4-minute read
It’s 9 a.m. on Tuesday morning when Kim Martin flips the switch on an old friend.
Two large air-blowers hum to life in the basement of the Polk Theatre. The Robert Morton Pipe Organ begins to breathe.
The 100-year-old instrument can be grumpy when it wakes up, affected by weather, humidity and temperature. It needs time for the pressure to equalize. Martin, who is 73, needs a few minutes to gauge how the instrument is feeling — what’s in and out of tune, which parts feel reliable or not so much.
Martin, who is the senior organist at the Polk, goes through this routine before each of his performances. As his fingers and feet move over the keys and pedals, Bob Siegel, 86, makes his way through the fire doors behind the theater and takes a seat near the organ, where he’ll wait for the rest of the team.
It takes a village: There are seven regular volunteers, including members of the Central Florida Theatre Organ Society, who help maintain the mammoth organ.
“It’s a continuous job,” says Siegel.
It requires a team who understand electronics, mechanics and tuning, plus those who can get into the organ’s hard-to-reach areas.
Siegel has a background in electrical engineering. Martin went to school for music education and worked as an IMAX projectionist for the Smithsonian.
Gary Blais, 68, specializes in tuning. Blais spent years as a radio and television broadcast engineer.
Troy Hambly, 58, fell in love with the organ as a kid when his parents took him to a restaurant where Frank Pellico was performing. Long before his career as a firefighter and EMT, Hambly studied under Pellico and learned to play.
Finally, an organ: James C. Casale designed the “atmospheric” Polk Theatre, which opened in 1928, to transport moviegoers to an Italian Renaissance courtyard, with faux-balconies and windows and ornate columns beneath a deep blue night sky, featuring a cloud machine and star machine.
The original design also included a pipe organ, but advancements in technology led owners to instead install a “Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc process . . . The first successfully mass-produced ‘talkie’ system,” according to Stephen E. Branch, in the journal Tampa Bay History.
The pipe chambers, behind the windows flanking the stage, sat empty for nearly 60 years.
After its heyday, decline, years of disrepair, and eventual restoration, the Polk Theatre finally acquired an organ in the 1980s.
The Polk organ — a Robert Morton Pipe Organ — was originally installed in the Loew’s Theater in Canton, Ohio. After that theater was closed in 1957, it was moved into a private home in the 1960s, followed by a stint in Scampi’s Old Organ Grinder Pizza Emporium in Austin, Texas, from 1977 to 1985. Then it was brought to Lakeland.
Bells and whistles: Troy Hambly has to squeeze into the pipe chambers to maintain the lead and wood pipes mounted alongside a car horn, train whistle, bass drum and wood block. Those additions separate theater pipe organs from the pipe organs typically found in churches.
Designed to accompany silent films, theater organs are capable of making a wider variety of sounds, including knocks, gongs, whistles and ringing bells. Everything is powered pneumatically, by air pushed through large black ductwork from the blowers in the basement.
A pipe organ is one of the few instruments that can fill a space as large as a theater with sound. Rather than hiring a group of musicians, theaters could hire a single organist to provide a soundtrack.
Playing along with a silent film was an art in itself, as movie studios did not provide scores. Organists had to compose their own or improvise.
Endangered species: There are very few real pipe organs left in Florida. Even fewer are regularly available for the public to enjoy.
“This is probably the only place you can come almost every day, whenever they’re showing a movie, that Kim (Martin) or someone else will play the organ,” Siegel said.
“Basically, I am the only one playing regularly in Central Florida,” said Martin.
Before each showing, he researches the movie and chooses songs related to the film to entertain guests as they get settled.
Calling all players: Methods to care for and maintain the Polk Theatre organ have passed from one person to the next over the years.
“I’ve been here about 15 years, but there’s a long heritage of people who worked on it behind us,” said Siegel.
The group is looking to increase public knowledge of the organ and find those interested in continuing its maintenance or learning to play.
“We desperately need people to play,” Martin said.
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