Liese Shewmaker moved to Hanover in 1967, when her husband, Ken Shewmaker, got a job teaching history at Dartmouth College. Both lifelong Lutherans, the Shewmakers soon joined Our Savior Lutheran Church. They were already acquainted with the pastor, Rev. John Lemkul, who knew Ken Shewmaker from his prep school days in California.
It was Rev. Lemkul who encouraged Liese Shewmaker to start playing organ for the church. Although she had studied the organ for three years at Concordia Teaching College (now Concordia University Chicago) in River Forest, Ill., she never felt she had any particular skill at it. Worse, the prospect of playing for an entire congregation made her nervous
“I always said I’d never play in church,” Shewmaker said. She was worried about making mistakes during the service, and about playing in front of people. Rev. Lemkul started by persuading her to play for an early summer service one year.
“He said, ‘Liese, there will only be five or six people there — you can’t be too scared!’ ” Shewmaker said. She agreed, and found it wasn’t so bad. After that summer, she began to substitute regularly as the organist on Sunday mornings.
From that modest beginning, Shewmaker went on the play the organ for Sunday services for four decades. Her last services are on Sunday, and the church will honor her with a reception after the 10:30 a.m. service.
Shewmaker stepped into the role permanently in the wake of tragedy. In 1981, Our Savior’s volunteer organist, Sarah Hawbecker, was killed in an auto accident. Hawbecker was a friend of Shewmaker’s as well as a fellow church member, and Shewmaker was deeply saddened by the loss. Shewmaker played organ for Sunday services, eventually taking over as the church’s new official organist. Since then, with few breaks, Shewmaker has played faithfully on Sunday mornings, (at 9:30 a.m. during the summer, and 10:30 during the school year), and for special services such as Holy Week and Christmas Eve.
While volunteering every Sunday at Our Savior, Shewmaker also raised two children — son Richard and daughter Nancy — and worked as a teacher. While her children were at home, she volunteered at the Ray School in Hanover, then was hired as a teaching assistant. After they left for college, she started working full-time again as a fourth-grade teacher at Seminary Hill School in Lebanon, then as a second-grade teacher at Mount Lebanon Elementary School.
Shewmaker loved teaching. “I knew I wanted to be a teacher since I finished kindergarten,” she said. She retired in 1994 after 13 years in the Lebanon school system. “It was a great run — a great school system, and I had wonderful colleagues,” she said. Shewmaker feels blessed that she and her family ended up in the Upper Valley.
The daughter of immigrants from Austria and the Netherlands, Shewmaker grew up in Newark, N.Y., just outside of Rochester. The youngest of three, she said, “My mother arranged for six godparents. I think she knew I was going to be a handful.”
She met Ken Shewmaker in their sophomore year at Concordia: They were seated next to each other in a class by alphabetical order (Shewmaker’s maiden name was Spalteholz). After they were graduated and married in 1960, the Shewmakers moved to San Francisco while Ken Shewmaker studied history and received a masters degree from the University of California at Berkeley, then to Chicago for his Ph.D. at Northwestern University, and then to Williamsburg, Va., where he took a job teaching history at William & Mary.
The Shewmakers lived in Williamsburg for only one year, because that fall, Ken Shewmaker met Prof. Louis Morton at a conference in New York. Morton was then chair of the History Department at Dartmouth, and he offered Ken Shewmaker a job.
“He had just gotten a grant and thought he wouldn’t be able to take it,” said Shewmaker. “But they were very gracious and allowed him to take a year for the grant before he started teaching.” They moved to Hanover in the summer of 1967, living in college housing until they moved to their house just off Greensboro Road, overlooking Mink Brook, in 1971. It was there that Ken Shewmaker died from complications from diabetes on Oct. 31, 2018. He had been a professor at Dartmouth for 39 years before his retirement in 2005, earning the Distinguished Teaching Award three times.
As she leaves the role of volunteer organist behind, Shewmaker is quick to give credit to the many people who helped her create the music at Our Savior every week.
“I’m not the only one making music by any means,” she said. “There are lots of wonderful people sharing their talent, and we’re always looking for more people to play music.”
In particular, she is grateful to Barbro Thuren, who accompanied Shewmaker’s organ playing on the piano for nearly 15 years. Her accompaniment helped Shewmaker to relax and enjoy playing, she said, worrying less about making mistakes, as well as giving the choir a greater choice of musical styles to choose from for special numbers. Other regular contributors to the music include classical guitarist Frank Kelecy, bassist Kirk Oseid, Randy Budner on drums and guitar and Hartford High School senior Katya Mueller on the violin.
“All of these people have made it easier for me to keep going,” Shewmaker said. “It’s great fun — you never know who’s going to be there.” She is also full of praise for Rev. Kyle Seibert who, she said, is helping to breathe new life into the church and encouraging more young people to attend.
There’s much more to the music at Our Savior than just a few hymns at the beginning of the service.
“We sing the liturgy, so I’m playing for most of the service,” said Shewmaker. In liturgical worship, the whole congregation participates in prayers and readings throughout the service. Oftentimes the order of service is simply read aloud by the priest and congregation, but at Our Savior, those prayers and responses are set to music that the congregation sings together.
The amount of time it took Shewmaker to prepare for a service varied, depending on the difficulty of the hymns, whether or not she was learning a new liturgy and the complexity of the prelude and postlude she chose to play.
“It’s taken me longer to practice as I’ve grown older,” she said.
The liturgy changes seasonally at Our Savior, as did the music Shewmaker played.
“For us, it’s important for the music to tie into the Sunday and the liturgical season,” she said. “It sounds different during Advent than it does during Lent.”
The new organist at Our Savior, Joshua Brown, has been hired by the church as a member of the staff. He’ll be the first regular organist at Our Savior who won’t serve in the role as a volunteer.
“I am so excited that someone is there now who will be excellent,” said Shewmaker, “We are thrilled that Joshua has consented to be our organist. It’s truly an answer to prayer.”
It was finding Brown, who is an excellent musician and also has experience playing in a church and familiarity with the liturgical calendar, that allowed her to feel comfortable with stepping down from her role as organist.
In retirement, Shewmaker is looking forward to more extended travel, particularly to visit her son Richard and her daughter Nancy, and to having weekends off to attend services at Our Savior and enjoy the music from a pew.
Sarah Clark lives in Hanover.