Part of Treasure Island’s history is personal for journalist Christine Weicher. Her aunt Catherine Rooney brought her gift of music to many who served there in the US Navy. As the organist in the dining room at the Admiral Nimitz Officers Club, “Kay Rooney” delighted military families throughout the 1950, 1960s and into the early 1970s. 

Christine Weicher and her family had the privilege of visiting the dining room and hearing her aunt at work.  In 2019, Christine Weicher donated the classic Hammond BV Organ that had spent so many years in the officers’ club to the Treasure Island Museum on behalf of her aunt’s extended family. During most of her 95 years, Catherine “Kay” Rooney supported herself as a professional organist, first in the nineteen teens and twenties at ice-skating rinks and silent movie houses in her native Seattle where she was born in 1905 on her parent’s dairy farm. Her first husband, also a musician, died in a car crash on his way home from a performance. Years later, she married Andrew “Mickey” Rooney, a career Army man. At the end of WWII as a Major, he would be stationed in the Philippines, where she, and her Hammond, also went and lived for several years until his tragic death there in 1948 in a jeep accident. After that, Kay Rooney returned to the US and found work on the President Cleveland Cruise ship in 1949 playing music in the ship’s dining room.  In 1951, back in San Francisco she was hired to entertain dinner guests at the Treasure Island Officer’s Club dining room. 

Christine Weicher is a CBS News journalist based in San Francisco. Previously, she worked at KPIX-TV and KQED-TV. While studying at UC Berkeley, she was a stringer for United Press International and the San Francisco Examiner. She inherited her aunt’s prized Hammond Organ in 2001, and had it completely restored before gifting it to the Treasure Island Museum in the hope that it will further the museum’s mission and help to delight many as her aunt’s music did. The Museum’s programming plans include recording organists playing Kay Rooney’s organ, showing off its capabilities, and theirs, performing the music they like best when playing a Hammond BV.  The Museum is dedicating one of its monthly lectures each year to a topic and/or performance related to the instrument and/or music on Treasure Island, and is also planning to present concerts, dances, and possibly roller-skating events to the music of the Hammond BV.