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Restoration

Theater organ undergoes revival

Contributed photo by Erik Jacobs Dust collecting on a wind pressure regulator in storage at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford, Mass. May 2, 2009.

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From left, volunteers with the Chevalier Theatre Organ Society Dick Pelland and Michael Cerullo do work on the main chest of a Wurlitzer theatre organ at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford, Mass. May 2, 2009.

Contributed photo by Erik Jacobs From left, volunteers with the Chevalier Theatre Organ Society Dick Pelland and Michael Cerullo do work on the main chest of a Wurlitzer theatre organ at the Chevalier Theatre in Medford, Mass. May 2, 2009.

Wurlitzer from city’s RKO Keith’s rebuilt with donated funds.

By Tom Beyerlein, Staff Writer Updated 1:58 PM Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Just before King Wrecking Co. crews tore down Dayton’s RKO Keith’s Theatre in 1967, David Bowers and a couple of friends went there on a mission to save a precious artifact.

“Pipe organ? We don’t have an organ!” a worker told them.

“Uhh, we think you do,” Bowers said.

Bowers and his friends, Roy Haning and Neal White, found a 1922-vintage Wurlitzer Style 210 pipe organ, “a gem of an instrument,” in Bowers’ estimation. Haning and White bought the organ and its nearly 1,000 pipes on the spot.

Four decades later, the RKO Keith’s Mighty Wurlitzer is being restored in Medford, Mass., for use in Medford’s Chevalier Theatre. If all goes as planned, it’ll be played for the first time since 1986 sometime next year.

Bowers, a former Kettering resident who now lives in Wolfeboro, N.H., said it will be one of fewer than 200 Wurlitzer theater organs available for the public to hear, out of about 2,200 originally made.

The nonprofit Chevalier Theatre Organ Society has raised $21,000 of a $55,000 goal to restore the organ. Volunteers have taken the organ apart and are evaluating and restoring many hundreds of sound valves.

Theater organs were the state of the art in 1910, when the Cincinnati-based Rudolph Wurlitzer Co. bought the New York business of Robert Hope-Jones, whose innovations transformed the church organ into an instrument capable of imitating an orchestra and of producing new musical sounds and sound effects.

Hope-Jones committed suicide in 1914, the year before D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” ushered in the golden age of silent movies and the theater organs used to accompany them. The organs also were used for concerts and vaudeville shows.

“The organists would get better billing than the movies in some cases,” said Kenneth Krause, president of the Chevalier Theatre Organ Society.

Built at the Wurlitzer factory at North Tonawanda, N.Y., the organ was installed at Keith’s in time for the elegant theater’s opening at West Fourth and South Ludlow streets on Nov. 27, 1922.

“No expense had been spared for this theater,” Jon Flynn wrote for Cinema Treasures, a theater preservation Web site. “Two heavily carpeted marble staircases led to the first promenade, which was decorated with rare, old French furniture upholstered in the riches of Louis XIV and Louis XV damask. ... In the auditorium, theater patrons enjoyed wide aisles with seats finished in ruby Italian velvet. The walls were finished with the color of old ivory and lit with crystal and gold chandeliers.”

For a time, Keith’s was more expensive than other Dayton theaters, said local historian Curt Dalton, author of “When Dayton Went to the Movies.” “It was THE theater to go to.”

Theater organs went out of style with the advent of talkies in the late 1920s, Krause said, and many were junked, used for scrap during World War II, or even concreted over to provide more floor space.

Keith’s kept its organ during its long run as a movie house for RKO Radio Pictures. But like most downtown theaters, Keith’s eventually fell prey to the migration to the suburbs. It was torn down in 1967, and the 22-story Grant-Deneau Tower was erected on the site.

After its rescue, the RKO Keith’s organ stayed at Haning and White’s H&W Appliances in Troy until 1986, when the men decided to sell the business. Bowers bought it from them and offered to donate it to the American Theatre Organ Society. He corresponded with Dorothy Bromage of the society’s Pine Tree Chapter in Maine, who flew from Portland to Dayton in May 1986 and played the organ briefly in Troy before loading it into a rented truck to drive it back to Maine.

“I thought it sounded very good,” said Liz Barnhart of Riverside, who helped Bromage load the organ. It was the last time to date that the organ has been played.

Bromage stored the organ in her home twice — a deal to give it to a Maine theater fell through — before it found a home at the Chevalier. The Pine Tree Chapter already was restoring another theater organ.

Krause said the $21,000 the Chevalier Theatre Organ Society has raised so far should be enough to get the organ in partially playable condition by next year. The society is selling metal coat-room tags from the RKO Keith’s to help raise money.

The organ has almost 1,000 pipes, each of which has three leather pneumatic valves that act like fireplace bellows to cause the pipes to sound, Krause said. Over time, as the leather wears out, the valves don’t work and individual notes don’t play.

Restoration means taking the organ’s piping system apart, evaluating every piece and replacing the worn leather, Krause said.

“It’s not physically difficult, but it’s very time-intensive and the leather is very expensive,” said Peter Haskell of the Pine Tree Chapter.

Haskell acknowledged that the organs don’t enjoy the kind of popularity they had in their heyday.

“Basically, it’s a struggle” to attract crowds to organ concerts, he said. “You have the die-hard fanatics like us, but they’re off the radar screen for most people. You say ‘organ’ and people think church and they stay away in droves.”

Downtown theaters in 1943

Columbia, 121 S. Jefferson St.

Ideal, 43 E. Fourth St.

Loew's, 123 N. Main St.

Mayfair, 22 E. Fifth St.

Ohio, 138 S. Jefferson St.

RKO Colonial, 141 S. Ludlow St.

RKO Keith's, W. Fourth at S. Ludlow

RKO State, 32 E. Fourth St.

Rialto, 214 S. Jefferson St.

Victory, 138 N. Main St.

Source: Dayton City Directory, 1943

Historic theater organs

The Victoria Theatre at 138 N. Main St. has a five-keyboard Wurlitzer that was donated by NCR Corp. when it was preparing to demolish the NCR Auditorium in 1978. It can be heard this summer before movie screenings at the Vic’s summer film series.

The Dayton Art Institute, 456 Belmonte Park North, recently restored its organ, a 1930 two-keyboard model made by Ernest M. Skinner.

The Dayton Masonic Center at 525 W. Riverview Ave. has a 1927 model Skinner pipe organ with 4,500 pipes. The Masons are looking for a grant to help refurbish what spokesman Brad Gamblin calls “the Rolls-Royce of organs.”

Take a tour

Local historian Leon Bey will be leading a walking tour that includes the site of the RKO Keith’s Theatre on May 29 and 30. The 10 a.m. tour will include historic photos and information about the RKO Keith’s and RKO Colonial theaters, the former Dayton Daily News building and the Arcade. To register, contact Bey at (937) 274-4749 or e-mail him at grantsguru501c3@yahoo.com.

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