1998 image & copy courtesy of the Davenport Iowa History Facebook page.

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1998 image & copy courtesy of the Davenport Iowa History Facebook page.

Capitol Theatre, Wicks Pipe Organ - 1998

Manufactured by the Wicks Pipe Organ Co., which is still in business in Highland, Illinois, the instrument was installed in the Capitol Theatre in 1928 at a reported cost of $30,000. The organ was newly-refurbished in February of 2000 at a cost of $75,000, by Anthony Lamourt, of Davenport, and Del Meinke, a retired Davenport Central High School electronics teacher. The organ is a one-of-a-kind original, designed specifically for stage and film entertainment. Amazingly, it is the only Wicks theatre organ in the world that is still in its original location! It has 1,000 pipes capable of producing the sounds of a full orchestra as well as an impressive variety of sound effects. All of the instrument’s tonal resources - the marimba, wood blocks, tambourine, etc. were all restored. It has three keyboards and eleven ranks containing about 1,000 pipes, ranging from the size of a little finger to some that are fully 16 feet high. The old electro-pneumatic relays that controlled the organ were replaced with a custom-built digital control system. The organ sounds exactly as it did in 1928, but the modern controls give the instrument reliability and longevity.

The Capitol theatre’s original Moeller organ arrived in Davenport on the morning of October 22, 1920. It was one of the largest pipe organs in the world and was an exact replica of the one in use in the Capitol Theatre in New York City. In fact, Davenport’s Capitol Theatre was patterned after the one in New York, even to the lighting system and the arrangement of seats and boxes.

In the days of silent films, all of the audio was supplied by the theatre’s orchestra, or more often, its pipe organ. Seated at their mighty Wurlitzers or Wicks, the theater organists watched the movie and played music they felt was appropriate for the action on screen, often improvising as the story unfolded. Theatre organists could also create sound effects with a stroke of a key or foot pedal, generating noises like a howling wind, sirens, the ring of a telephone, a Model T “ahoogah” horn and other sound effects to coincide with the story line of the photoplay. With the advent of sound movies in the late 1920s, theater organs were used less frequently and like the one at the Capitol Theatre developed mechanical issues due to neglect.