Organist Sings the Praises of His Work

For someone who didn’t start studying the organ until his junior year in college, Mark Thallander has made some significant tuneful strides.

“Actually, I’m an adequate organist,” said the assistant director of music at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. He is also the newly elected dean of the Orange County chapter of the American Guild of Organists.

Whatever his self-described shortcomings, Thallander said: “I practice and train a lot to make up for any deficiencies I might have compared to others.”

If Thallander feels that he’s not the best, he may get an argument from the thousands of regular church parishioners and the estimated 300 couples each year who hear his organ music before getting married at the church.

“I have to program my entire day for the wedding,” said the Santa Ana resident, who may play for as many as 14 weddings a weekend in the four wedding chapels in the church. “I have to run to them, and sometimes I have to send out for a patty melt to keep my energy up.”

At weddings in the church itself, couples hear Thallander play nuptial music on the world’s largest church organ.

“It’s really a humbling experience to have grown with the international scope of the church,” Thallander said. “One weekend I was asked to play a Sunday service and it grew into this.”

He started 15 years ago with the Garden Grove Community Church, forerunner of the Crystal Cathedral. “The hole wasn’t even dug when I got my job here,” he said.

At first Thallander was hired for clerical and administrative work “until someone at the church asked if I wanted to play (the organ) at a Sunday service. At that time playing the organ was a small part of my job.”

Now he is an assistant to Frederick Swann, director of music for the church, and is responsible for playing the organ at the Sunday night services as well as the 300 weddings each year.

“I’ve grown into the job,” said Thallander, who thrills to hymnal music. “I love to play hymns and love to hear people in their singing worship to God.” At times, upward of 3,000 participate in the singing during a service, he said. “But I get the same good feeling if only a few people or a few hundred are singing.”

The 39-year-old bachelor credits his parents’ life style with his own connection with the church.

“They lived their faith at home and I saw that it was real,” noted Thallander, who is on the musical staff of several Orange County churches. “It was an everyday thing, not just on Sunday.”

While he also plays gospel music on the piano, has played the organ in a Bach festival and once had a fun time playing an old-time theater organ, Thallander is on constant lookout for a certain organ sound.

“What you do is look for sounds other organists might not have discovered,” he said. “You have to realize what is here and what isn’t. The challenge is to find a new and different sound and then you pick up on it.”

Thallander goes beyond local musical activities to enjoy a national reputation. He has been invited to play and dedicate a new organ in a church in rural Sheffield, Iowa, early next year.

“The church is excited about their new instrument, and I’m really looking forward to being there,” he said.

Hondo is one tough cop with blood to give.

The Newport Beach police dog went into the Costa Mesa Animal Hospital to have a tumor removed from its shoulder and was resting near another German shepherd that was in serious trouble from a disease that was destroying its red blood cells. It was in desperate need of a blood transfusion.

“Hondo had the same blood type and we didn’t have any on hand so we asked his trainer, Officer Tom Voth, if we could draw some from Hondo, and he approved the transfusion,” Dr. Tim Donnelly said.”Hondo is a big, strong dog and came through his operation and the blood donation with flying colors.”

But despite Hondo’s help, the dog died.

Acknowledgments--Mai Pham, a senior at Ocean View High School in Huntington Beach, was named winner in the high school English category of the “Oct. 12, 1492: A meeting of Two Worlds” essay contest. Pham, who received a $500 scholarship, was one of 20 winners of the 1,000 who entered. It was sponsored by USC and the Mexican-American Education Commission of the Los Angeles Unified School District.