Harold Kellan playing the organ. (Courtesy photo)

By BETH GRUBER

Marquette Regional History Center

MARQUETTE — Dick Clark once said, “Music is the soundtrack of our lives.” Harold L. Kellan’s music provided the soundtrack for generations of Marquette residents.

Harold was born July 25, 1906 in Laurium, the second youngest of William and Edith (Hocking) Kellan’s seven children. His father was a timber cruiser for the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company, but following the decline of the Copper Country mining industry, the Kellan family moved to Marquette in 1912.

While the family didn’t have enough money for luxuries, Harold’s mother sensed his adoration of music and persuaded her husband to invest in a piano. That purchase was all Harold needed to begin his lifelong love of music.

Like many children of that era, Kellan left school early and began working to help support the family. Some of his early jobs included driving cows to pasture and selling Marquette Chronicle newspapers. At age 17, Harold fibbed about his age in order to get a job with the Lake Superior and Ishpeming Railroad which paid $50 a week.

Starting in his mid-teens, Harold supplemented his LS&I wages by playing musical scores for silent movies at the old Marquette Opera House on nights and weekends. He was in big demand and also began performing at the Delft Theater. His tunes added suspense as the audience contemplated the villainous character’s next move, and tugged at viewers’ heartstrings as the hero and his girl rode off into the sunset.

When the time came, it was only appropriate that Kellan be the one to usher out the silent picture age. On July 31, 1928, Harold played the score to “The Harvester” the final silent film shown at the Opera House. In a 1987 interview, he noted that he still knew the musical score to the film. “It was a sad night. When it (talking movies) first came they were quite the thing. It was one of those things that had to happen.”

The silent movies at the Delft ceased just a year later in June 1929.

Despite the changes, Kellan found a new outlet for his musical abilities, playing the organ on WBEO radio starting in July 1931. The announcer would introduce the 30-minute show by saying Harold was waiting at the console at the Delft Theater. For the rest of his life, people would continue asking him if he was waiting at the console.

Harold began playing the organ for local churches in 1930, when he became the organist at the First Presbyterian Church, a job he continued until he was drafted in 1942. He spent three years in Europe as a private in the 5th Armored Division where he helped liberate several concentration camps.

Upon his return in late 1945, Kellan took a job running the dining room at the Northland Hotel (now the Landmark Inn) in Marquette. After his stint at the Northland Hotel, he took a position as the night clerk at Ishpeming’s Mather Inn. Then in 1949, Harold briefly struck out on his own, purchasing a small hotel, the Anderson Hotel, across the street from the Mather.

He became the organist at Bethany Lutheran Church, also in Ishpeming, where he served from 1950 until 1961. In 1964 he came back to Marquette as organist, first at Trinity Lutheran, and then, after that church’s merger with Zion Lutheran, at the new Redeemer Lutheran Church.

The different denominations didn’t bother Kellan. He noted that “it’s all good music.” His favorite piece of church music, which he requested at a celebration of his 25 years of service at Redeemer, was a Gustav Holst arrangement of “Te Deum Laudamus” from the 1941 Lutheran Hymnal. But the 25th anniversary celebration wasn’t a retirement — he served two more years, eventually retiring in 1991 at the age of 85.

In his later years, Harold also played for the Merry Music Makers, a group organized through the Marquette Senior Center that played mainly old-time favorites and patriotic tunes at nursing homes and fraternal lodges. He even kept his ties with First Presbyterian, frequently playing at the monthly senior citizen “lunch bunch” there.

In 2006, on his 100th birthday, Harold was honored with an organ recital at Redeemer Lutheran. At the time, he was described as having a wonderful sense of humor and was often known to jokingly con the uninitiated into believing he was a man of the cloth by turning on his Irish brogue. Another of his favorite pranks was telling new acquaintances that he came to America on the ill-fated Titanic.

Harold Kellan spent his final years at the D.J. Jacobetti Home for Veterans. He died there on April 18, 2007, three months shy of his 101st birthday.