AUBURN – Alzheimer’s disease stole her own memory over the past few years, but when Vesta Orr passed away Friday, many memories sprang to life among those who’d been touched by her humor and music.
Those memories are being shared, beginning at 11 a.m. today, at a memorial gathering for friends and relatives at Dillingham and Son Memorial Chapel and Tribute Center, 62 Spring St., Auburn.
For more than a half-century, Vesta Orr was a noted piano teacher, accompanist and soloist. Some of the people who learned from her and enjoyed her performances will play in 15-minute turns for two hours before the 1 p.m. memorial service.
Kathy Haley, Norma Rice Gould, Eric Peppe, Phil House, Mitchell Clyde Thomas and Dave Rowe are among those invited to participate. Haley was making numerous calls Monday to line up tributes.
Norma Rice Gould, organist at the United Methodist Church of Auburn, remembers that Orr was the first director of the church’s highly respected hand bell choir.
Orr and Gould’s father each battled Alzheimer’s in recent years, and Gould would bring Orr to her house from Clover Manor so Orr could play while he sang.
“It was wonderful. But eventually, they’d almost come to blows when Vesta would be playing “The Old Rugged Cross” and it would unexpectedly turn into “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” Gould said
“That’s not right,’ Dad would say. Yes, it is,’ Vesta would argue. And I would have to come in and break it up.”
She said Orr was from a large family with many talented members and Orr was very proud that her father had composed several published hymns.
For Mitchell Clyde Thomas, a popular singer, actor and mentor for youth theater, an early happy memory was playing on the two back-to-back grand pianos in Orr’s Court Street home and teaching studio.
“We would play four-handed pieces, swapping parts back and forth, for hours. And then she’d say, Let’s go play some mini-golf.'”
Thomas recalls that Orr was “an incredibly humorous person and she used her humor in her music a lot.”
She had a popular comic routine for the Red Stocking Revues of the Central Maine Medical Center’s Women’s Hospital Association. Gould remembers it as “kind of a Victor Borge act” that also featured Barbara Ring, another Community Little Theatre veteran.
Orr, whose early training was at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, taught piano to hundreds throughout the area, both adults and children.
Community Little Theatre audiences enjoyed many performances when Orr was a musical director in the 1950s and 1960s. Music lovers throughout the area have heard her at Poland Spring’s All Souls Chapel, the Inn at Poland Spring, Empire Grove and dozens of other locations.
Orr’s music also reached thousands through her church affiliations.
Esther Tucker, a choir member at Auburn’s First Universalist Church, recalls that Orr was organist there for an 18-year period and then for another seven years later. Orr also was organist at Sixth Street Congregational Church until it was no longer possible because of advancing Alzheimer’s disease.
Comments are no longer available on this story