The East Hartford Gazette

HOMEMADE PIPE ORGAN—Allen Miller, 383 Forbes Street, sits (left) at the huge pipe organ which he has built in his bedroom. In center, he hooks up one of the many ducts which distribute air from the blower he has built from three vacuum cleaners, which are in closet. At right, Allen doctors up an old player piano roll so that it will play various chords and sound effects of the organ.

Youth Builds His Own Pipe Organ, And It Works

Wall-to-Wall Music In the Bedroom

High school boys have a way of filling up their bedrooms with items that have little to do with sleeping or dressing or studying. Few have done such a good job as Allen Miller, 17, son of Mr. and Mrs. Preston H. Miller, 383 Forbes Street.

His second floor room is completely dominated by a genuine 35-pipe organ which he has built himself.

It's impossible to pass it on one side, barely possible on the other.

The bass pipes reach up seven feet, just missing the ceiling. The only closet space is taken up by a blower made from three vacuum cleaners scavenged from his parents and both sets of grandparents.

In the morning, instead of radio or phonograph music, great booming, house-shaking chords emanate from his room as he rises. This doesn't slow up his dressing: the organ is equipped with a player piano mechanism and a series of old player rolls which Allen has doctored up with a jack knife so that they record the thundering basses and flute whistles which his organ is capable of producing.

Parts for the entire organ cost him just $62. An officer of a Boston organ firm estimated recently that a factory made organ with the same equipment would cost more than $2,000.

Allen, now a senior, became interested in organ when in the eighth grade. He was encouraged by Robert Erdin, proprietor of East Hartford's Erdin Organ Co who let Allen play an organ at the Home Show that year.

The Miller family own a handsome electric organ, which is in the living room. Mr. and Mrs. Miller and Allen all play it.

Started Last Summer

Last summer Allen determined to build his own. The decision was spurred by the fact that St. John's Church, to which the family belongs, was buying a new organ.

This made it possible to salvage some parts from the old one.

Mrs. Miller didn't object.

The project headed off a proposal by Allen and his father that the family buy a huge theater organ.

"I thought it was one of those things he would start to work on and it would be too much and he would drop it," she said.

Allen wasn't to be discouraged.

He "begged" some of the smaller pipes and the player piano mechanism from St. John's. He got the large bass pipes as a gift from an organ firm in Hartford. They came from an out-dated model which had been traded in.

For $25, he got the chest under the pipes and an air regulator from the Aeolian Skinner Organ Co., of Boston, which was selling a new organ to St. John's.

He made shutters that open and shut to control volume. He made the air blower from the three vacuum cleaners.

Climbed Through Theaters

Allen hit upon an ingenious way to get other miscellaneous parts. He made the rounds of old movie theaters, asking to see their organs.

"They'd say the organ was taken out years ago," he said.

"But they didn't know that most of the pipes and connections were still in."

Climbing around through the upper reaches of the theaters, he would often find something he needed. Managers prove to be soft touches when asked for something they didn't know they had.

For $2.50 Allen bought hundreds of old player piano rolls from a woman in Burnside. These he converted into organ music by cutting new slits in them to control the volume and tone mechanisms that pianos don't have.

Right now, the organ plays better from the player roll than it does when manually operated.

With the player mechanism, Allen can run around the room turning special effects on and off. He doesn't yet have enough convenient pedals and buttons and keys to use the organ's full power when both hands are on the keyboard.

Intercom Helps Tuning

Allen also built an intercom system between his bedroom and the living room so he can tune his upstairs organ by the downstairs one.

One of his next jobs will be to disassemble large parts of his organ so that he can get it out of the house and enter it in next month's Northern Connecticut Science Fair.

Meanwhile, just for practice on the side, he has rigged the family's living room organ so that it plays doorbells, sleigh bells, an auto horn, a cow bell, a train whistle and other miscellaneous noises. He works these into musical pieces with a Spike Jones effect. Net cost in space of these attachments is some miscellaneous wires, bells and panels on the steps going upstairs.

Allen's tastes in music are not too elaborate. He likes "theater music," preferably pleasant tunes that lend themselves to elaborate sound effects. His goal is to be an electronics engineer. It could be argued that he's a long way toward it already.