Down by the riverside – and beyond

By Peter Finney Jr. 
Clarion Herald

When Debbie Fagnano, 70, was an infant, her father Eugene would climb the stairs to the choir loft at Our Lady of Grace Church in Fairview, New Jersey – just across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan – with his babe in arms. 

Eugene was a baritone in the choir, which sang at the Sunday morning Mass, and he didn’t want to miss, so for one hour every week, the choir loft became a spiritual oasis of joint child care.

“He used to tell me that one of the ladies would have to hold his music for him – or sometimes he would pass me around, and they all took turns holding me,” Debbie said.

When Debbie was 2 or 3, she recalls climbing the steps to sit in the choir loft with her dad, watching the organist, Barbara Mehr, scoot her feet over the pedals of a Hammond organ and making magic.

“She was a tiny lady, and she was always smiling,” Debbie recalls. “I used to watch in fascination and say, ‘Maybe I could do that someday.’ Then, I’d watch the singers, and there was this one lady with the short, white hair who always went into the closet and came out with the hymn books. Sometimes, my dad would let me hold them.”

Her childhood fascination with the massive sound produced by small fingers and tiny feet deepened over time. As Debbie grew older and sat near the organ, she began turning pages for Mehr. But the most incredible thing happened during the consecration.

“She used to ring one chime at the elevation, and then she would let me do it,” Debbie said. “I would turn the pages, and she let me hit the reset button. That’s how she kind of figured out I wanted to get my hands on those keys.”

By the time Debbie was in seventh grade, she played her first Mass with Mehr watching over her shoulder. In eighth grade, she advanced to playing the parish novena, and by the time she was a sophomore in high school, she asked the pastor of Our Lady of Grace if she could revive the disbanded children’s choir to sing hymns before Christmas Eve Mass.

“That’s how I became a choir director,” Debbie said.

All that is prelude to Debbie’s parallel identity today as the Pied Piper of the Mississippi River.
In addition to her weekend ministry since 2001 as organist and choir director at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Belle Chasse, six or seven days a week she stands on a perch atop the Steamboat Natchez, playing the blaring, steam-powered, 32-key calliope in pre-boarding concerts that, as in the times of Mark Twain, created a clarion call to assembly for people along the banks of the Mississippi River.

“When I get up on the roof and I look out over the river and crank up the steam, it’s like I go someplace else,” Fagnano said. “I watch the people on the dock. Sometimes they’re dancing. A lot of times they’re pointing, and I see a lot of cell phones. I know people can hear it at a distance, so I try to vary the concert every day for the benefit of the people who have to listen to it every day. I know a lot of songs.”

Those songs range from New Orleans jazz classics to spirituals to patriotic hymns to show tunes. Debbie turns a knob on a steam pipe – the same steam that fuels the engines of the Natchez – unleashing the hot air that allows the calliope to gush out its notes through a set of brass whistles, controlled by the small keyboard, which covers only 2 1/2 octaves.

“It’s like a whistling teapot,” Debbie says.

She does her homework. When she spotted a group of Ecuadorian sailors standing at attention as part of their several-day visit to New Orleans, 

she went home and learned Ecuador’s national anthem.

“You can find anything on the internet,” Debbie said, laughing, and she played it for them the 
next day.

Doesn’t need AccuWeather

She has performed in all types of weather, even thunderstorms.

“The instrument is all plumbing, copper and brass, so the rain doesn’t bother me,” she says. “I put on my big raincoat. The worst is in the wintertime when it’s cold. I’ll have on a camisole, a sweatshirt and a heavy jacket, and the wind goes right through me.”

Fagnano will celebrate her 60 years in liturgical music – dating back to when she first played the organ as a 10-year-old in New Jersey – with a 7 p.m. concert on Nov. 10 Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Belle Chasse.

She knows the sound she has helped create over the last six decades has deep spiritual meaning.

“Any note I can play that helps people praise God or helps them think of something that gets them in a prayerful mood is wonderful,” she says. “Sometimes the choir will do a very moving piece, where the words speak to people, and somebody will come up after Mass and say, ‘You know, that song made me cry today. But it was a good cry because it reminded me that life is going to be OK, and Jesus is here.’”

Due to complications from recent knee surgery, Debbie needs extra time and effort to scale the series of narrow, metal steps to her perch atop the Natchez.

Post-Katrina beacon

When she struggles, she often thinks back to a random conversation she had one day, a few years after Hurricane Katrina, with a clerk in the Apple store. Debbie was wearing a shirt with the New Orleans Steamboat logo, and the clerk asked her what she did for the company.

“I told her, ‘I play the calliope,’” Debbie recalled. “And she just got really quiet and she almost started crying. Then she said, ‘You know, when I finally got back here after the hurricane, I was outside trying to clean up my yard, and I heard the calliope playing.’ And she said, ‘I stopped (working) and started crying at that moment because I knew everything was going to be OK.’”

Her music wafting across the Mississippi is so much a part of her life that “it’s almost like breathing.”

“Even if I’m really not having a very good day, I walk into church or on the ship and I sit down at that organ, and everything goes away,” she said. “It’s a hard feeling to explain. But when I walk into church, I just know this is where I belong, and when I’m on the roof of the boat, that’s where I belong.

“It means that the world is full of life and that God is here all the time. I get emotional when I think about it. It’s just an experience from the heart and soul. I get to stand here every day on this big river. There’s never been a day – here or at church – where I get up in the morning and say, ‘Gosh, I wish I didn’t have to go to work.’ I can’t wait to come to work here. I don’t call it work. It’s not work.”

Debbie Fagnano’s “Celebration Concert: Ancora” will be held Nov. 10 at 7 p.m. at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, 8968 Hwy. 23, Belle Chasse. For information, contact [email protected].

[email protected]