MISQUAH — Lorraine Vekved, 90, of Misquah, died peacefully Sunday at her home on Whitefish Lake. She was born in 1936 above her family’s hardware store on Main Street and lived in Misquah all her life, save two years in Duluth she described as “an experiment.”

For fifty-one years Lorraine was the organist at First Lutheran, a tenure spanning four pastors, two organs, and an estimated nine thousand hymns, none of which, by her insistence, was ever taken too fast. “A hymn is a prayer, not a race,” she told generations of restless choir directors, and she set the tempo, and the tempo held.

She was hired to the bench in 1975 and outlasted, in the end, four pastors, a span she summarized as “clergy come and go; the hymnal stays.” She served two instruments: the 1931 Hinners reed organ she loved and defended, and the electronic Allen that replaced it in 1984, which she played beautifully and forgave never. Her substitute across most of those years was her friend Doris Knutson, who died just ten days before her — the two of them a complete theology of tempo, Doris hurrying the congregation toward lunch on her occasional Sundays, Lorraine holding it to reverence on all the others. The bench lost both its keepers inside a single month.

Her nephew Karl’s girls — Maren, Greta, and Liv, the triplets the softball town knows by their grand slams — sat the front left pew on her Sundays, where she could, she said, “keep time for them until they can keep it themselves.” She left, in a sealed envelope with the church secretary, the full order of music for her own funeral, chosen years ago and revised, per the postmarks, at least twice. The secretary reports the envelope is thick.

She is survived by her daughter, Karen; two grandchildren; and the congregation she accompanied for half a century. She was preceded in death by her husband, Alvin, and her sister, Gladys Rantala. Services are Wednesday at First Lutheran, the Rev. Karl Lindholm officiating — and the closing hymn, the family requests, is to be taken slowly.