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Nancy Bea Hefley (born February 24, 1936) was the stadium organist for 27 years for Major League Baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers.
| The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies .(September 2012) |
Nancy Bea Hefley (born February 24, 1936) was the stadium organist for 27 years for Major League Baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers.
Bea grew up in the Los Angeles area, and began playing the piano at age 4 by listening to her seventeen-year-old sister, and by the age of seven she was also proficient at playing the accordion. At the age of thirteen, she talked her piano teacher into teaching her the basics of the organ. She has been playing the organ at Bellflower Baptist Church for over 55 years; it was there that she met her husband, Bill. She also plays the organ at the Orange County Fair, the Pomona Fair, and has played shows in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe.
In the mid-1980s, Bea filled in for a friend as the organist for California Angels games at Angel Stadium, and was offered a job which she declined not wishing to take work from a friend. When it was announced in 1987 that long-time Dodger organist Helen Dell was to retire at the end of the season after fifteen years, Bea auditioned at an exhibition game between the Dodgers and the USC Trojans on February 14, 1988. [1] She did not preplan her programs, getting her cues from the events occurring on the field during the game and including a variety of popular pop and rock songs alongside older and less commonly played numbers. [2] Bea– alongside announcers Vin Scully and Rick Monday – was a great crowd favorite at Dodger Stadium.
On October 2, 2015, Bea announced her retirement following the 2015 season and was replaced with Los Angeles Kings organist Dieter Ruehle. [3]
The Los Angeles Dodgers are an American professional baseball team based in Los Angeles. The Dodgers compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (NL) West division. Established in 1883 in the city of Brooklyn, which in 1898 became a borough of New York City, the team joined the NL in 1890 as the Brooklyn Bridegrooms and assumed several other monikers before finally settling on the name Dodgers in 1932. From the 1940s through the mid-1950s, the Dodgers developed a fierce crosstown rivalry with the New York Yankees as the two clubs faced each other in the World Series seven times, with the Dodgers losing the first five matchups before defeating them to win the franchise's first title in 1955. It was also during this period that the Dodgers made history by breaking the baseball color line in 1947 with the debut of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in the Major Leagues since 1884. Another major milestone was reached in 1956 when Don Newcombe became the first player ever to win both the Cy Young Award and the NL MVP in the same season.
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A stadium organist is a musician who plays an organ during live sporting events.
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