ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
From: Dave Bishop, May 2010
The organ had been sold to one of the OSP organists for a home installation that never quite materialized.
He then offered it for sale to the Rocky Mountain ATOS, which in those years was a small group, short on funds
but brimming with energy.
The membership voted to buy the organ after a recently-joined member offered to advanced the money needed.
The console, percussions, traps and manual chest pipework had been removed and taken to Phoenix when our club bought the organ.
What remained in the theater was a four-rank chest, a one-rank Tibia chest, pedal offsets, relay, swell shutters,
regulators, tremulants, winding, framing, wiring and the blower.
The plan was for two members of our chapter to fly to Phoenix one Friday in April, 1977, load the console
and crated pipes onto a Ryder truck on a Friday afternoon and head for Alamosa the next morning.
Meanwhile, Don Wick, the late Harry Krzywicki and I would be driving to Alamosa with our hand tools to
disassemble and remove what was left in the theater.
The five of us would then load everything onto the rental truck on Saturday or, at the latest, Sunday.
Somehow, we managed to squeeze it all in and haul it to Denver relatively unscathed.
A welcoming party convened on our arrival to help unload the tons of organ parts into temporary storage in a member's garage.
The rebuild commenced soon after in a donated space in the basement of an Army recruiting center.
Enthusiasm for completing the instrument diminished with time, as potential venues for housing the organ either put
too many restrictions on its use or were too distant to consider.
Being just five ranks in size, it might have been suitable in someone's home or a bar
but (at least in the opinion of professionals) inadequate as a concert instrument.
When the opportunity came to sell it by way of Ed Zollman for inclusion in the huge Wurlitzer installation
in Dick Wilcox's Gig Harbor, Washington, home, the club reluctantly gave it up.
Ivan Duff, whose efforts had brought the organ to Denver, would assist Ed with that project.
The Rialto organ did have a Tibia, so it was more than the standard Style B.
I think that rank might have been added after the theater opened, as it was on a separate chest and regulator.
The name of the installer, written on the front wall of the pipe chamber, was Fred Munier.
I understand his firm did a lot of work in the Rocky Mountain region in the first half of the 20th Century.
A recording of this organ when it was in the theater sounds much bigger than you'd expect from a little 5-ranker.
Addition of the Tibia must have made quite a difference, and perhaps accounts for the organ's being used almost
continuously from the silent era until the 1970s. Of course, the theater manager being an organist was also a factor.