When Joseph Emanuele celebrates his 90th birthday on Sunday with friends at Grace United Methodist Church in Oil City, the partygoers will be commemorating a lifetime marked by music and fidelity.
Emanuele has lived his entire life in Oil City, taught music for 34 years at Oil City elementary schools and enriched the Schubert Club for many years with his mastery of the piano.
He is also well-known for playing the organ for Sunday services at seven churches in Oil City, including 20 years at St. Joseph Church and 26 years at Grace United Methodist, where he still plays every Sunday.
Emanuele will be honored after the 10:45 a.m. worship service Sunday at Grace United Methodist, located at 100 Central Ave., with a luncheon in the church’s Asbury Hall.
A card basket will be available for personal expressions of gratitude.
The public is invited to the service and to stay through the postlude as a way to honor Emanuele.
Emanuele and Rev. Dr. John D. Miller, the pastor at Grace, sat in Miller’s office this week and gave an amiable account, punctuated by chuckles, of Emanuele’s life in Oil City, which touched to some extent upon Miller’s life.
Miller’s wife, Diane, was also a music teacher, and his two sisters-in-law taught with Emanuele at Oil City schools.
“Joe has been a very steady person in terms of providing music here,” said Miller, who grew up in Seneca, as did his wife. “He gives us very high-quality music.”
“I have walked into a wonderful situation with Joe playing here,” added Miller, who was appointed as a part-time, retired pastor to Grace last September.
Emanuele credits a “wonderful teacher, a perfect teacher” at St. Joseph Elementary School, Sister Mary Thomasine, of the Erie Benedictine order of nuns, with teaching him to play the piano.
“I was a latecomer — I was in ninth grade when I started the lessons,” Emanuele said, recounting that he had attended St. Joseph elementary and high schools, graduating from high school in 1951.
Emanuele explained, as he held his wide-rimmed fedora on his lap, that his cousin, Anna Marie Emanuele Harry, five years his elder, inspired him to ask the nun for lessons.
“I watched my cousin play the piano, and I just wondered how she did what she did on that instrument. I wanted to learn about it,” Emanuele said.
“I loved to play from the beginning,” he added, remembering his lessons in the convent.
Emanuele said he still plays “all the time at home. I love to play the piano.”
When he first started, he said, “I liked to play for myself, not necessarily in public. Sister Mary Thomasine had recitals every year at the high school. The first recital was scary.”
Emanuele went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania, then called a State Teachers College, and majored in music education.
Upon graduation he returned to Oil City to begin teaching classroom music in grades one to six.
“I taught at Hasson Heights mostly, sometimes at Rouseville and Plumer schools, which no longer exist,” he said. “The students were all lovable. My years there were all wonderful.”
Miller chimed in as Emanuele talked about his days in the classroom, saying, “My sister-in-law Dixie Agnew taught with Joe, and she remembers when Joe would wheel his piano into the classroom to teach.”
“There was no music room then,” Emanuele explained, “and I had to go to the classrooms. You can’t teach music without a piano, so I wheeled the piano around the school.”
No doubt his students heard some delightful playing because Miller offered the information that “Nancy Simpson, a longtime music teacher at Cranberry schools, told me she went to see Joe’s senior recital at Indiana University because, as a freshman, she had to attend every one of the senior recitals. She said that he was the best senior recital she ever heard there.”
When Miller asked Emanuele if he remembered what he played at the recital in 1955, he replied, “Chopin’s Ballade in G-minor.”
In 1956, Erie Diocese Bishop Edward McManaman, who was the pastor at St. Joseph, asked Emanuele to play the church’s organ. Consenting to do so, he played the instrument in a church for the first time.
He stayed on at St. Joseph until, “for various reasons,” he left in 1977, his years there encompassing the time of massive changes in liturgy and music in Catholic churches, as the Roman Catholic Church in 1970 went abruptly, and worldwide, from the traditional Latin Mass to the Novus Ordo (New Order) Mass.
After retiring from teaching in 1989, he began receiving requests to play as a substitute for other church organists, this time in Protestant churches.
“I first played as a substitute at Second Presbyterian Church, only because the organist persevered and called me three times, and I finally said I would. Then I added subbing at Good Hope Lutheran Church, Hasson Heights Presbyterian Church and Zion Lutheran Church,” Emanuele said.
“Father Joel Mason from Christ Episcopal Church then asked me to sub, and I ended up playing there every Sunday for a year,” he said.
Emanuele consented to all the calls for subbing, and then in 1994 he received another one.
“Grace United Methodist called me and asked me to sub for two weeks,” he said. “But at the end of two weeks, the organist didn’t come back. So I subbed here from 1994-1998. In 1998 the pastor Byron Myers then asked me to be permanent. I promised I would, for one year. But I’ve been here ever since, 26 years.”
“I love playing for the choir,” he added. “Choir director Debby Stahl started in 1994 with me. When we sing two hymns in particular, ‘Give Me Jesus’ and ‘The Majesty and Glory of Your Name,’ it is magnificent. I love those two hymns,” said Emanuele, who calls the organ “the king of instruments.”
“I played here (Grace United Methodist) the longest because I like it the best. I like the choir, the organ, the pastor and the people. The people are very nice to me, and the organ has three manuals (keyboards placed in tiers).”
And each month, he shows up faithfully at the Schubert Club meetings to play the opening piece and then the notable closing piece “Pennsylvania.”
Emanuele is one of six children of Antonio and Nunzia Emanuele, who immigrated to Oil City from the province of Messina in Sicily.
“Antonio Emanuele worked with his brother at Emanuele’s Produce on Cedar Street,” Emanuele said. “They would go to Pittsburgh every day and pick up produce to provide to all the little stores. There were not a large number of Italians in Oil City, but there used to be a Little Italy here.”
His father had come over because he had sisters in Oil City. He then returned to Sicily to marry Nunzia Emanuele and bring her back to Oil City, where they lived in Hasson Heights.
All of Antonio and Nunzia Emanuele’s children remained in Oil City.
Emanuele loves dogs, owning seven of them at one time. He doesn’t own a television, however, and besides playing piano “all the time” and cooking, he is a successful gardener and is especially proud of his large trees and masses of day lilies.
He is also, apparently, a rare species, as both Emanuele and Miller agree that one “can’t find people to play the organ anymore.”
When asked if there are fewer numbers now than in the past, Emanuele said, “Oh my goodness, yes. You can’t find organ and piano teachers.”
They both commiserated about the fact that most schools are dropping music and art education completely or cutting them back drastically so as to emphasize much more mathematics and the sciences.
“We are reaping the consequences now,” said Miller, “because we can’t find organists and pianists, or even many choir members.”
“Joe is a gift for all of us,” Miller said. “We have a camera in the choir loft, behind Joe, that projects onto a screen, and I can see Joe play, see the movement of his hands and feet, and I stand amazed.”
“He never takes Sundays off, except when he was in the hospital. People are so appreciative of Joe that some of those former choir members who have left said they will be coming back to his birthday party,” Miller added.
“And on Sunday at the service, we’ll sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Joe, and afterwards we’ll have a hoopla for him, but after this party, he can go back to being his quiet self. Joe doesn’t like being the center of attention,” said Miller.
The Grace United Methodist Sunday service, with Miller preaching and Emanuele playing, will be broadcast on Facebook and YouTube and can be viewed afterwards on the church’s website.
