Published: July 06, 2009 12:32 am      

SOUNDS: Rare machine ensures Wurlitzer sound can be heard for years to come.

TOWN OF TONAWANDA — A retired 42-year Napa Autoparts worker recently became, as a hobby, conductor for what may be the world’s oldest band.

The outfit, like other similar players still scattered across the country, is bellows-blown and powered by a crankshaft.

And though it sometimes consists of about three trombones, 16 flutes, as many violins and orchestra bells, 15 trumpets, a bass and a snare drum, the whole ensemble would fit easily into the back of a pickup and sounds as good as it did in 1925 providing it’s properly oiled.

It’s Rudolph Wurlitzer’s famous automatic band organ, and Douglas Hershberger is rolling his way into the director’s chair to usher a new generation of Wurlitzer’s legacy in North Tonawanda.

He is one of the few known operators of the only known machine still capable of producing perfect copies of the perforated paper music the great band organs need to function.

There are other ways to produce the rolls discontinued by Wurlitzer in 1945, but not with the kind of original quality Hershberger achieves using his 100-year-old machine — once housed in the factory — and a trove of about 2,500 original Wurlitzer “master” rolls, each about 200 feet of ancient oaktag and accounting for just one song apiece.

The smaller rolled paper cartridges he produces are made by combining tunes from several master rolls (many of which are nearly 100 years old) to make custom song lists for owners of the nation’s remaining band organs.

“What we make here are band organ rolls — all of them that were made in the United States were made here in North Tonawanda by about five different companies. The best known of which, being Wurlitzer, stopped making them in 1945,” he said.

Hershberger taught himself how to operate the machine since it was obtained by the Herschell Carrousel Factory Museum several years ago and has for about three years been selling his original reproductions out of a display shop housed inside the museum at 180 Thompson St.

The reproductions are capable of making the old band organs sing exactly as they were intended — with the same kind of mechanical and musical precision as the classic wooden carrousels the city is famous for, and for which the band organs played a central part.

Now housed at the museum for which he is a trustee, the musical copy machine appeals to collectors and connoisseurs far and wide as a source for reproducing the old paper rolls the classic organs use to play carnival-like melodies redolent of a bygone era, when the circus or carnival was a cutting edge mainstay of entertainment for the masses.

The requests have been coming in faster than Hershberger can fill them.

“You may not recognize a band organ if you were leaning up against one but you’d know the music,” said Hershberger, a dedicated music reproduction specialist and also a trustee at the museum . “It’s carnival music, merry-go-round music, circus music,” he said.