Richard Simonton
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Richard Simonton
Richard Simonton (1915–1979), also known under the pseudonym Doug Malloy, was a Hollywood businessman and entrepreneur, known for his involvement in the Hollywood community, his rescue of the steamboat ''Delta Queen'', his work in preserving the work of musicians in the Welte-Mignon piano rolls and for founding the American Theatre Organ Society. Among piercing enthusiasts he is also known as an early pioneer of the contemporary resurgence in body piercing. Early life and professional career Richard Simonton was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1915. His father died when he was three, and his mother subsequently moved to Seattle, where he grew up in the difficult conditions of the Great Depression. He showed an early aptitude for music and audio engineering, earning money in high school by tuning pipe organs. He later worked for the Masterphone Sound Company, which installed sound systems in silent theatres adapting to the new talking pictures. Always of an inventive and entre ...
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Evanston, Illinois
Evanston ( ) is a city, suburb of Chicago. Located in Cook County, Illinois, United States, it is situated on the North Shore along Lake Michigan. Evanston is north of Downtown Chicago, bordered by Chicago to the south, Skokie to the west, Wilmette to the north, and Lake Michigan to the east. Evanston had a population of 78,110 . Founded by Methodist business leaders in 1857, the city was incorporated in 1863. Evanston is home to Northwestern University, founded in 1851 before the city's incorporation, one of the world's leading research universities. Today known for its socially liberal politics and ethnically diverse population, Evanston was historically a dry city, until 1972. The city uses a council–manager system of government and is a Democratic stronghold. The city is heavily shaped by the influence of Chicago, externally, and Northwestern, internally. The city and the university share a historically complex long-standing relationship. History Prior to the 1830s, ...
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Groucho Marx
Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx (; October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977) was an American comedian, actor, writer, stage, film, radio, singer, television star and vaudeville performer. He is generally considered to have been a master of quick wit and one of America's greatest comedians. He made 13 feature films as a team with his siblings the Marx Brothers; he was the third-born of the brothers. He also had a successful solo career primarily on radio and television, most notably as the host of the game show ''You Bet Your Life''. His distinctive appearance, carried over from his days in vaudeville, included quirks such as an exaggerated stooped posture, spectacles, cigar, and a thick greasepaint mustache and eyebrows. These exaggerated features resulted in the creation of one of the most recognizable and ubiquitous novelty disguises, known as Groucho glasses: a one-piece mask consisting of horn-rimmed glasses, a large plastic nose, bushy eyebrows and mustache. Early life Julius H ...
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Paramount Theatre (Manhattan)
The Paramount Theatre was a 3,664-seat movie palace located at 43rd Street and Broadway (Manhattan), Broadway on Times Square in New York City. Opened in 1926, it was a showcase theatre and the New York headquarters of Paramount Pictures. Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount predecessor Famous Players Film Company, maintained an office in the building until his death in 1976. The Paramount Theatre eventually became a popular live performance venue. The theater was closed in 1964 and its space converted to office and retail use. The tower which housed it, known as the ''Paramount Building'' at 1501 Broadway, is in commercial use as an office building and is still home to Paramount Pictures offices. Following the closing of the Times Square Paramount Theatre, two other theaters in Manhattan have had the same name: the Paramount Theatre at Madison Square Garden and a movie theater in Columbus Circle, now demolished. The Brooklyn Paramount Theater, also in New York City, opened in ...
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Korla Pandit
Korla Pandit (September 16, 1921 – October 2, 1998), born John Roland Redd, was an American musician, composer, pianist, and organist. After moving to California in the late 1940s and getting involved in show business, Redd became known as "Korla Pandit", a French-Indian musician from New Delhi, India. However, Redd was actually a light-skinned African-American man from Missouri who passed as Indian. A pathbreaking musical performer in the early days of television, Redd is known for ''Korla Pandit's Adventures In Music''; the show was the first all-music program on television. He also performed live and on radio and made various film appearances, becoming known as the "Godfather of Exotica". Redd maintained the Korla Pandit persona—both in public and in private—until the end of his life. Early life, marriage, and family In 1921, John Roland Redd was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Ernest Redd, was an African-American Baptist pastor. Redd's mother, Doshia O'Nina Jo ...
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Gordon Kibbee
Gordon may refer to: People * Gordon (given name), a masculine given name, including list of persons and fictional characters * Gordon (surname), the surname * Gordon (slave), escaped to a Union Army camp during the U.S. Civil War * Clan Gordon, aka the House of Gordon, a Scottish clan Education * Gordon State College, a public college in Barnesville, Georgia * Gordon College (Massachusetts), a Christian college in Wenham, Massachusetts * Gordon College (Pakistan), a Christian college in Rawalpindi, Pakistan * Gordon College (Philippines), a public university in Subic, Zambales * Gordon College of Education, a public college in Haifa, Israel Places Australia *Gordon, Australian Capital Territory *Gordon, New South Wales * Gordon, South Australia *Gordon, Victoria *Gordon River, Tasmania *Gordon River (Western Australia) Canada *Gordon Parish, New Brunswick *Gordon/Barrie Island, municipality in Ontario *Gordon River (Chochocouane River), a river in Quebec Scotland *Gordon ( ...
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Jesse Crawford
Jesse Crawford (December 2, 1895 – May 28, 1962) was an American pianist and organist. He was well known in the 1920s as a theatre organist for silent films and as a popular recording artist. In the 1930s, he switched to the Hammond organ and became a freelancer. In the 1940s, he authored instruction books on organ and taught organ lessons. Early life He was born in Woodland, California. Crawford's father died when Jesse was one year old and left an impoverished wife and mother, who placed the baby in an orphanage asylum near Woodland in which Jesse taught himself music. At the age of nine, he was already playing a cornet in the orphanage band. At age 14, he left the orphanage to play piano in a small dance band, and then took a job playing piano in a ten-cent-admission silent film house. His early theatre organ experience was at Washington's Spokane Gem Theater in 1911 and at the Clemmer-owned Casino Theatre (on an eight-rank Estey organ). He next played briefly at theatres in ...
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Gaylord Carter
Gaylord Carter (August 3, 1905 – November 20, 2000) was an American organist and the composer of many film scores that were added to silent movies released on video tape or disks. He died from Parkinson disease. Early life and musical beginnings Gaylord Beach Carter was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, the son of Charles Davis Carter (1857–1940) and Olive Athena Beach (1873–1964). His father was a church organist and taught music, while his mother taught voice. They met in Europe and were married at Litchfield cathedral in England, eventually spending time in Wiesbaden, where Gaylord was born. He was originally to be called Mortimer Preston Carter, and the name Gaylord came about later. His family soon emigrated to the United States, settling in Wichita, Kansas, where his father opened a conservatory of music and also served as a church organist. The young Carter displayed the family talent for music and became a soloist in a church choir, until his voice changed. He also pl ...
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Wurlitzer
The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, usually referred to as simply Wurlitzer, is an American company started in Cincinnati in 1853 by German immigrant (Franz) Rudolph Wurlitzer. The company initially imported stringed, woodwind and brass instruments from Germany for resale in the United States. Wurlitzer enjoyed initial success, largely due to defense contracts to provide musical instruments to the U.S. military. In 1880, the company began manufacturing pianos and eventually relocated to North Tonawanda, New York. It quickly expanded to make band organs, orchestrions, player pianos and pipe or theatre organs popular in theatres during the days of silent movies. Wurlitzer is most known for their production of entry level pianos. During the 1960s, they manufactured Spinet, Console, Studio and Grand Pianos. Over time, Wurlitzer acquired a number of other companies which made a variety of loosely related products, including kitchen appliances, carnival rides, player piano rolls and radi ...
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Virgil Fox
Virgil Keel Fox (May 3, 1912 in Princeton, Illinois – October 25, 1980 in Palm Beach, Florida) was an American organist, known especially for his years as organist at Riverside Church in New York City, from 1946 to 1965, and his flamboyant "Heavy Organ" concerts of the music of Bach in the 1970s, staged complete with light shows. His many recordings made on the RCA Victor and Capitol labels, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, have been remastered and re-released on compact disc in recent years. They continue to be widely available in mainstream music stores. Birth and studies Virgil Fox was born on May 3, 1912, in Princeton, Illinois, to Miles and Birdie Fox, a farming family. Showing musical talent at an early age, he began playing the organ for church services as a ten-year old as well as at a local movie theater owned by his father. Four years later, Fox made his concert debut before an audience of 2,500 at Withrow High School in Cincinnati, Ohio. The program included one of the m ...
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Aeolian-Skinner
Æolian-Skinner Organ Company, Inc. of Boston, Massachusetts was an American builder of a large number of pipe organs from its inception as the Skinner Organ Company in 1901 until its closure in 1972. Key figures were Ernest M. Skinner (1866–1960), Arthur Hudson Marks (1875–1939), Joseph Silver Whiteford (1921-1978), and G. Donald Harrison (1889–1956). The company was formed from the merger of the Skinner Organ Company and the pipe organ division of the Æolian Company in 1932. Skinner period The Skinner & Cole Company was formed in 1902 as a partnership of Ernest Skinner and Cole, another former Hutchings-Votey employee. By 1904 the partnership had dissolved, and the "Ernest M. Skinner & Company" purchased the Skinner and Cole assets, in the form of the contract for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity in New York CityOpus 113, 190Holy Trinity Lutheran Church Organ History (Accessed 25 Dec 2010) from the former company for $1. Between 1904 and 1910, t ...
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American Theatre Organ Enthusiasts
American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, people who self-identify their ancestry as "American" ** American English, the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States ** Native Americans in the United States, indigenous peoples of the United States * American, something of, from, or related to the Americas, also known as "America" ** Indigenous peoples of the Americas * American (word), for analysis and history of the meanings in various contexts Organizations * American Airlines, U.S.-based airline headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas * American Athletic Conference, an American college athletic conference * American Recordings (record label), a record label previously known as Def American * American University, in Washington, D.C. Sports teams Soccer * Ba ...
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Theatre Organ
A theatre organ (also known as a theater organ, or, especially in the United Kingdom, a cinema organ) is a type of pipe organ developed to accompany silent films, from the 1900s to the 1920s. Theatre organs have horseshoe-shaped arrangements of stop tabs (tongue-shaped switches) above and around the instrument's keyboards on their consoles. Theatre organ consoles were typically decorated with brightly colored stop tabs, with built-in console lighting. Organs in the UK had a common feature: large translucent surrounds extending from both sides of the console, with internal colored lighting. Theatre organs began to be installed in other venues, such as civic auditoriums, sports arenas, private residences, and churches. One of the largest theatre organs ever built was the 6 manual 52 rank Barton installed in the Chicago Stadium. There were over 7,000 such organs installed in America and elsewhere from 1915 to 1933, but fewer than 40 instruments remain in their original venues. Th ...
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