The Organ Builder

In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman says each of us is born with as much of a destiny, calling, mission, or fate, as an acorn has within it an oak tree. He also says “Reading life backward enables you to see how early obsessions are the sketchy preformation of behaviors now… Reading backward means that growth is less the key biographical term than form, and that development only makes sense when it reveals a facet of the original image.”

The original image on the right is the high school yearbook picture of Allan John Ontko, one of my best friends during the three years we were classmates at what I half-jokingly call a Lutheran academic correctional institution. Because that’s what it was for me. For most of the boys there, however, it was a seminary. Allan, then known to all as A.J., was one of the seminarians. He was also completely obsessed with pipe organ music and production.

At the time that picture was taken, in May 1965, A.J. was seventeen, a senior about to graduate, and the builder of his a pipe organ in his parents’ basement. The main parts of the organ were so large that a cinder-block wall needed to be removed so the thing could be extracted. It was also hand-built and tested, with thousands of drilled holes, thick webworks of wiring, and solder joints. All the pipes, stops, keyboards, and foot pedals were scavenged or bought used.  I went with him on some of his trips around New Jersey and New York to obtain pipe organ parts. His determination toward completing the project was absolute. Just as amazing was that he did this work on weekends, since ours was a boarding school in Westchester, New York, and his home was more than an hour’s drive away in New Jersey. His parents’ patience and moral support seemed infinite.

A.J. sold the organ to some church. That was the first step on his main path in life. Look up Ontko pipe organ and you’ll find plenty of links to his work on the Web. One of his companies, Ontko & Young, has fifteen listed organs in the the Pipe Organ Database. His website, ontkopipeorgans.com, is partially preserved in the Internet Archive. Here’s one snapshot.

After high school, Allan (no longer A.J.) went to Westminster Choir College. In that time he continued building pipe organs, advancing his skills as an organist, and singing as well, I suppose. Both of us sang bass, though he could hold a tune while I could not. He had many amusing reports of his choir’s collaborations with the New York Philharmonic, and did a brilliant impression of Leonard Bernstein’s conducting style. Allan could be very funny. I recall a list of fake organ stops that he and another organist friend (who I am sure is reading this) created for a fake pipe organ design worthy of National Lampoon or The Onion. (Some stops were named after teachers. The only one I recall is the Roschkeflöte, named after Rev. Walter Roschke, who taught church history.)

After that, we were only in occasional contact.  I know he married twice. I met his first wife when he still lived in New Jersey. That was soon after college. Later he divorced, moved to Charleston, South Carolina and remarried. Most of what I know about this period was that the organ-building continued, along with work composing and playing music.

A surprise came in 2011, when I got a friend request on Facebook from Olivia Margaret Ontko. I assumed that this must be a relative of Allan’s, since he came from a large Slovak family in New Jersey. When I went to Olivia’s website, I thought for a moment that looks kind of like Allan but… then realized this was Allen. He was a woman now.

I accepted the request, and marveled at how well Olivia had gathered a large collection of very supportive friends, and had become an active advocate for trans rights and acceptance of gender choices. And so, for the next few years, we would occasionally comment on each others’ posts, and talk now and then on the phone. Olivia also created a Linkedin account which is still there.

Our longest conversation was in June 2015, while I was driving to the 50th reunion of our high school class, and reporting on it afterwards. Olivia was in Charleston and said she couldn’t afford to come, and didn’t have much appetite for it anyway. Nor did the rest of the class, except for me. I was the only one from the Class of ’65 to show up at the reunion, outnumbered six-to-one by photos of dead classmates taped to one wall of the room. Fortunately, the room was not empty of people, because it was also the 50th reunion of the graduating class of the junior college that shared the same campus, and had absorbed our high school dorm and its classrooms the year after I left. Eighteen Concordia College alumni attended, including some guys who had been two years ahead of me in high school.*

Back to Olivia.

In a high, thin voice, she recounted for me how tortured she felt through all those decades as a female in a male body. She regretted not having been born at a time, like the present, when a child who knows their body is wrongly gendered can get the medical interventions required to grow up in the right one. She said she knew from a young age that she was a lesbian, because she was sexually attracted to girls as a kid, and then women as an adult. She also lamented that the term “transsexual” was not in wide circulation back in our high school years, when it mostly referred to pioneering work Johns Hopkins was doing at the time. So Allan repressed his urge to change sex until finally deciding to become Olivia. This was a deep and moving conversation because A.J. and I were so close in our high school years and yet I had no idea what he, or she, was going through. Finally, she told me she had written an autobiography, and that she would send it to me, hoping I might find a publisher. I told her I would do my best. This was a promise she repeated each time we talked after that.

Two years later, I got a surprising friend request from Allan Ontko on Facebook. The account for Olivia was gone. I accepted, and got this in response to an email:

I gave up on Olivia… the surgery involved in making the full change would have posed some serious risks and would have been totally out of my budgetary means (not to mention the cost of an entirely new wardrobe)… HA!

As we used to say in SC: Call me anything except late for supper…

Not long after that, he wrote this:

It is inconcievable that I will turn 70 this September – but for the nonce I would rather be alive and kicking. I have had a few medical problems – I am developing cataracts and double vision but they aren’t bad enough to require immediate treatment; I had total joint replacement of my right shoulder about 1 1/2 years ago; my Parkinsons is very much under control since about 2 1/2 years ago I was fitted with two brain implants (DBS).

And, I have moved since last May to Spangle WA; a little town of about 238 people which is 18 miles South of Spokane.

His address was a post office box. His phone was a cell.

Our last contact was a series of audio calls over Facebook totaling about an hour on December 17, 2020. He was by then very hard to understand, because advancing Parkinson’s had severely impaired his speech, and the call kept dropping because the connection was so bad. I did gather that he was in a facility of some kind, but I didn’t catch the name. Attempts to reach him after that were for naught.

Then a few days ago I heard from a mutual friend that Allan had died in 2022 of Covid. A search for an obituary then led me to in the Spokane Spokesman-Review, with this entry among them:

ONTKO, Olivia (Age 74) Passed away February 9, 2022

I don’t know where Allan/Olivia died, or what was done with remains or belongings. I also think those facts matter far less than whatever might be in that autobiography. I hope someone reading this might help find it. Sure, it’s a long shot, but ya never know.

It is also an appeal for others to help me fill out this short biography of sorts. (One friend already has, and I’ve made adjustments in the text above.) Allen/Olivia was an extremely unique, talented, and deep person, who deserves to be recognized and remembered for what he and she brought to the world.

*The college, called Corcordia (one of many Lutheran institutions by that name) was by then a four-year college. Five years later it too was gone. The campus, on White Plains Road in Bronxville, New York, is now part of Iona University. It’s quite lovely. Check it out if you’re in the hood.