The instrument that we removed was acquired from the estate of Dick Simonton who lived in Hollywood, California. Dick founded the American Theater Organ Society, and became its first president during an organizational meeting held at his home in February, 1955.
Dick was an unusually avid enthusiast of pipe organs and had in his home both a theater organ in a walkout basement theater, and a more conventional Aeolian-Skinner classic organ which was located in his living room.
The Simonton residence was only a few miles from the epicenter of the infamous Northridge earthquake of January, 1994. This particular earthquake was unusual in that a very significant force vector was in the vertical direction. The picture above gives you an idea of the amount of sudden vertical motion involved. These two overhead highway supports gave way under the combined sudden shocking force of the earth's upthrust in addition to their normal static load. Not surprisingly, both the Aeolian Skinner classical organ on the first floor of the Simonton residence and the Wurlitzer theater organ in his Bijou Theater in the basement suffered some damage as a result of the earthquake.
Because of the earth's sudden vertical displacement, many pipes in the Skinner organ, above, were thrust upward, and when they came back down, the pipes didn't fall back into their normal positions on the windchests. The low rack boards alone could not hold the pipes in their normal vertical position since the pipe toes had been shifted away from their normal resting place in the recessed holes of the toe boards. The inevitable result was bent and broken pipes that would have to be restored, and in a few cases, replaced.
The Wurlitzer apparently fared a little better than the Skinner organ upstairs in the living room. During the removal of the instrument, approximately 100 pipes were identified as requiring major repair by an experienced pipe maker. They were packed separately and after delivery to Great Falls, they were taken to two pipe shops, some to Austin Organs in Hartford, CT, and others to Joe Clipp at his Trivo Corporation in nearby Hagerstown, MD.
A work crew headed by Bill Schutz, a member of the Los Angeles Chapter of the ATOS, had been engaged to remove the Wurlitzer from the Bijou theater's pipe chambers. The same crew had previously gained experience removing the famous San Francisco Fox Wurlitzer from its second home in the Lanterman residence prior to its eventual installation in Walt Disney's El Capitan theater in Hollywood.
It took 7 men about 10 days working at the Bijou to complete the removal and packing of the many pipes, wind chests, regulators, tremolos, racking, etc. Finally they were loaded into one humongous moving van, described by Mayflower as the largest tractor trailer that could make the cross country trip without need for special oversize permits from each of the many states to be crossed. Credit is due the van's driver and his co-pilot wife for their knowledge and skill loading. There was remarkably little damage to the wooden components of the organ, and no discernible damage to the many boxes of carefully wrapped pipes.
Sitting down on the job, these workers have already removed the pipes from these wind chests, and are now removing the rackboards using electric screwdrivers. The white partition separated the Main pipe chamber from the Solo chamber on the right.
Pipe Box # 24, one of 89 similar boxes that were built in the Bijou "warehouse" which served as the staging area for all the organ parts as they were removed from the pipe chambers and prepared for boxing and shipment to Virginia. The two garages that served the Simonton residence were also used to temporarily store many organ parts until they could be loaded in the driver's carefully selected sequence into the big Mayflower trailer.
Topped by a triple wind pressure regulator, two manual chests rest on their sides ready for loading. The bottom boards of a 5 rank chest in the foreground shows the black caps on the electromagnetic bleed valves which operated the primary wind valves, one for each pipe in the organ. The close spacing of some of the magnets indicates the relative diameter of the pipes that are intended to be placed on the wind chest after restoration and installation in the new pipe chambers. String pipes are long and skinny, flutes are fat, with many sizes and shapes in between.
After a day and a half loading, the big Mayflower tractor trailer headed east, bound for the barn in Great Falls, Virginia, seven days and some 2,700 miles away.
