About 400 elementary- and middle-school students taking part in the Shenendehowa Inventors program will display their inventions at the former Cotton Market store at Clifton Park Center from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday.
Aviators and theater organists have a strange symbiosis.
“It’s something about those buttons,” said Carl Hackert, who plays Proctors’ Wurlitzer theater organ, known as Goldie. He also is the coordinator for the monthly noon organ concerts. “To play a theater organ, you need to be an orchestrator, to think in more dimensions. It’s like flying planes. It’s the same part of the brain. It’s a machine and you need to make that machine do what you want it to do.
The physical appearance of the instrument may explain why so many pilots play it, or why a theater organist could make a good pilot, Hackert said. One need only look at the 250 stops or buttons placed on a console that gently curves in a horseshoe shape around the player, along with the three keyboards and the 32 foot pedals. Posted on February 3, 2010.
Organist Carl Hackert talks about “Goldie,” Proctors’ mighty Wurlitzer organ during the free MVP Health Care Organ Concert Series presented by the Hudson - Mohawk Theatre Organ Society.
‘Theater organs were the precursors of synthesizers . . . . When people hear a theater organ, they can’t believe it. [The society is] trying to preserve this,” said Carl Hackert, organist, member of the Hudson-Mohawk Chapter of the American Theatre Organ Society and coordinator of MVP’s monthly concerts at Proctors. Here, Helen Maksymicz of Little Falls plays “Goldie.”
Organist Charles Jones accompanies members of the Schenectady Light Opera on "Goldie" during a November 2009 MVP Noontime Recital at Proctors. Photo courtesy of retired Gazette photographer and Hudson-Mohawk Theatre Organ Society member Sid Brown
