Word: organizers
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...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...
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...
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...