The Home: Bigger Than Stereo

There has never been anything to compare with the sound of a Mighty Wurlitzer in full cry. Its rumbling, trumpeting majesty, its cooing, whimpering intimacy brought shivery pleasure to a generation of balcony sitters back in the golden age of the movie palace; saccharine with sentiment one moment, it was a hell-for-leather Marine marching band the next, and for many a movie fan, when the Wurlitzer sank out of sight into the bowels of the orchestra pit, the best part of the show was over.

Most cinemagoers today have forgotten the Mighty Wurlitzer along with the choruses of Sunkist Beauties, the personality bandleaders, and the bouncing ball — all victims of the talking picture. But there is one group that still remembers: a fiercely dedicated underground called the American Association of Theatre Organ Enthusiasts. Like the electric-trolley buffs and the antique-auto fanciers, the Enthusiasts are a diehard coterie, with a single-minded mission: to save those mighty relics of the recent past from the wrecker’s hammer.

Some enthusiasts have been content to restore superannuated organs in movie theaters in return for the privilege of holding Sunday-morning rallies, where everybody gets a chance to noodle before the house opens for business. But the real zealots remove complete organs from doomed movie palaces (or theaters where they have been neglected, unplayed and unloved) and install them in, under, and behind their homes.

Monster in the House. It is no small undertaking, for a Mighty Wurlitzer is like an iceberg; the largest portion of it is invisible. Hidden behind ornate grilles on either side of the stage in a theater are a number of rooms, each bristling with ranks of pipe (one rank sounds like a flute, another a musical foghorn, a saxophone, a violin, a trumpet) or the percussion instruments, ranging from a grand piano to a castanet, which gives the Wurlitzer its one-man-band versatility. These organ chambers must be duplicated in a home installation, and even the smallest organ needs more space than a kitchen for its hundreds of pipes, which vary in size from a pea shooter to a howitzer.

Restoring a wilted Wurlitzer can be both costly and timeconsuming. Last year United Air Lines Captain Erwin Young installed an organ out of the Regent Theater in Harrisburg, Pa., in his home near Mount Vernon in Virginia. Less mighty than most, Young’s Wurlitzer has a two-manual console and seven ranks of pipes. But it has cost him more than $10,000 to purchase, ship, and install it in the new cinder-block and brick annex that he built for it behind his house. The work of wiring, releathering, tuning, and voicing took unnumbered hours. Sighs Young’s wife: “I’m a Wurlitzer widow.”

Rescued from Paramount. The American Association of Theatre Organ Enthusiasts was organized in 1955 in California by a group of Wurlitzer fans headed by Richard Simonton, who holds the Muzak franchise for Southern California (among his other interests: a 51% share of the Delta Queen, one of the last of the Mississippi River passenger steamers). Simonton, 45, was hooked on the Mighty Wurlitzer early in life, when he got a job in Seattle’s Fifth Avenue Theater. The lady organist played an all-request program every Saturday, but she had a poor memory for tunes. It was young Simonton’s duty to stand beside the console and whistle the melodies for her as titles were yelled from the audience.

Simonton’s own Wurlitzer is one of the largest home installations in the U.S. Housed in a private 63-seat movie theater in the basement of his Toluca Lake home in North Hollywood, the organ is a four-manual 36-ranker, identical in size to the instruments in Manhattan’s Paramount Theater, the Fox theaters in Detroit, St. Louis, Brooklyn and San Francisco.* Nucleus of Simonton’s organ was a 19-rank job from Paramount Studios in Hollywood, to which he has added a new four-manual console and ten additional tons of pipework.

Though he admits to being only a noodler himself, Simonton never lacks for live music. Famed Theater Organist Jesse Crawford—”the Poet of the Organ”—comes over to practice on the Wurlitzer three days a week. And when Simonton reels off a silent flicker in his basement Bijou, he always has on hand an oldtime organist to accompany the picture with the requisite mysteriosos and agitatos.

The Giant Keepers. The American Association of Theatre Organ Enthusiasts numbers more than 1,500 devotees of the Mighty Wurlitzer and its cousins, the Silver Throated Barton, the Kilgen Wonder Organ, the Möller De Luxe, the Marr & Colton Symphonic Registrator. Among the cultists:

> Humorist Herb Shriner, whose Larchmont, N.Y., home shelters a 14-rank Wurlitzer salvaged from the old Chicago Arena. Shriner is better known as a harmonica player (he recently played as soloist with the Cleveland Symphony) than as an organist. Says he: “All my life I wanted a mouth organ big enough to set down to, and now I’ve got it. My wife calls it a mechanical mother-in-law.”

> TV Actor Joe Kearns (“Mr. Wilson” on Dennis the Menace), who literally built his Hollywood home around a 26-rank Wurlitzer.

> Reinhold Delzer, Bismarck, N. Dak., contractor, who rescued the 20-rank Wurlitzer from the demolished Radio City Theater in Minneapolis. Delzer has carved out a grotto for his prize beneath his home after getting special permission from a nonplussed Bismarck city commission to build organ chambers tangent to a city right of way.

> Radio Red-Baiter Fulton Lewis Jr., who is not a card-carrying member of the A.T.O.E., has nonetheless gone underground with a theater organ in his basement—a modest, three-rank Robert Morton instrument salvaged from a Tampa movie house.

> Richard Loderhose. Manhattan glue magnate, who bought the four-manual, 21-rank Wurlitzer studio organ from the Paramount Theater building on Times Square, erected a 1,846-sq.-ft. outbuilding for it behind his suburban home. Since then, he has added 15 ranks of pipes, is currently wiring-in the giant five-manual Kimball organ console from the late lamented Roxy Theater in Manhattan. Says Loderhose: “If worse comes to worst, we can always live in it.”

* Mightiest of all Wurlitzers: Radio City Music Hall’s 58-rank monster with twin four-manual consoles, still in constant use after 30 years of intermissions.