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UAF photo by Eric Engman.
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By Sam Bishop

A panoramic photograph in Fairbanks International Airport’s gate area documents a moment of grand history — the meeting of President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II on the tarmac in May 1984.

The photograph also captures another, lesser-known person whose presence nevertheless continues to resonate in Fairbanks and at UAF decades later.

David Stech, a UAF music professor from 1972 to 2008, can be seen in the picture doing what he loved best: playing the organ.

Stech died in 2024, but his legacy will assist UAF students indefinitely. In his will, he left $75,000 to endow a scholarship fund for keyboard students. With other contributions, the endowment has topped $100,000, enough to soon start providing scholarships.

The photograph now on display at the airport previously hung on a wall in Stech’s home in Fairbanks.

Jaunelle Celaire, chair of the UAF Music Department, noticed it there in June 2024 when she went to visit Stech after being out of the country for a time. She’d heard that Stech’s wife, Mary, had died the month before.

“So I took a big fruit basket from the department and I went out to his house,” she recalled. “I got a chance to sit and chat with him a little bit. And he has this panoramic picture that was hanging in his house, and I said ‘Hey, Dr. Stech, what is this?’”

As Stech explained the photograph, Celaire said, “he said, ‘I think I'm the only person in town who has this picture.’”

Stech wanted it shared with the community somehow, so he and Celaire agreed to see if the airport would take it.

Before that could happen, Stech died in July 2024.

Celaire continued to pursue the idea, though. She talked with Stech’s younger brother, Harlan, who was working on the estate and agreed to donate the photograph. A small ceremony marked its installation at the airport in May 2025.

During the same visit in which Celaire first saw the airport photograph, she and Stech also talked about his desire to set up a scholarship fund for UAF students.

“He said, ‘You know, I have some money put away that I would love to put toward some scholarships for UAF,’ and I said, ‘OK, well, you let me know whenever you're ready to do that.’”

They never had a chance to talk again, but it turned out Stech had already outlined the gift in his will.

“I think David had a love of music, and a scholarship can help kind of maintain that — his love — as a legacy, you know,” said Harlan Stech, a math professor who retired from the University of Minnesota in Duluth in 2016. “I know college education is extremely expensive nowadays. I think anything, any sort of scholarship can help. That’s sort of the underlying goal. We all know the debt that students typically come out with.”

Math and music

The two brothers David and Harlan (and another, Charles, the youngest) grew up in Amonk, a suburb north of New York City. Their father worked as an art director for Life magazine.

Both Harlan and David practiced the organ in high school.

“It took with him much better than me, and it influenced his life dramatically,” Harlan recalled.

They both also shared a knack for mathematics. Harlan became a professor in the field. David applied his abilities to analyzing music with the newly realized power of the computer. With that work, he earned a doctorate from Michigan State University in 1976.

“He used a scientific language called Fortran to actually encode kind of a pattern-finding program,” his brother said. “If you're familiar with the work of Bach, J.S. Bach, a lot of his work involved taking themes and doing very strange things, you know, playing them upside down or backwards at half speed or at double speed. And sometimes these reoccurrences would be overlooked. And so (David) thought, ‘Well, I'll use a computer program to help seek out these reoccurrences of versions of the theme.’”

After being hired at UAF in 1972, David Stech also incorporated computers in music education.

And he continued to play the organ.

In 1982, at Stech’s urging, UAF installed a Gress-Miles pipe organ in the Davis Concert Hall on campus. It remains the largest pipe organ in Alaska, with 35 racks containing more than 1,900 pipes.

Jotting down fugues

After retirement in 2008, David Stech turned to another unique undertaking — transcribing and publishing the improvised performances of the famous French organist Marcel Dupré.

“He was a church organist who played at some of the biggest organs in Paris,” Harlan Stech said, “and had quite the reputation of being able to do extraordinary things very spontaneously on these large instruments.”

Dupré died in 1971, so a number of his improvisations had been recorded.

“But no one had ever attempted to write down the actual notes that he played,” Harlan Stech said. “My brother had that ability to listen to a piece of music and then reconstruct it in terms of its notes and what pipes were being played. It was quite a talent he had.”

Former student Dean Shannon ’09, ’10, ’12 remembered that talent in a memorial note he wrote after his former teacher died.

>“When there was a ding, a screech or some other sound, he could name what that note was,” Shannon recalled. “When people doubted him, he would walk over to the piano and play the matching pitch. One day he brought in some transcriptions he made of Marcel Dupré’s improvisations. I’ve been having to rub every brain cell I have together to transcribe a simple two-part line, and this man is over here jotting down fugues by ear.”

The suspenders

Despite such academic interests and prestige, David Stech fit in well with laid-back Fairbanks culture. Celaire, speaking at a memorial, recalled the first time she saw him in 2003.

She had just earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, was 27 years old and had come to Fairbanks to interview for a faculty position at UAF.

>“I remember getting off the airplane — you have to remember that this was before the airport was renovated,” she said. “I remember coming down the escalator, looking around at all of these dead animal heads on the walls of the airport and finally looking down to a man wearing jogging pants and suspenders, holding a sign with my name on it. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, where am I and what are these people gonna do with me?”

Stech’s suspenders were such a part of his persona that music students would wear them as Halloween costumes annually.

And while Stech dressed up to play the organ, he also dressed down to fix it. “He’d have to get all deep in there and clean it and tune it,” Celaire recalled.

The university dedicated the Gress-Miles organ to David Stech’s memory in a ceremony on Nov. 9, 2025. Renowned organist Stephen Price, a music faculty member at the University of Washington,.

Sam Bishop is a writer and editor for UAF Advancement.