From Portable Pianos to Portable Organs
Earlier this week My Own True Love and I were at an event at an aviation history museum in Poplar Grove, Illinois.* In the course of chatting with the executive director, the GI Steinway (aka the Victory Vertical) came up. The director mentioned that another museum in the community had a portable organ made for army chaplains. Once again down the rabbit hole. I went**
Army chaplain Thomas Eugene West, plays the organ during the singing of a hymn by members of the Japanese-American 422 Division combat team at the Sunday services at Camp Shelby
It turns out that the army was a late player in the production of portable reed pump organs. The first portable organs were invented in the late nineteenth century for use by missionaries,*** traveling evangelists, and, and, at the other end of the musical social spectrum, by traveling musicians who played at dances. The organs had a shorter keyboard than a regular reed organ and folded up into a box roughly the size of a large suitcase.**** Unlike the military pianos produced by Steinway in the Second World War, portable organs were designed to be carried by one strong person: they weighed 90 pounds in the carrying case.
By World War II, Etsey and other organ manufacturers were producing folding organs in olive drab boxes as part of the standard chaplain’s kit and continued to be part of the kit through the Korean War.
*The Poplar Grove Vintage Wings and Wheels Museum: https://www.wingsandwheelsmuseum.org/ If aviation history is your thing and you find yourself in northern Illinois, it’s worth a stop.
**If you decide to follow this up further, I will point out something that confused me for a bit: The Etsey Organ Company was the major manufacturer of reed organs in the United States, portable and otherwise, for roughly 100 years. There are also several listings of chaplain organs on Etsy. You’re welcome.
***The Etsey Organ Company developed an “Acclimatized Organ” in the 1880s which was designed to withstand tropical weather, possibly pioneering some of the techniques used to weatherproof pianos for military use in the Pacific Theater.
****One source describes it as the size of a child’s coffin, which is vivid but misses the point that the organ was portable.
Late to the Party: Independent Bookstore Day
In the United States, the last Saturday of April is Independent Bookstore Day—a nationwide party for book lovers. (Here in Chicago, the independent bookstores host a bookstore crawl, which is far more dangerous than a pub crawl as far as I’m concerned.)
For the past few years, I’ve run a blog post the day the event before reminding book lovers (which I assume includes most of you) not only of the event, but of the importance of supporting independent bookstores. This year I missed it—in both meanings of that word. It slipped past my radar, so I didn’t run my annual love letter to independent bookstores. I had a conflicting event that meant I couldn’t even make it to my neighborhood bookstore, let along running around downtown to as many other bookstores as I could manage. And once I realized that I was going to miss it in the physical sense, I missed it in the emotional (spiritual?) sense.
That said, it’s never too late to support bookstores.
I’m lucky enough to live within walking distance of my two of my favorite stores: the very academic Seminary Coop Bookstore and its more commercial sibling, 57th Street Books. Once there, I browse. I chat about books with booksellers. I check to see if my own books are on the shelves. I check to see if my friends’ books are on the shelves. I attend an occasional reading when the stars are in alignment. I resist the temptation to buy books I don’t need, because at this point I already own several hundred thousand books I have not yet read. And I give in to the temptation to buy more books because with bookstores it’s a case of use them or lose them.
If you’re lucky enough to have an independent bookstore near you, stop by and show them some love. If not, you can adopt an independent bookstore somewhere else*—most of them ship. Or you can buy your books through Bookshop.org, an online bookseller that supports independent bookstores.
*I am happy to recommend the Seminary Coop, where you can preorder signed copies of The Dragon From Chicago**and most any other books your heart desires.
**I’ve said it enough times here that by now you know what to do: https://www.semcoop.com/dragon-chicago-untold-story-american-reporter-nazi-germany
Pianos for Victory
This story has been brought to my attention twice in the last 48 hours from two different sources.* Sometimes the universe says “You need to write a blog post about this!” in a very clear voice.
When the United States entered World War II in 1941, raw materials of all sorts were diverted to the war effort and manufacturers retooled their plants to produce war material. (Typewriters were an interesting example of this.)
At first, the Steinway piano company used its capacity for making big wooden boxes to manufacture tails and wings for gliders for troop transport and coffins for bringing casualties home. Late in 1941, the company received a request from the War Production Board to design a small upright piano that could be made inexpensively and shipped in a crate to soldiers in the field. The first prototypes were ready by June, 1942.
The pianos were designed to stand up to wartime conditions, without access to the materials the company would normally use. They didn’t have front legs because legs might have broken off when airdropped. They used only one-tenth the metal of a regular Steinway. (Just because the government ordered the pianos didn’t mean Steinway had access to the metals they used to make pianos in peacetime.) They had celluloid keys instead of ivory. The wood was treated with insect repellent and the glue was water resistant.
Known as “Victory Vertical” pianos and “G.I. Steinways,” the pianos were 40-inches tall and weighed 455 pounds. They were made with handles under the keybed and in the back, making it easy for four soldiers to carry them. They were shipped, and sometimes airdropped onto the battlefield, with a set of tuning tools, instructions for using them, spare parts, and sheet music, including current popular music for sing-alongs, Protestant hymns, and boogie-woogie tunes.
The first shipment of 405 olive drab pianos were greeted with enthusiasm, and were quickly followed by more. Later pianos were painted in olive drab, blue, or gray depending on the service to which they were shipped.
The Steinway company shipped more than 3,000 Victory Vertical pianos between 1943 and 1953, when production ended. The last of the pianos went into service in 1961, when the captain of the newly built nuclear submarine USS Thomas A. Edison requested that one be installed in the crew’s mess area. It remained on board until the sub was decommissioned in 1983 and is now on display in the Navy Historical Center in Washington, D.C.
*With thanks. Keep those stories coming, y’all.