Ethel Hogan Hanson Heinz Merrill, organist and more

Intermountain Catholic

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Ethel Hogan, shown in a photo dated circa1930, became the principal organist at the Cathedral of the Madeleine when she was 14. Courtesy photo/Diocese of Salt Lake City Archives

Feb. 24 is the anniversary of the death of one of the most remarkable women in the history of the Diocese of Salt Lake City. Ethel Hogan Hanson Heinz Merrill is remembered as a long-time organist at the Cathedral of the Madeleine, but she was much more than that, and this anniversary seems an appropriate occasion to create a larger and more detailed profile of a multi-talented and much loved figure in Utah Catholic history.

Ethel was not a native Utahn, though her family moved to Salt Lake City not long after her birth in 1903 in Aspen, Colo., and she lived in Utah until the last year of her life, when her marriage to her third husband took her to Lake San Marcos, Calif. She was educated at St. Mary’s Academy in downtown Salt Lake City and the University of Utah. An early measure of her precocious musical talent was a scholarship to Notre Dame University, which she won while still in high school, and she later did graduate work there. We would like to know more about her education, for it is an intriguing speculation that she might have studied with Bishop Lawrence Scanlan’s organist, Nora Gleason, a prominent teacher in the city who died while Ethel was a teenager.

Gifted with an amazing improvisational talent at the organ bench, she was engaged to provide music for silent movies at the Capitol Theater while still a young girl at St. Mary’s. She was so young, in fact, that the nuns would have to chaperone her to and from work. Her niece, Mary Ellen Weber, reports that the "score" from which she played at the theater was "a sheet of paper with three to five bars (measures) of single notes of a suggested new melody," a description of the action on the screen, and the number of minutes the scene would last.

At the tender age of 14, Ethel became the principal organist at the Cathedral of the Madeleine. In those days the Cathedral organist was paid very little (Cletus Walz, who succeeded her in that post, remembers getting nothing at all), so making a musical living required a great deal of versatility, enabling her to play in other churches as well as weddings and funerals. But she was able to play any type of music called for on either the organ or the piano, and to transpose it into any key to match the vocal range of the singers she often accompanied. Jenifer Gibbons remembers that her father, Larry Brennan, who sang in the Cathedral choir but who was not a trained musician, became very confident when performing solos with Ethel’s accompaniment. She was also a proficient cellist, and performed with the faculty string quartet at the University of Utah.

Personally, she was the life of any party, happily entertaining other guests at the piano and playing any kind of music they wanted, from Irish jigs to ragtime tunes to Broadway musicals. She maintained her bright red hair to the end of her life. In the 1950s she drove a little Nash Rambler, but eventually traded up to a white Cadillac, which promoted a style that some remember as flamboyant. "Vivacious" might be a better characterization, but she was certainly unforgettable to all who knew her.

Her marital life was less happy, for she outlived her first two husbands and lived alone for almost a decade after the death of the second. In 1974 she married Landell S. Merrill, reputedly the love of her life, but her bliss was short-lived, for she died barely a year after the wedding.

Even her death was memorable. She disliked being alone, and often stayed up late at night to listen to the Nitecap radio program on KSL, a call-in talk show originated in the mid-1960s by a radio personality named Herb Jepko. People all across the country would call in to chat, and Ethel would often play her organ when she called in. She was doing just that on the night of Feb. 24, 1975 when she collapsed and passed away. Ethel Hogan Hanson Heinz Merrill died "with her boots on."

Who could ask for a better exit?