POWERGRAMS

12 donating tickets to downtown businesses and encouraging them to give them to employees as freebies. People slowly started coming, and now the Christmas movies are amazingly popular. They sell out. Given the theatre seats 2,195 people, that's pretty amazing." 'Big Bertha' saves the day Although Tom first listened to the Alabama's iconic Wurlitzer pipe organ, fondly known as "Big Bertha," as a small boy, it was not until 1985 that his interest was truly piqued. Friends invited him to tour the 1927 theatre, which had been closed for several years due to the decline of the downtown area and movie attendance in general. That visit led Tom to join the Alabama Chapter of the American Theatre Organ Society (ATOS). Members of the organization still met ever y Saturday in the closed theatre to maintain their beloved organ. Tom said it was Big Bertha that ultimately saved the theatre from permanent closure. "When the theatre fell on hard times in 1987 and went into bankruptcy, our ATOS chapter asked if we could purchase the organ and move it from the building," Tom said. "But the court refused to sell it to us, so in order to save the organ, we had to save the building." Thus, Whitmire, the local ATOS chapter president at the time, and a small group of volunteers formed Birmingham Landmarks Inc., a nonprofit that has since returned the Alabama, and eventually its neighboring theatre, the L yric, to their former glor y. The Alabama's struggle to sur vive was a poignant time for Tom. When he talks about the time Siouxsie and the Banshees, an English alternative rock band, played at the Alabama, he still chokes up, even though it has been more than 30 years. In the late 1980s, Whitmire was renting the theatre to "anybody who would pay money," Tom recalled. That night, the Banshees brought in a huge crowd and helped fill the theatre's empty coffers, but in Whitmire's eyes, the rewards weren't worth it. "I had stayed late into the night to help load the band's equipment and close the doors," Tom said. "I remember walking down aisle 2 and seeing Cecil standing at the end of the aisle. He looked down at some of the seats, and someone had taken a knife and slashed the upholster y. He put his hand in the hole, looked up at the theatre and said, 'I'm sorr y. You deser ve better than this. This will never happen again.'" ENERGIZERS The Mighty Wurlitzer organ 'Big Bertha' has been a feature of the Alabama Theatre in Birmingham for nearly a century.

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