A good and faithful servant

FEW HAVE TOUCHED more young lives in Holmes County than Ken Yates. Or possibly more adult lives, either.

He was honored last Sunday for playing the organ at First Baptist Church in Bonifay for 70 years. One might guess the ever-youthful Mr. Yates must have started before he was born.

In fact, he started at 14. He and young Dianne Williams — later as Dianne Smith a revered high school English teacher — played for Sunday night services.

Along the way he set out to find the church a respectable pipe organ. He heard the old First Presbyterian Church building in Pensacola was being torn down. So he arranged, for $400, to have its organ brought to Bonifay — where, as it happened, mighty First Baptist was just about to build and occupy a grand new sanctuary. The organ, and Mr. Yates himself, have been installed there ever since.

“I’ve had a wonderful time, and it started innocently,” he said when he finally rose from the bench and leaned on the organ to speak on Sunday morning. There wasn’t a lot to do in Bonifay on Sunday afternoons when he was growing up two blocks from the church. One Sunday he wandered in while Dianne Williams was practicing for that night’s service.

“Don’t you play the piano?” she asked.

He had taken a few lessons, and he did play the bass drum in the high school band, but was not a trained musician — and in fact has never had a formal organ lesson. But the Bonifay Baptists acquired a modest organ in the 1950s “because the Methodist church bought an organ,” Yates cracked. “They had money.” He asked Miss Mary Coleman, the church’s retired organist and a longtime 4th grade teacher, to meet him after school to show him the basics.

“That’s how it all started,” he said, recalling his first offertory song: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

In addition to being a natural musician, he was a good student. He went on to Chipola and then to Florida State, where he got his bachelor’s degree. After teaching for a year in Marianna, he went back to FSU for a masters in educational administration and supervision. During his internship at a Pensacola high school, he was lured home to become the principal at Poplar Springs. He was almost as young as his students.

“Sitting in this room are people from way back,” he told the congregation. “Some of you have gotten older than I am — I don’t know how you did it.”

Yates went on to serve for two decades as principal of the modern new Bonifay Elementary School and implemented all sorts of innovative programs. Students and teachers loved him, and parents did, too. Eventually he got kicked upstairs to the county office and kept stirring the pot until his retirement. Then he started volunteering at the hospital and nursing home and as a teacher at the new state prison built just south of town.

“I taught school and I taught prison,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of difference.”

Through it all, he’s kept playing the organ at First Baptist Church.

“This was on the side,” he said. “But I felt just as committed to what I did here.”