A Musical Dream Come True : Pasadena City College Gives Theater Organ a New Home

Part of a dream arrived last week at Pasadena City College on the back of a truck.

It was a pretty hefty dream, requiring a mechanical hoist and the labor of five men to jigger it through a back entrance at Sexson Auditorium and onto a place of honor under the stage spotlights.

When they finished, the men stood back and admired it: a three-tiered, black-and-gold console belonging to a $750,000 Wurlitzer Theater Organ.

The organ is a dream come true for the college, the Los Angeles Theatre Organ Society and the family of J. Ross Reed, all of whom have worked for the last three years to install the instrument at PCC.

“It’s the culmination of a lot of people’s dreams,” said Sexson Auditorium stage manager Frank Way. “That’s why (the dedication concert) is called ‘A Dream Come True.’ It was just about everybody’s dream.”

The dreams included those of Ken Crome, an organ society member who pieced together cast-off Wurlitzer parts during the 1970s to create his dream of a perfect organ.

A Michigan pizza parlor bought the instrument in 1979 and used it for a time. But a few years later, it was auctioned off to the society, which hoped to place it in a public hall as part of its concert and fund-raising program.

Enter J. Ross Reed, a Pasadena electrical engineer, who next acquired the organ from the society in 1985 and installed it in a La Mirada warehouse. But two weeks after the first public concert in the warehouse, Reed died, leaving his seven children to fulfill his dream of a public home for the instrument where schoolchildren could play it.

Pasadena City College became a logical choice. Reed and all of his children had attended the institution. In addition, the school’s auditorium was originally designed for a theater organ but one had never been installed for lack of funds.

Now, $100,000 worth of repairs have been completed on the organ by the society, which will maintain it and use it for concerts.

Another $100,000 worth of renovations in the auditorium have been made by the college, which will use the instrument as part of its music course offerings. Already, 18 students are enrolled in the college’s first theater organ class.

But much work remains before the Oct. 14 debut concert.

Last week, organ pipes littered the auditorium stage. Some lay in wooden crates and others stood in rows backstage. They must be carried up ladders and into two high-ceilinged rooms on both sides of the stage, where they will sit in orderly ranks--1,667 pipes ranging in size from wooden growlers as wide as an air-conditioning chute to tiny pipers as thin as a pencil.

“This organ, although it’s old, it’s new,” said Donn Linton, president of the Los Angeles organ society. “It’s state of the art.”

For theater organs, that means using a computer to relay signals to the pipes instead of old-fashioned electric wires. Before computers, an entire room filled with electrical wires was needed. Now, a computer beneath the stage will perform the same function.

Linton, as are many organ enthusiasts, seemed equally engrossed by the mechanics of the instrument as by its aesthetics. Theater organs, he explained, unlike their church cousins, are generally smaller and have less force. They were designed during the era of silent films to simulate an entire orchestra, with sound effects such as train whistles, fire engines and even the human voice.

“A church organ may have four times the size of a theater organ,” Linton said, “but it can’t do justice to a Sousa march.”

Organ aficionados also know that no two theater organs are alike. Each varies depending on its works and the building that houses it. Thus, PCC’s organ will have a new sound in its new environment.

“Oh, this will be a magnificent thing,” Linton said.