Miss Page: the Embassy's Grande Page organ

Installed 1928 — still playing

Not a Wurlitzer: The Embassy Theatre's famous organ is a Page — a Grande Page theatre pipe organ of four manuals and fifteen ranks, built by the Page Organ Company of Lima, Ohio, and installed when the theatre opened as the Emboyd on May 14, 1928. (The instrument is persistently misdescribed as a Wurlitzer, even in otherwise careful briefs; the theatre-organ record is unambiguous that it is a Page, original to the room.) On opening night the twenty-piece Emboyd Symphonic Orchestra under Wilber Pickett played the dedication overture, and the "Mighty Page Grande Organ" was played by Percy Robbins, who stayed for a long engagement as the theatre's first organist; the console, with its 260 stops and rainbow-gold decoration, rose from the pit to accompany pictures five times a day, seven days a week. The organ's second life is the famous one. When the Alliance chain renamed the house the Embassy in 1952, the Page fell mostly silent — until Buddy Nolan, a pianist and organist who had arrived in Fort Wayne in 1947 after wartime army service, made it his cause. Named house organist in 1952, Nolan spent his own money and time tuning and improving the instrument, left and returned for good in the fall of 1962, and in 1963 played the first concert on the restored organ — from midnight to 2:30 in the morning, beginning his celebrated "Theatre Organ at Midnight" series. With technician Bob Nickerson as the organ's chief keeper, Nolan made the Embassy Page known, in the theatre-organ journal's phrase, around the globe. When the theatre itself was threatened with demolition in the early 1970s, the organ was the rallying cry: Nolan, Robert Goldstine, and Dyne Pfeffenberger led the campaign that created the Embassy Theatre Foundation, and Nolan's May 1975 benefit concert filled the house to capacity. The instrument was restored between 1976 and 1996 (the Architecture record carries the building's side of that work), its console completely rebuilt by the Aikman Organ Company's Carlton B. Smith in 1988. Nolan died in 1986, synonymous, as Theatre Organ magazine wrote, with the Embassy itself. The Grande Page — "Miss Page" to the theatre's own telling — remains in place, maintained by a dedicated crew, and is still played: it is one of the very few theatre organs in America that has sounded in its original room, nearly without interruption, since 1928.

Sources:

1. Theatre Organ, journal of the American Theatre Organ Society — Lloyd E. Klos's Emboyd/Embassy history (Fall 1964; October–November 1975) and Robert J. Ort's account (March/April 1989): the 4/15 Page installed in 1928, Percy Robbins and the opening program, Buddy Nolan's tenure and anecdotes, the console rebuild of 1988, and Nolan's death in 1986.
2. Embassy Theatre history (fwembassytheatre.org, via avidlocals.com) — "Miss Page," Nolan's 1963 midnight-to-2:30 a.m. first concert on the restored organ, the guardians, and the May 1975 capacity benefit concert.
3. Architecture section of this history — the organ in place and still played; restoration 1976–1996.