Falls TownshipSpirit of Christmas year 'round
Posted: Wednesday, October 24, 2012 5:00 am | Updated: 6:44 am, Wed Oct 24, 2012.
Posted on October 24, 2012
Keeping the true spirit of Christmas alive is what keeps the Men of Harmony going year after year.
Amid the commercialization of Christmas, the singers remind people of the true spirit of Christmas. They sing in four-part harmony much of the year sporting tuxedos. For the Christmas holiday season however, they break out the Dickens’ attire — waistcoats, trousers, stovepipe hats and all.
“People hardly realize what Christmas is about,” said Barry Vannauker, 76, of Falls, the director of the chorus. Without saying a word, they send the message by singing songs like “Oh, Holy Night,” he said.
“People have to understand what you are talking about in the song,” said Vannauker. “Choral music is poetry.”
Vannauker has been directing the Men of Harmony for 39 years.
In the beginning, only U.S. Steel millworkers at the company’s Fairless Works in Falls were allowed to participate in the chorus founded in 1951. Vannauker and another man were the only nonsteelworkers in the group, then known as the U.S. Steel Chorus.
Like similar groups at other U.S. Steel facilities, the chorus enjoyed the sponsorship of the corporation. It came into being during the fall of 1951 when employees from out of the area toiled at building the mammoth mill far from their families. The chorus would sing Christmas carols for the employees who worked every day for three weeks straight, never making it home for Christmas that year.
With the decline of the mill in the 1980s, U.S. Steel would no longer sponsor the singers. Chorus members, with Vannauker’s encouragement, decided to keep going under a new name, the Men of Harmony, and invited men from throughout the area to join.
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