Comments, Observations, and Updates from Our Fearless Leader

Did you know that the Kinura came about by accident? One day someone in the Robert Hope Jones organ shop dropped an oboe and the resonator broke off? In trying to fix it RHJ tried a bell shaped resonator and eventually developed the Kinura as a new rank.

Did you know that eighteenth century German organs used drums, bells, and whistles much like nineteenth century Theatre Pipe organs?

Did you know that the word "diapason" is also an architectural term? Musically, at least, in referring to an organ stop, it is from the Greek meaning "all voices."

ATOS has 68 chapters. The average membership is about 86. COTOS membership is about 90. Some chapters don't own their own organ while some own several. COTOS owns one and a very good one at that. Only about 25 chapters have reports in the ATOS Magazine at any given time or about 37%. Could it be that we are about average or even a little above?

The largest chapter of 360 members is in Los Angeles which also has about 10 million people as potential members. That would be roughly .00036%. COTOS is in an area of some 1 million people which gives us a ratio equaling 009%. OK, so I like statistics but it all goes to show that even though we certainly need to work on making our chapter bigger and better and furthering the cause of the theatre organ, we have a lot to be proud of too. I once belonged to a small church in Pennsylvania that proclaimed one Sunday in January that they were going to double their membership in the coming year. I have to admire their ambition but that was about 20 years ago and they haven't even come close to doubling. Reasonable goals work better in my way of thinking. At least they can always be revised upward.

Tom Hamilton did a great job at the Strand in Delaware accompanying the silent movie "Lilac Time" on the newly installed and COTOS owned Conn. May there be more. You might encourage the Strand to have more of this type of program.

At a recent board meeting I urged that the Worthington Wurlitzer be made more user friendly. For those of you who have no trouble finding your way around the stop rail this doesn't apply. For some of us though, registration is best left alone if a simple push button won't bring up something reasonable to hear. However, even that is not so simple anymore since the entire combination can be in memory for someone else's registrations. Consequently, if possible we will have a default setting for not only the generals but also the divisionals, all of these being the little white buttons just below each keyboard. The generals which control all stops are on the left and are numbered from 1 - 15. Usually #1 would be pppp and #15 would be ffff but only if someone set them up that way. This way the default settings would be known ahead of time and could be listed on a handy reference card.