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DREAM JOB? PIPE ORGAN TUNER While still in Junior School, Amy HATHAWAY Sandford’86 heard her life’s calling echoing through the church rafters
BY ANDREA ASTER
o, what do you do?” It’s the commonest, if perhaps the most contested of conversation starters. Those who inquire about Amy Sandford are in for a treat. “When I tell people I’m a pipe organ tuner and technician, they look at me like I have two heads,” she says. “They’ve never heard that before.” Once your curiosity is piqued, Amy will explain a bit more about this most magisterial of instruments, which she likens more to a car, “a big piece of machinery that needs servicing,” rather than a French horn, which she also plays. She’s been a musician with the Canadian Forces Reserves for 31 years, eight of those with the 7th Toronto Regiment Royal Canadian Artillery Band. She also rides a Kawasaki Z650.
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That is to say, Amy is not conventional, and a conversation with her is rather like an unintentional life-coaching lesson. Why didn’t we all follow through on the voice in our little heads that said, “That’s what I want to be when I grow up?” In terms of formative life experiences that established Amy’s destiny, her mechanical inclinations were nurtured by her father, a classic car collector whose fleet included a 1911 Ford Model T and a 1929 Packard. He also played saxophone, and her mother piano. But it was the pipe organ at St. Paul’s Bloor Street which Amy heard—first as a congregant attending Christmas services and as a choir singer, and also as a Branksome student in the pews for the annual Carol Service—that really settled it. “Way up in the rafters, I was distinctly fascinated with the sound, and wondered what was behind those pipes,” she
JEFF KIRK
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The READ Fall 2021
