Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 234, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1912 — HAS OWN ORGANIST [ARTICLE]

HAS OWN ORGANIST

Frick Employs Skilled Musician to Play for Him. Salary of $15,000 a Year Is Paid Archer Gibson for an Hour's Solo Each Morning on Millionaire's SIOO,OOO Instrument. New York. —Pity the hard lot of Archer Gibson. He gets $15,000 a year for fingering a SIOO,OOO organ an hour a day and rendering “Dearie’* between the classical thunderings and groanings of the costly pipea Also he gets a summer home —you’d wish

you owned it if you saw it —and a. nice, comfortable automobile. Archer works at the above-mentioned laborious task to delight the musical soul of Henry Clay Frick, multimillionaire Pittsburg steel magnate, whose summer home is at Pride’s crossing, near Beverly Farms, Mass. Every day at two p. m. the phone rings in the Gibson house and the organist motors over to the Frick mansion. There in the music hall, the silent, gruff money giant sits waiting for his dally music. While the nimble fingers of Organist Gibson rip out peal after peal of stuff that dead men wrote—the kind that no one could see any merit in while the composer was alive —Henry Clay Frick, the tips of his strong fingers joined, listens in. silence. After a particularly weird succession of crashes and thunders from the costly organ the millionaire’s countenance loses its former expression of wrapt Interest He leans forward uneasily as the music bursts in a glorious finishing flare. ' , “Play ’Dearie!"' he commands. Then the SIOO,OOO organ sends forth the strains of “that popular ballad, ladies and gentlemen,” strains that the common instalment, go-as-you-please house piano used to know before every began “doing it” Usually a few repetitions of the above ballad are enough to allow a fresh start on the previous heavy stuff. And so the hour of passes.