University Daily Kansan, October 20, 1982
Page 6
Modern day pipe organs embody beauty, technology
By DAN PARELMAN Staff Reporter
The pipe organ console stood stoically in the 100-year-old, stone-walled room.
Malayog keys rested on the console that would be shipped to
But Al Brandt, the Reuter Pipe Organ Co. production manager, pointed at the network of circuit boards attached like a respirator to the back of the console.
"If we can't give the federal government credit for anything else, we can give them credit for solid state technology," he said.
Brandt said space age technology blended with the old craft to make modern day pipe organs.
AND SO, in its 60th year of business,
the Reutep Teipe Organ Co., 612 New
Hampshire St., still builds pipe organs for churches and university cathedrals
Alan Fisher, personnel and purchasing manager and Reuter employee since 1949, said four men founded Reuter at Trenton, III, in 1917. The men, A.C. Reuter, his nephew, Albert Sabel Sr., Henry Jost, and Herman Schwartz began shipping organs to businesses across the midwest and the south.
When one of those organs went by train to the Masonic Temple in Lawrence, Fisher said, local businessmen told Reuter that Lawrence, a christian peron, had an empty building which the company could move into.
REUTER ACCEPTED the offer and in 1919 moved into the former Wilder shirt factory, adding an assembly room
large enough to fit a 20-foot pipe organ.
Although the company still ships organs to points across the United States, Fisher said he was not sure how the company survived.
"New sales are not what we want them to be." Fisher said.
"Just tenacity, I guess," he said. Now the economy has taken its toll on Reuter. Lower sales forced it to lay off 20 employees last month, reducing its number of employees to 40. Fisher said the company only broke even last year.
THE COMPANY, which sells about 30 organs a year, has not duplicated its peak years of the 1950s and early 1960s, Fisher said. During World War II, the factory was converted into a factory that made tote boxes to carry powder at the Sunflower Ammunition plant, he said.
meso sacked as new communities began building churches, he said. Reuter is one of the group's leaders.
After the war, the company's busi-
A brown, fading map of the United States, dotted with pins, hangs behind Fisher's desk. The red pins represent cities where organs were sold before World War II; the white pins represent organs sold between 1945 and 1965; and the blue pins represent organs sold since 1965, he said.
REUTER ORGANS are played in Danforth Chapel and Swartout Recital Hall at KU, and in Lawrence churches, including the First Methodist, First Christian First Baptist, United Methodism Saint John's Catholic church, Fisher said.
He said a church would pay $125,000 on the average for an organ.
Fisher said the company blended poplar, oak, walnut, magnolia, birch.
rosewood or maple to build different types of organs.
Georgian poplars make the wind chests of the organs, where the pipes supply theeries of valves inside the wind stent that helps air flow into the pipes to make sound, he said.
THE COMPANY used to use Philippe mahogany for wind chests, but shifted to poplar when it discovered that worms infested the mahogany and formed tiny holes. Wind chests must be airtight, Fisher said.
Fisher walked to the huge, garage-like assembly room to further explain the pipe organ. He climbed a ladder to the top of the forest of pipes in the organ destined for Alabama. He plucked one of the smaller pipes, which was about a quarter inch in diameter, producing a high-pitched whistle. He said pipes could be as small as one inch.
IN THE CONSOLE room, Brandt said the console he was working on featured quad memory. He said that an organist using quad memory could set four music patterns for each stop, or sound key, on the console.
Charles Wilson, in the console room with Brandt, tests Brandt's handwork after it is finished. Wilson tunes the mix, then makes adjustments to achieve the goal.
Wilson also adjusts the organ's sounds after they are installed in chandelier fixtures.
"This organ out here will sound entirely different when it gets to the chest."
Brandt said the acoustics of churches used to be perfect for organ music.
The largest pipes on the organ are 18 feet long. Fisher said the larger organs
"Now you walk into a church with the padded pews and the canvas walls and the sound is totally dead," he said.
Wilson told Brandt that an organ Reuter had made in the 1960s that he had recently inspected was in great shape. Reuter knew how to make good organs then, he said, and they still make good organs.
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Fisher rode a wooden, platform elevator up three flights to the console robe.
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