Rare vintage Wurlitzer finds new home at the Paramount

CEDAR RAPIDS - When the Paramount Theatre reopens in 2012, the organ pipes will be singing the same old song, which is music to the ears of organ enthusiasts.

The city of Cedar Rapids has purchased the very next console built in the 1920s after the Mighty Wurlitzer, which was destroyed when 8 feet of raging floodwaters tossed it onto the Paramount stage in June 2008.

It took a national search, a stroke of good luck, and $7,500 in insurance funds to buy the instrument from a private collector.

Jeff Weiler of Chicago, who is leading the $300,000 Paramount organ restoration project, picked up the console in Alliance, Ohio, on Wednesday and drove it to Cedar Rapids in a rented panel truck. He and a crew from the Cedar Rapids Area Theatre Organ Society (CRATOS) unloaded it Friday morning into a secure city storage facility, next to the remnants of the Mighty Wurlitzer.

The famed organ company produced its instruments sequentially, and historians later assigned them Opus numbers, Weiler said. The Mighty Wurlitzer was dubbed Opus 1907. The “new” console is Opus 1908.

“Finding any Wurlitzer console is extremely difficult,” he said. “Finding one that was still intact is extremely difficult. Finding the console from the next instrument built is - there must be higher forces at work in doing that, because that is absolutely incredible.

“These materials were created at the same time, in succession, and the artisans that worked on this console were the same artisans that worked on that console within weeks of each other,” he said.

“From the standpoint of a restorer, that's as good as it gets.”

Similar in color but less ornate than its predecessor, the Opus 1908 console was installed in the Kenmore Theatre in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1928. It will be rehabilitated and end up looking very much like the organ that has delighted Cedar Rapids audiences for 80 years.

“The new console will be restored so that it will conform in every respect to the original,” Weiler said.

As many components as possible will be salvaged from the Mighty Wurlitzer and incorporated into the finished replacement. Work is estimated to take about a year.

A native of Traer, Weiler, 52, is a 1981 Coe College graduate and pipe organ conservationist with a special affinity to the Paramount organ.

“That instrument is an old friend,” he told The Gazette early in the restoration process. “I've known that instrument since my youth. I have a real emotional attachment to it.”

After the Paramount reopens, the organ installed in 1928 to accompany silent films will be silent no more. CRATOS plans to hold two organ concerts and have the instrument featured in two Orchestra Iowa concerts each year.