April 23, 2010
Emily Wolf
Corpus Christi’s organist has served parishes for 65 years
By MARY ANN HUGHES (Message staff writer)
Her service to the Catholic Church has spanned 65 years, and as Emily Wolf prepares to retire as the organist at Corpus Christi Church she remembers the good times and the hard times.
And the funny times too.
She started taking piano lessons at the end of her third grade year. The next year, in the fourth grade, she met a new piano teacher who “thought I was the dumbest person on this earth.”
Emily stayed with the piano lessons through her eighth grade year, and then switched to the organ. “She fussed at me,” Emily remembers of the teacher who told her, “I worked so hard with you, and now you are going to the organ.”
But playing the organ was Emily’s dream. “That’s all I wanted to do.”
She was 14 years old when she began playing at the 9 a.m. Sunday Mass at St. Boniface Church on Evansville’s westside. “I practiced a lot,” she said. “I practiced an hour a day.”
Even as a young girl she wasn’t nervous. “I never have been nervous,” she said. “I just take things as they come.”
Her eyes light up and she smiles broadly as she remembers a moment long ago when she deviated - a bit - from the traditional church music.
She was a teenager, and it was a Saturday afternoon. She was practicing for Sunday’s Mass when she had a thought. “I wondered how the ‘Boogie Woogie’ would sound on this organ.”
She decided to find out, and she was in the middle of the song when assistant pastor Father Adolph Egloff walked into the church.
“I switched over to a hymn,” she remembers.
When she went home she told her mom, “I did something bad today. I played a boogie woogie and Father Egloff walked in.”
It took 50 years for Father Egloff to mention that afternoon. “At our fiftieth grade school class reunion, he came and he had to tell that to the kids.
“He said to me, ‘You don’t remember that, do you?’
“I said, ‘How could I forget!’”
Emily’s work as a music minister eased a bit when she married Danny Wolf, and became the mother of nine children, eight daughters and one son. The Wolfs were married nearly 60 years when he passed away two years ago.
During those years, she continued to play the organ at her parish. When Corpus Christi Church was established in 1955, “my neighbor said I would play the organ there. He put me on the spot.”
It was all volunteer until 1994. “Now I get a small stipend for every Mass that I do.”
As a parish organist she was there as the Church was transformed in the post-Vatican II years. “We had all new music. People didn’t really like it at first, and they would say, ‘When are you going to have a Latin Mass?’”
At first there wasn’t a lot of music to choose from. “We had to take what we could get. We didn’t have that much music.”
It’s a different experience to celebrate Mass as an organist instead of being in a pew. Over the years she has come to believe “he who sings once prays twice. I figure it’s the same with playing the organ.”
Diane Sammet is the music director at Corpus Christi, and she’s known Emily since the 1970s. “Emily is cool,” she said. “She’s a lot of fun, and she’s got a real, real, real good sense of humor.”
What impresses Diane the most about Emily is her dedication. “I’m a choir director, and you know how many excuses you hear. But she never missed.”
She laughed as she said, “Emily would be pregnant one week and be back the next. She was that dedicated. You are not going to find anyone like that anymore.”
Over the years, “if something came up with the church and she had plans, she would change her plans. The church came first. She was always that way.
“They will never find anyone that dependable. She always put the church before anything.”
For years, Emily has been the first one in church for the Sunday morning Mass, and she’s usually the last to leave. She says she’s a little tearful at the thought of retiring but says, “It’s time. I’m 80 years old.
“I loved it,” she said of her work. “Other things didn’t get in my way. If I had plans but I needed to be there, I changed my plans.” The Mass always took precedence.
Years ago before air conditioning was installed at Corpus Christi “the choir didn’t sing in the summer. During the year, they would say, ‘We are tired of being at the 9 o’clock Mass,’ but in the summer you’d go over there and they’d all be at the 9 o’clock Mass.”
She laughs as she predicts, “I know I’ll be at the same Mass.
“I’ve already told them I’ll help out if they need me. This decision hasn’t been easy but the time has come.”