Transcribed from a conversation with Melvin West and Loren Dickinson and recorded by Gordon Wildman.
Mel West remembers ...
"We chose a theme song. The theme song was an instant success [and] people very early on grabbed on to that song. I've heard people say, 'All that it took was to have that theme song start and tears came.'
"I have thought this, but I don't know if I've ever expressed it. We could do the opening and the closing, have nothing in the middle ... and we would have satisfied a lot of people. There's something about that melody we picked years ago that just stuck ... and people want that."
Loren Dickinson recalls ...
"Mel saw [the new college Casavant organ] was capable of doing things that hadn't been done before. The church was new, the organ was new, and he saw potential that the rest of us didn't understand. So, this made it reasonable to hook into some kind of a programmatic idea. And there it was. Providence filled in all the rest as far as I am concerned."
(Walla Walla University archive)
