The following article about Conservatory Professor Gladys Christensen ’49 was featured in the Wheaton College Alumni Magazine in June 1987 and is transcribed below.

An Instrument of Service
by Sue Miller ’82

I can remember as a very young child going up and trying to touch an organ, and the organist, of course, shooed me away very quickly,” recalls Gladys Christensen ’49, professor of music at the Wheaton Conservatory of Music.

In spite of her initial brief encounter with the instrument, Gladys went on to pursue organ study in high school and at Wheaton, eventually earning a master of music degree from Northwestern University. She returned to Wheaton in 1954 for a two-year part-time teaching position. At the end of that time, the Conservatory asked her to join the faculty full time.

After 33 years of teaching organ at Wheaton, Gladys knows what works with students. “I think a good teacher is one who inspires a student to do very well and inspires in him or her a love of the great organ literature, as well as the experience of church service playing.” She enjoys teaching a student who will search out material and research the background of the literature. Her goal is to teach students to be independent of her so they can select a piece of music, register it and play it well. “That is the most exciting kind of teaching because I am bringing out something in that student which doesn’t come easily. It’s a developmental process.”

In addition to teaching solo performance, Gladys has the responsibility of instructing her students in the art of church service playing. “Accompanying is the major part of the organist’s work, rather than solo playing…The accompanimental role is a very tricky one because you are dealing with the individuality of the soloist or the choir. You must enhance and support without overpowering.” Teaching this type of sensitivity is difficult for two reasons: There is no choir, soloist or congregation with which to practice, and Gladys can seldom observe her students on location since service.

Church accompaniment has been a vital part of Gladys’ musical career for over 30 years. During the past school year she has been interim organist for several churches. To enjoy service playing, an organist must develop a philosophy of ministry because “what the organist enjoys playing the most is not what he or she is called upon to do in church. Sometimes you feel a little resistant to the number of hours you have to put into preparing music that is somebody else’s choice. You are imprisoned by another’s taste. I was taught that the church organist is very self-effacing…Flexibility and adaptability are two qualities of a good church organist.”

In spite of the inherent difficulties in service playing, Gladys affirms there is satisfaction in knowing that her playing is an inspiration to people in t worship service. “To lead in worship is a privilege. It’s a two-way street: we worship together.”

Last spring, Gladys took a sabbatical in Europe in order to practice organ technique and to study the literature relevant to the instrument for which it was written. She studied with Lionel Rogg, professor of organ at the Conservatoire de Musique in Geneva, Switzerland. Gladys wanted to become proficient in a technique for the tracker or mechanical action organ. Tracker organs, as opposed to electro-pneumatic organs, were once the only way organs were built, and they have regained the attention in organists in recent years. “With a mechanical action instrument, the organist is actually controlling the speech of the pipe…You do feel immediacy with the tracker organ, which makes it a more responsive action to the artist.”

Another benefit of Professor Christensen’s sabbatical was the opportunity to become acquainted with the French and German instruments for which the literature was composed. “The instruments in their own surrounding reveal the literature,” explains Gladys. When her students are studying, for instance, a piece written in Germany 200 years ago, Gladys can embellish the lesson with her own experience of having played the original (or restored) organ in the composer’s actual church–or one close to it. “More than for any other instrument, the literature of the organ is directly tied to the instrument of the time and country for which it was composed.”

The dual role of scholar and teacher is what keeps Professor Christensen fresh in the classroom. Her joy in the instrument spreads to all those around her.

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Gladys Christensen died on November 8, 2011. She served as professor of organ and harpsichord in Wheaton’s Conservatory of Music from 1954 to 1988. Gladys was very well known in the community and was very active in the American Guild of Organists having memberships with the Chicago, North Shore, and Fox Valley Chapters over many years. She was a graduate of the Wheaton College Class of 1949, and Professor of Music Emerita at Wheaton College at the time of her death. During her teaching years at Wheaton, she also taught Church Music, Music Theory, Organ Literature and Pedagogy. She attended many masterclasses throughout the USA and Europe, and studied organ with many of the great teachers of her time. She was well-loved and well-respected throughout many musical circles in Chicagoland. Gladys had asked that memorial gifts be made to the Lester Wheeler Groom Organ Recital Endowment which funds guest organ concerts, as well as student scholarships at Wheaton College. She established the Foundation years ago with the intention that it will continue to support organ music at Wheaton.

We know the names of the great. But there are those who, as influential as any statesman, author or inventor, step in and out of history. Amazingly, their identity remains totally unknown.

One such figure appears in the Bible, Daniel 3:16-28. King Nebuchadnezzar did not appreciate the fact that his captives, “certain Jews,” Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego, refused to worship the golden image he had provided, so he ordered the boys bound and thrown into a blazing furnace. Looking into the pit, the king saw another figure. “Lo, I see four men loose,” he told his confused counselors, “walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” The king concluded that God had sent an angel to protect the three Jewish boys.

One day in the mountains of Tibet missionaries Bob Ekvall and Ed Carlson (both graduates of Wheaton College) were riding their horses. Fully aware that larger packs of marauders might overtake a smaller groups, both carried rifles and knew how to use them. Though Ekvall never killed a man, he stated that he had shot the horses out from under a few. As Carlson and Ekvall rode up a remote pass, they saw in the distance several men on horseback galloping toward them, obviously plotting an assault. Suddenly the would-be bandits stopped and retreated. Later, Ekvall came across one of the men and asked why they had ridden away so hastily. “You outnumbered us,” he replied. “We weren’t afraid of you. We weren’t afraid of your friend. But who was that shining one with you?” Ekvall was understandably baffled.

Encountering apparitions was new to Ekvall and Carlson, but it is not so to the human experience. John Geiger, author of The Third Man Factor (2009) chronicles several such visitations. A few instances from the book illustrate:

Sir Ernest Shackleton, during his 1916 expedition to the South Pole, ordered his crew to abandon their ice-battered vessel, Endurance, and trek across breaking floes and frozen tundra, desperately searching for the shelter of a whaling station. Traversing mile after agonizing mile over glaciers and unnamed mountains, Shackleton and his starved, exhausted men at last reached their destination. Later, the explorer admitted that he and his companions, each without telling the other, had experienced the acute sense of a comforting, protective presence guiding them. In lectures he spoke of the event, but declined to elaborate. “None of us cares to speak about that,” he told an interviewer. “There are some things which can never be spoken of. Almost to hint about them comes perilously near to sacrilege. This experience was eminently one of those things.”

During his historic 1927 transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, Charles Lindbergh, piloting the Spirit of St. Louis, flew into explosive thunderstorms and blinding fog, drifting with each mile ever closer to sleep. To keep awake, he doused himself with cold rainwater. During the twenty-second hour of his voyage Lindbergh sensed other presences aboard the craft. These “phantoms,” he wrote, were there to assist, “conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.” The famed aviator did not discuss this until nearly three decades after the flight. He remembered “transparent forms in human outline,” but stated, “I can’t remember a single word they said.”

On 911 during the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, at least one documented report told of an unknown rescuer suddenly appearing amid the chaos to lead desperate office workers to safety through thick smoke and falling debris.

Though necessary to survival, Geiger says, the Third Man is not “real” as a physical manifestation. He believes that each human brain carries an “angel switch,” a brain response activated by extreme and unusual circumstances. The Third Man may be explained neurologically, he suggests, but this does not answer “why” he appears. Ultimately, the Third Man is an instrument of hope.

The prophet Daniel, Robert Ekvall, Ernest Shackleton, Charles Lindbergh and many others throughout history would surely agree with Geiger that the Third Man is an instrument of hope, but would wholeheartedly disagree that he is not real. Something unreal cannot lead a dying man to safety, just as a starving man cannot eat unreal food that suddenly appears on his plate. Who or whatever the identity of the Third Man, he religiously keeps his appointments.

A painting depicting Ekvall’s encounter, “Who Was That Shining One?” by DeWitt Whistler Jayne, is displayed in the Special Collections reading room on the third floor of the Billy Graham Center.

Edgar C. Bundy was a strident opponent of left-wing politics and one of the supremely colorful personalities inhabiting Wheaton. A retired Air Force former Staff Intelligence Officer, serving in every major theater of operations during World War II, he was also the Chief of Research and Analysis, Headquarters Intelligence, of the Alaskan Air Command after the war. He testified frequently as an expert witness in both open and executive sessions of both houses of Congress and state legislatures. An ordained Southern Baptist minister, Bundy preached at conferences and churches across America. Opposing the incursion of theological compromise and radical leftism, he spoke on hundreds of radio and television talk shows, debating such figures as Bishop James A. Pike and spokesmen of the Communist Party. He was a member of the Mayflower Society, The Order of Founders and Patriots of America, the Sons of the American Revolution, the American Legion, The Military Order of the World Wars, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and was past president of the Miami Beach Symphony Orchestra.

For decades he and his wife, Lela May, resided in the Jesse Wheaton home, built in 1838, given to them by a Wheaton family member as an inheritance. At their home the Bundys entertained doctors, attorneys and politicians. They had no children, but Lela May worked alongside her husband in his endeavors, including raising German shepherds which they often brought into their offices at the right-wing Church League of America. As president of the organization, Major Bundy (as he preferred) maintained a far-reaching mailing list for the distribution of his newsletter and books. His roommate in officers training school was Senator Lloyd Bentsen, and during drill exercises he marched with actor Clark Gable. Bundy’s collection of books, maps and file cards was occasionally used by the FBI for research. World-traveled and widely connected, he enjoyed friendships with powerful conservative voices like Robert Taft, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan. Bundy, single-minded, fearless and irascible, was a Cold War warrior who undoubtedly loved his country and did not deviate from his principles. Bundy perceived that certain evangelical leaders and institutions had been co-opted by unfriendly forces through the slow, steady poison of compromise. In books such as How Liberals and Radicals are Manipulating Evangelicals and How the Communists Use Religion he presents his expose of their tactics, chronicling the evangelical drift toward liberalism and Communism. “Great moral damage has been done to the United States as a result of this neoevangelical compromise,” he writes.