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Rescued from Paramount. The American Association of Theatre Organ Enthusiasts was organized in 1955 in California by a group of Wurlitzer fans headed by Richard Simonton, who holds the Muzak franchise for Southern California (among his other interests: a 51% share of the Delta Queen, one of the last of the Mississippi River passenger steamers). Simonton, 45, was hooked on the Mighty Wurlitzer early in life, when he got a job in Seattle's Fifth Avenue Theater. The lady organist played an all-request program every Saturday, but she had a poor memory for tunes. It was young Simonton's duty to stand beside the console and whistle the melodies for her as titles were yelled from the audience.
Simonton's own Wurlitzer is one of the largest home installations in the U.S. Housed in a private 63-seat movie theater in the basement of his Toluca Lake home in North Hollywood, the organ is a four-manual 36-ranker, identical in size to the instruments in Manhattan's Paramount Theater, the Fox theaters in Detroit, St. Louis, Brooklyn and San Francisco.* Nucleus of Simonton's organ was a 19-rank job from Paramount Studios in Hollywood, to which he has added a new four-manual console and ten additional tons of pipework.
Though he admits to being only a noodler himself, Simonton never lacks for live music. Famed Theater Organist Jesse Crawford—"the Poet of the Organ"—comes over to practice on the Wurlitzer three days a week. And when Simonton reels off a silent flicker in his basement Bijou, he always has on hand an oldtime organist to accompany the picture with the requisite mysteriosos and agitatos.
The Giant Keepers. The American Association of Theatre Organ Enthusiasts numbers more than 1,500 devotees of the Mighty Wurlitzer and its cousins, the Silver Throated Barton, the Kilgen Wonder Organ, the Möller De Luxe, the Marr & Colton Symphonic Registrator. Among the cultists:
> Humorist Herb Shriner, whose Larchmont, N.Y., home shelters a 14-rank Wurlitzer salvaged from the old Chicago Arena. Shriner is better known as a harmonica player (he recently played as soloist with the Cleveland Symphony) than as an organist. Says he: "All my life I wanted a mouth organ big enough to set down to, and now I've got it. My wife calls it a mechanical mother-in-law."
> TV Actor Joe Kearns ("Mr. Wilson" on Dennis the Menace), who literally built his Hollywood home around a 26-rank Wurlitzer.
> Reinhold Delzer, Bismarck, N. Dak., contractor, who rescued the 20-rank Wurlitzer from the demolished Radio City Theater in Minneapolis. Delzer has carved out a grotto for his prize beneath his home after getting special permission from a nonplussed Bismarck city commission to build organ chambers tangent to a city right of way.
> Radio Red-Baiter Fulton Lewis Jr., who is not a card-carrying member of the A.T.O.E., has nonetheless gone underground with a theater organ in his basement—a modest, three-rank Robert Morton instrument salvaged from a Tampa movie house.