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."