Massive vintage organ headed back

to historic Corvallis movie theater

By BENNETT HALL

Gazette-Times Reporter

History is where you find it — sometimes in the most unlikely places.

Oregon State University archaeologist David Brauner is used to unearthing artifacts in the field, but one of his more significant discoveries was made right on campus.

Brauner is a regular visitor to the university’s surplus property warehouse, where he scouts for equipment he can use in his work. That’s where, in the summer of 2001, he spotted the old Gill Coliseum organ. After years of firing up the crowd at Beaver basketball games, the instrument had been retired.

“That’s not the kind of thing you usually see in a surplus equipment warehouse, so I went over and took a look at it, and there was a little plaque on it,” Brauner recalled. “I was shocked to find it was the Whiteside organ.”

The plaque recorded the Wurlitzer’s donation to OSU decades earlier, and Brauner now realized this was the same instrument that once accompanied silent movies at the old Whiteside Theatre downtown. He also realized that a significant piece of local history was about to be put up for bid at an OSUsed surplus property auction.

“I said, ‘Whoa! That can’t happen.’”

Brauner called a former student, Mary Gallagher, who by then was working as the collections manager for the Benton County Historical Museum. She immediately got on the phone to university officials.

“We were of course concerned, and we called over there and asked if they would donate it,” Gallagher said. “The deal was that if we hauled it, they would donate it.”

The console was transported to Philomath, where it went on display in the museum. Eventually that exhibit came down, and the organ went into storage. And there it stayed until the museum received a call from some people in Silverton who were restoring the old Palace Theatre. They were looking for a Wurlitzer to replace the one that once graced the Palace, and the museum agreed to let them have the Whiteside console on loan.

And then history took yet another unexpected turn.

Early this year, a group of Corvallis preservationists blocked a Portland firm’s plans to redevelop the Whiteside Theatre as retail and restaurant space and persuaded owner Regal Entertainment Group to donate the vintage picture palace for restoration.

And that, Gallagher says, changed everything. Suddenly, it became possible to restore the organ to its original home in the Whiteside.

“We’ve always thought it belonged there,” Gallagher said. “We always agreed that if it could be reunited with the pipes, that would be the best and highest use for it.”

The first step in that reunion is taking place this week as volunteers work to remove the organ pipes from Gill Coliseum, where they’ve been since the Whiteside family donated the instrument to the university in 1961.

OSU is getting ready to remodel the arena and needs the pipes removed by July 1, said Louise-Annette Burgess, vice chairwoman of the Whiteside Theatre Foundation board of directors.

It’s a big job because the organ is a big instrument. It’s also an antique, dating from 1927.

“A theater organ is very fragile,” said Burgess. “It has many parts.”

The Whiteside organ’s 638 pipes, mounted in wooden boxes high on the west wall of Gill Coliseum, range from about 3 inches to 8 feet in length. Each one must be carefully removed, wrapped in padding and packed in wooden crates for transport and storage, Burgess said.

In addition, there’s an assortment of auxiliary instruments that can be controlled from the organ keyboard, including sleighbells, chimes, a drum and a woodblock. There are also wooden shutters that control the volume of air pumped through the organ.

About two dozen volunteers are working on the project, including a pair of experts from the Columbia River Organ Club.

“We’re hoping to be done by Friday,” Burgess said.

The pipes will be kept in a rented, climate-controlled storage facility in Philomath for now. In the meantime, as volunteer help and donations permit, the nonprofit Whiteside Theatre Foundation will begin the painstaking work of restoring the organ.

A big part of that involves “releathering,” the process of replacing the leather wings of the wooden bellows that sends air through each pipe.

“The releathering has to be done very carefully because if you have a hole between the leather and the wood, that pipe will either sound all the time or it won’t sound at all,” Burgess said. “We have volunteers being trained right now to do the work.”

Ultimately, the foundation plans to reinstall the organ in the Whiteside, where it will be used for concerts, education and its original purpose — to provide live musical accompaniment to silent films.

Bennett Hall can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.