fred Merchant, when he lived on Kauai. Now it has returned to The Garden Island, where it will be a lot more convenient for Hank Curtis to practice before the Rosales arrives.

Well, today I raided the “Crosier Special” Fund again, when I brought my student, Daniel Welch, over from Kauai to Oahu for him to experience the thrill and great satisfaction in playing a tracker organ. Here are a few pictures of him seated at the Beckerath organ, and then in my apartment playing my little 2-rank tracker. Daniel treated me to a dim sum lunch, and then I brought out Haagen-Dazs vanilla swiss almond ice cream with nectarines and blueberries for dessert.