RIP Franchises of our youths

[Drunk Monk]

Man, I loved these places. I think they had a tremendous impact upon my musical tastes today.

This Bay Area pizza chain rose to fame in the 1970s. Then, one by one, the restaurants disappeared.
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Courtesy of John Lauter

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Susana Guerrero, SFGATE
Aug. 19, 2021Updated: Aug. 20, 2021 11:52 a.m.
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The concept was simple: combine pizza with the harmonious tunes of the musical organ. In 1968, Bill Breuer embarked on a business venture that would redefine how families ate for the better part of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Cap'ns Galley Pizza & Pipes, best remembered as simply Pizza & Pipes, was the ultimate family-friendly restaurant where massive Wurlitzer organs were the main attraction of the evening. Starting off with a location in Santa Clara, Breuer would go on to open Pizza & Pipes restaurants in Daly City, Fresno and Redwood City, as well as more in Washington.

Even as a child, I recognized that Pizza & Pipes wasn’t your average eating establishment. My introduction to the chain came in the early 1990s, when I’d spent many evenings dining at the Redwood City location at 821 Winslow St. The lingering smell of pizza was the first thing you’d notice, followed by the sight of families huddled at the cafeteria-style tables. Parents were armed with pitchers of ice-cold beer while squirmy children waited impatiently for food.
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At long last, the organist would emerge from the darkened room and take his seat at the organ. He’d strike the first notes to cast a resounding roar throughout the room as flashing lights illuminated the faces of star-struck children. The show was never complete without dramatic renditions of Disney hits.
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Organist John Lauter is pictured around 1984 at Theatre Organ Pizza and Pipes in Pontiac, Mich. 
Courtesy of John Lauter
John Lauter remembers Pizza & Pipes all too well. As a theater organist with 46 years of professional experience, his career took him through the Pizza & Pipes playing circuit. 
“I think I went to all of them,” Lauter said. “I sat in and played at Redwood City on a slow Monday night probably around 1985. [I] would play audience requests that kind of led to a set of tunes that we called the dirty 30, which were songs that everybody always asked for. We played Star Wars and John Williams movie music, but Star Wars was probably No. 1. If you couldn't play that, you couldn't get the job.”
The Wurlitzer organ inside Redwood City’s Pizza & Pipes dining hall was a transplant from the landmark 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle. It was one of 2,238 organs built by the Wurlitzer company between 1910 and 1938, according to Redwood City Daily News, and weighed 15 tons. It also had four keyboards and about 3,000 pipes when it was purchased by Breuer in 1969.
Of all the Pizza & Pipes restaurants Lauter performed in, he considers Redwood City to have the best Wurlitzer. Not because it was particularly large in comparison to the others, but because the acoustics were unmatched. Even in 1981, Theatre Organ wrote that the Redwood City Pizza & Pipes organ was considered “the finest to be found in any food establishment” among pro organists.
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Original caption: "The Serramonte Cap'ns Galley console sports a bobbling mechanicle monkey." The undated image was featured within a Theatre Organ Journal article published in1981. 
Courtesy of American Theatre Organ Society (ATOS)
“Redwood City was the first one with a really good organ. … We organ people around the country knew about it,” Lauter said. “They made LP records that they sold as a souvenir of your night … [and] they were done under studio conditions.”  
Lauter, who lives in Detroit, would go on to play at other Pizza & Pipes copycats throughout the country, but he believes there was something uniquely special about the chain that other competitors didn’t have — “good organs and great organists.”
“The Bay Area has always been a magnet for good players,” Lauter said. “The people running [Pizza & Pipes] ... knew something about music, and they kind of held out for good talent. So, [Pizza & Pipes] was kind of a standout across the country.”
And so the chain went on that way for decades, until one by one, they all vanished.
An unlikely pair: The mighty Wurlitzer and pizza pies
Breuer may have been the first to open a pizza and pipes chain, but he wasn’t the architect behind the business model. Beginning in 1958, Carsten and Joyce Henningsen opened a funky pizza parlor in Hayward dubbed Ye Olde Pizza Joynt before pizza even became a hallmark of American culture, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. It was around that same time that Carsten became impressed by the popularity of Wurlitzers, and he secured a 1928 organ from San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre in 1962. The organ was swiftly restored and installed inside Ye Olde Pizza Joynt, thus ushering in a new era of entertainment around the bay. 
But you might wonder what it was about a massive organ that convinced Carsten to install it inside his pizzeria to begin with. Well, to understand that, you’d first have to go back to the 1920s. 
During the silent film era, many movie theaters around the country housed elaborate Wurlitzer organs that served as amusement for moviegoers and as musical components of films (organs can produce a range of sounds like horn blows and whistles). They were considered cost-effective instruments for movie theater owners, who reasoned they could pay a sole musician to handle the organ versus paying an entire band, Bloomberg City Lab reported.  
But when sound was integrated into film, the mighty Wurlitzers fell out of use. Decades later, when silent movie theaters were demolished, many of the organs needed to find new homes, and restaurant owners were ready to snatch them up. What followed was a new entertainment hub within pizza parlors, like Ye Olde Pizza Joynt, and other businesses that installed antique organs in the middle of their dining space to charm their customers.  
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Organist Bill Langford poses inside Ye Olde Pizza Joynt in Hayward, left. The organ pictured with Langford came from San Francisco's Warfield Theatre. The exterior of Ye Olde Pizza Joynt is pictured on the right. The undated images were featured within a Theatre Organ Journal article published in 1981. 
Courtesy of American Theatre Organ Society (ATOS)
When the Henningsens got their hands on the Warfield Theatre organ, it was soon under the trustful hands of entertainer Bill Langford, the restaurant’s regular organist, who is also credited for Ye Olde Pizza Joynt’s success. The Hayward pizzeria even caught the eye of the San Francisco Chronicle’s celebrated columnist, Herb Caen, who briefly wrote about it in 1964.
“San Francisco has almost everything — but NOT a pizza parlor featuring a full-sized theater organ,” Caen wrote. “For that, you’ll have to travel all the way to Ye Olde Pizza Joynt in San Lorenzo, where the night is made miserable or beautiful, depending on your taste, by Organist Bill Langford...” (Historical articles state Ye Olde Pizza Joynt was in San Lorenzo, but the location was in Hayward.)  
The fall of Pizza & Pipes
A major problem was on the horizon for the pizza and pipes concept, when in 1977, a new pizza chain entered the arena. The perpetrator would be none other than Nolan Bushnell, founder of Chuck E. Cheese.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Bushnell confessed that Pizza & Pipes was the inspiration behind his own pizza and entertainment chain. A smug Bushnell outlined the business structure of Pizza & Pipes while casually roasting the longtime institution in the process.
"The synthesis came along because there was a pizza parlor called Pizza and Pipes,” Bushnell told The Atlantic in 2013. “It basically resurrected a Wurlitzer theater organ and the place was packed when they had an organist that actually played on the thing. And I thought, there is a demand for some kind of entertainment to go along with the pizza. But I'm not going to have something that needs a player and I'm not going to do something that requires finding and restoring an antique.”
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Pizza & Pipes at 821 Winslow St. in Redwood City is pictured in the background around 1975. That location, which was among many found around the Bay Area, opened in 1969 and permanently closed in 2001. 
Courtesy of John Lauter
We all know what happened next. Bushnell, who also co-founded Atari, would dissect the Pizza & Pipes model and give it a modern touch with animatronic singing mascots that would rake in the big bucks across hundreds of U.S. locations. 
The Redwood City Pizza & Pipes barely made it past the millennium when it eventually closed in 2001. By that point, the Wurlitzer organ had aged 75 years from its heyday at the 5th Avenue Theatre and the decades it entertained locals at Pizza & Pipes. It was sold to organist Larry Embury, who played at the Redwood City outpost nightly. 
Randy Blair, who in 1999 became owner of Pizza & Pipes in Santa Clara and Redwood City, decided to sell the Peninsula store to focus on Santa Clara. But despite his efforts, Blair knew Pizza & Pipes' days were numbered. 
“The organ has really run its course as far as being a draw for customers,” Blair told the Redwood City Daily News in 2001. 
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The Pizza & Pipes at 821 Winslow St. in Redwood City pictured 1990. That site, which was among many found around the Bay Area, opened in 1969 and permanently closed in 2001. 
Courtesy of Local History Room RWC Public Library
The allure of pizza and pipes may have disappeared from the Bay Area and California long ago, but the tradition lives on beyond the state line, albeit in small numbers. In 2018, Taste Magazine reported that only three pizza and pipes-style restaurants exist around the U.S.: Organ Stop Pizza in Mesa, Arizona; Organ Piper Pizza in Greenfield, Wisconsin; and Beggar’s Pizza in Lansing, Illinois. Those businesses are still in operation to date. 
Lauter thinks that the demise of Pizza & Pipes was partly due to the popularity of Chuck E. Cheese, but he also points to its flaws. 
“The Chuck E. Cheese thing happened and that stole a little bit of its thunder,” Lauter said. “[But] a lot of [the Pizza & Pipes locations] were inconsistent. People that came didn't know a world-class organ from a merely good organ, but they all knew what good tasting pizza and pasta was like. And they knew what mediocre pizza and bad pizza was like.” 
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A view inside Theatre Organ Pizza and Pipes in Pontiac, Mich., around 1984. 
Courtesy of John Lauter
Food aside, Lauter looks back fondly at his long career as a theater organist that also allowed him to play at the Bay Area Pizza & Pipes chain —  even if the overall model wasn’t perfect. 
“I played professionally for [more than] 40 years and some of that was in the pizza parlor business when that was a thing,” Lauter said. “I learned a lot of songs in a very short window of time. I learned Michael Jackson songs and whatever I could learn off the air. I think I learned a couple of Van Halen songs that worked on the organ. Redwood City [was a] very special place in all those restaurants. I miss it.”