Joan Armitage

1928 - 2016

(News story) Joan Armitage, who taught electronic organ lessons to hundreds of people in West Toledo and Sylvania area stores and who played the organ for crowds of holiday shoppers in Franklin Park Mall's center court in the 1970s, died Saturday at ProMedica Ebeid Hospice Residence in Sylvania.

She was 87 and her health had declined in March. She suffered from congestive heart failure and kidney failure, daughter Brenda Armitage said.

For about 20 years, Mrs. Armitage taught group organ classes of children and adults and gave individual lessons. She started at the former Howard's Organs & Pianos, which was first near Franklin Park Mall and later inside the mall. When Howard's closed, she taught at Great Lakes Piano-Organs, farther west on Monroe Street.

Stores often included lessons in the price of an organ, and Mrs. Armitage frequently taught groups in a room with about 10 organs.

Her musical career dated back to DeVeaux Elementary School where as a student in the late 1930s or early '40s she regularly played piano as her fellow students marched into and out of classes.

"She was brought up musically," her daughter said, explaining that her mother had learned to play piano from relatives.

In the 1960s, when home organs gained popularity locally, Mrs. Armitage took lessons, and when her father died, she used her inheritance to buy an organ that took up a third of the living room in the ranch house in Temperance that she had designed and had built with her husband, Lester. He added support beams in the crawl space under the organ.

She joined the Toledo Organ Club, a group of about 60 that met at restaurants and listened to a member - sometimes Mrs. Armitage - or a professional play the organ. She also was involved in the Toledo Area Theatre Organ Society, which supported the Ohio Theatre on Lagrange Street, where Mrs. Armitage played sometimes.

When she played in the mall at the holidays, she wore sparkly shoes to show off her footwork and took requests from the crowd. At home, she played songs that her husband enjoyed, such as "Elvira," "Flight of the Bumblebee," and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

She was born May 31, 1928, the only child of Joel and Lenore Spearing. She graduated from DeVilbiss High School, where she had been a yearbook editor and one of the first girls to take a drafting class, and began work the next week in the accounts payable department at Owens-Illinois. A co-worker there introduced her to her brother, Lester Armitage, a World War II Army veteran who was a sheet metal worker, and they married May 28, 1949.

Mrs. Armitage continued working at O-I until her children were born, stayed home with them until they started school, then returned to accounting work in the early 1960s at Toledo Engineering Co. After about a decade there, she began teaching organ.

For their 25th wedding anniversary, she and her husband traveled to Hawaii, where he had been stationed during the war. She loved the islands so much that they returned every other year. They usually spent the month of February there because it was when Mr. Armitage's work in construction was at its slowest point. After he died in 2009, she spent almost every February in Hawaii.

She took up golf in her 60s and for a while played in three leagues. She was confident in putting and was president for years of the Monday Morning Swingers league, which over time ranged from 12 to 30 members playing at Giant Oak Golf Club in Temperance. In the last few years, when her health no longer allowed her to play golf, she loved to just ride through top courses.

She collected Snoopy items - her collection ranging from Christmas ornaments to bed linens numbered in the hundreds - and her daughter said she will be buried in Snoopy sneakers.

Surviving are her son, Jeffrey, and daughter, Brenda Armitage.

Visitation will be from 4-8 p.m. Tuesday and an hour before services at the Foth-Dorfmeyer Mortuary, where the funeral will be at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday. The family suggests tributes to Trinity Episcopal Church, where Mrs. Armitage was a lifelong member.

This is a news story written by Blade staff writer Jane Schmucker. Contact her at: jschmucker@theblade.com or 419-724-6050.