Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk Ruth und Sohn Band Organ

The organ made in 1894 in Germany has returned to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, after an over one year restoration by Don Stinson. The organ has a new face or facade, replacing the origonal one that was lost many years ago when the merry go round building was remodeled. Sadly the organ is behind a glass alcove to protect it, and to cut down the sound. The state of California only allows up to 80 DB inside the building.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Santa
• Cruz
• Beach
• Boardwalk
• '09
• 064

[zipperfoot1]

Organ sounds good. I would be interested to know what is the scale (how many keys (or should I say keyless) basis for this Ruth organ? Being that old, was it originally a cylinder organ and converted to book music or rolls?

[koasterkav]

@zipperfoot1 It's a 38 Ruth barritone model. As far as I know it was not a cylinder organ and used book music. Sometime in the 1950's the Boardwalk added the Wurlitzer dual roll player frames to play Wurlitzer 165 msuic, and sadly threw away many pipes to do it. Don Stinson with his work on another Ruth organ back east, made new pipes based on that Ruth organ and it now plays the way it did up to the Wurlitzer conversion, using music from the old books transfered to MIDI.

[anglerfly]

WHY do so many band organs look like 157's?

[koasterkav]

I sent a reply using my cell phone, but it doesn't appear so I'll answer the 157 facade question. Very few Wurlitzer 157 band organs are out there, but Don Stinson likes the fronts from them, and uses it in his large organs. The SCBB did not want to research on the origional Ruth facade, so they agreed to use a Stinson M2000 model as shown.

[tregnier279]

@koasterkav

>>"Get over it."

>>posting a reply to something that happened 10 months ago

I dunno, maybe you'd have a point about me being a stupid whiner or whatever if I'd been arguing this for the past 10 months, but I haven't (in fact I'd forgotten all about it), so... yeah.

[koasterkav]

@tregnier279 Get over it. They really had nothing to go on. The only photo showing the facade was taken at a distance away from the ride, and showed an outline of it, but no details. Nobody is complaining about the new facade. The old timers know about the park throwing away the original facade a long time ago, and they are happy with the new one. I don't hear the band organ community upset about it like you are.

[tregnier279]

I always have thought it interesting how the "Mighty WurliTzer" organs were copied almost exactly from other organs by competing manufacturers.

I still think the WurliTzer 157 facade they put on this organ was horribly inappropriate.

[KawhackitaRag]

Correct! It was copied from the 65-keyless model. In this case it was an almost exact copy even down to the original scale.

The Wurlitzer 146A and 146B late-model facades are copied from the Wilhelm Bruder Sohne model 79 facade, but that organ itself is a Wurlitzer scale and design.

Many other organs are copied from cylinder organs:

the 104 and 105 from the 17;

the 125 from the 18;

the 110 from the 19;

130 from the 20;

150 from the 20-B; and

120 from the 21.

[tregnier279]

Don't forget, the 165 was copied from the Gebr Bruder Apollo Orchestor (I believe that's right.)

[KawhackitaRag]

What's ironic is that the Wurlitzer 157 organ and facade itself was copied from a special-model 57-key Gavioli facade which Gavioli apparently made for Dentzel carousels.

There is one known surviving Gavioli of this type, and it is located on the Rocky Springs Park carousel in Pennsylvania (this is the carousel which was at Dollywood for a while).