Sounds Of The Schober Electronic Organ
LP-soc7
1966
Demonstration and advertising records can hold musical moments so I pick them up when I find them. In this case, the jacket was appealing with the image of the family excited about the sounds of the electronic organ. As a child, and I was the same age as the boy on the cover when this record was released, I would have found the prospect of playing the organ a nightmare from a horror movie. This is just a matter of how you grow up and what tastes you develop folks.
Anyway, on second glance I saw the phrase "easy-to-assemble kits". The Schober organs were sold as kits and the idea of buying an organ as a box of parts intrigued me.
I found, online, a 1966 Schober ad they ran in Popular Mechanics. The top model, Recital, sold for $1500 (compare that to $2500 for a "ready-built" organ). The ad goes on to state the organ is "easy to assemble" and "You supply only simple hand tools and the time."
Then I found a webpage that describes restoring a Recital model, purchased new by the owner in 1973. One paragraph from that page grabbed my attention: "In 1973, my wife and I bought a Recital organ kit, then spent nine months soldering circuit boards, building the console and pedal clavier, and wiring everything together. We had a big party when we finished, and we were very happy with the results."
So, the "easy-to-assemble" kit didn't arrive as components that would take an afternoon to assemble with a pair of pilers and a screw driver. No, you had to actually solder you own circuit boards!!!
I wonder how many people expected that they would be required do such a total assembly? How many organs were returned and if you started the build, how many folks were defeated by the assembly process and never finished?
Apparently enough organs were sold to keep the company in business for some time. The company was formed in 1954 and went out of business sometime after 1973 (in the 70s).
I'm enough of a collector to know that anything that came as a "kit" is desirable, because not many people had the "time and tools" to mess with this type of high-level assembly. Therefore, there probably aren't that many surviving examples. So, if I may, I'd say a real organ collector couldn't give up the hobby until he or she found a nice Schober organ to show off.