A man with a pipe dream, and a lot of memories
DAN VOELPEL; THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Pizza & Pipes. Do you remember it?
Twenty-four years on the border between Tacoma and University Place. The 1930 Wurlitzer theater organ with its massive arc of 1,100 silver pipes. Organists who played requests from diners – Disney tunes, movie theme songs, concertos, “The Hokey Pokey.” Soap bubbles floating through the restaurant as the organist played “Tiny Bubbles.” The family atmosphere. A favorite hangout for sports teams and fundraisers.
Destroyed Aug. 3, 1999, during a Tuesday night late dinner rush, by a fire in a pizza oven and fueled by grease built up in the oven’s vent. When the alarm sounded, organist Sherrie Mael Gibelyou was performing the “Titanic” love theme, “My Heart Will Go On.”
The restaurant didn’t go on. Didn’t have a sprinkler system. The organ’s console burned, its keys melted. Not enough insurance to rebuild.
Do you remember it?
Randy Stearnes does. He married one of the organists. Now he hopes to bring back the magic of Pizza & Pipes – with a twist and a new name: Pizzarena – a combination of the words “pizza” and “arena.”
He wants to make it a venue not just for the pipe organ but a stage for other live music for established and budding performers.
“I like to describe it as Pizza & Pipes on steroids, although I guess steroids isn’t a really good word these days,” said Stearnes, a former director of community relations for the Seattle Mariners.
He has a business plan. He has a start on a team of investors. He has a line on a historic pipe organ in San Francisco. Recently Stearnes has started scouting potential lease locations from Gig Harbor to Puyallup.
Most of all, he hopes the nearly nine years that have lapsed since Pizza & Pipes burned down haven’t snuffed out the nostalgic draw that made the concept successful.
“When Pizza & Pipes burned down, I pulled out some old files that I’d written down,” said Stearnes, who now works in community relations for Tacoma Public Utilities. “I love the concept – inexpensive food that’s fun, a theater organ with all the bells and whistles, literally, all controlled by one person with their imagination. There’s something about that. I thought, ‘Man, if there’s a way to make that work’ – the problem is, you need big bucks.”
Stearnes has found some willing financial interest through his old contacts with the Mariners. But he needs more.
Margaret Daubert, who co-owned the Tacoma Pizza & Pipes with her husband, Dick, employed Stearnes’ wife, Sharon, as an organist. Daubert hopes Stearnes can revive the concept, but has her doubts.
“I don’t know,” she said this week. “It’s a very sweet dream and something I would love to see. We miss it very much. … I know other people do, too. Almost every week, we run into one or two people who say, “Awwww.’
“But the pizza business has gotten more competitive since then, and the organs have gotten more expensive,” Daubert said.
Daubert’s brothers borrowed the idea of pairing a pipe organ and pizza from a pizzeria in San Leandro, Calif. Eventually the family owned nine Pizza & Pipes restaurants from Seattle and Bellevue to the San Francisco Bay Area. All three Northwest locations have closed.
Stearnes got his introduction to the Seattle location in 1985. As a Mariners executive he had to find an organist to play during baseball games in the Kingdome. Sharon, who later became his wife, applied for the job. He hired her. She took him along to her Pizza & Pipes performances on nights she didn’t have to play at the ballpark.
Their three children – Riley, now 17, Kalynda, 16, and Baylor, 14 – spent many nights of their childhood eating pizza, watching Mom play the organ and helping out in the Tacoma restaurant.
“I remember when Riley was a baby,” Stearnes said. “I’d just left the Seattle Mariners. While Sharon was inside playing, Riley and I would play in the back of the van and listen to the game on the radio. And on breaks, I’d take Riley in so Sharon could feed her. Riley would walk the aisles and talk to people. She became a child of the restaurant. The restaurant became a part of our family.
“So it’s personal.”
Two days after the 1999 fire, Dick Daubert gathered at the restaurant with former employees and patrons. A reporter captured the moment:
“I hoped and prayed I wouldn’t see my building burn,” he said, standing and hugging his wife, Margaret, while choking back tears near the organ’s bent and water-damaged pipes. “We were going to be here forever.”
Maybe they will, after all.
Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785
dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com">
dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com
