JoAnn Stilwell is retiring after 67 years of playing church piano and organ music, 36 of those years were at Our Lady of Victory Parish in Kadoka.

 Her pastor, Fr. Tyler Dennis, said, “I appreciate how loyal she has been. Whenever I needed her for a funeral, I knew JoAnn was going to be there.”

 “I started playing for churches when I was 15 years old,” she said. In third grade she began taking piano lessons from the Benedictine nuns teaching at St. John the Evangelist Church school in Rapid City. (Now the parish is called St. Therese the Little Flower.)

 Stilwell was raised in Rapid City and attended Catholic schools. For grades 1-3 she attended Immaculate Conception elementary school near what is now Immaculate Conception Church on the corner of Fifth and South Streets. For grades 4-8 she went to St. John the Evangelist Church school. She attended Cathedral High School her freshman through junior years. When she was a senior her family moved to Philip, and she graduated from there.

 For college she attended Mt. Marty University in Yankton for a year-and-a-half. Then she went to Black Hills State University in Spearfish for a year-and-a-half. While attending school in Spearfish, she played for Catholic Churches in Cokeville and Sundance, Wyoming, both of which had pump organs.

 After college she lived in Philip, then in Kadoka, for several years. She remembers playing for weddings and funerals in Spearfish, Philip, Kadoka, Midland, Belvidere, Murdo and “all these little towns around.”

 “The churches I attended had little choirs, so I sang and played the piano or organ with whomever was singing,” she said.

 For many years, with an exception of the COVID pandemic, she has played for the residents of the nursing home in Kadoka every other Tuesday. “I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the residents enjoyed it. One lady told me, ‘Now, I can understand why my mother loved to sit and listen to piano music.’ I thought that was a wonderful compliment,” Stilwell said

 An older lady (who has since passed away) knew music and could sing many of the songs. “I played a lot of the older music from the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties,” she said. “I like classical music, but I got away from classical and now play more popular and contemporary music.”

 After she began piano lessons in grade school, she set about collecting music. “I have hundreds of books and a lot of sheet music of all kinds from the late 1800s and early 1900s. The music that they wrote is much more difficult than the music that is written today. One lady gave me a grocery bag full, and another gave me a paper bag full of old, old music. It’s really fun to sit down and play,” said Stilwell.

 Stilwell was residing with a son who passed away in April. She is moving to South Carolina to live near her oldest and youngest sons.

 “I will be leaving Kadoka before the snow flies,” she said, while packing up her belongings for the move — and for a price, she is willing to part with her classic pump organ …