FROM: "SYMPHONY" MAGAZINE JUNE 1951: "This city's thirteenth Pop
concert season got off to a rousing start June 9, when all attendance
records were broken. Close to 9,000 persons jammed Publis Hall to
hear Hammond organist Ehel Smith and the Cleveland Summer
Orchestradfirected by Dr Rufolph Ringwall. It looks very much as
though hard pressed orchestra managers have a new, smash box office
attraction in Miss Smith for she not only packs the hall, as Dr
Ringwall said, is a fine artist and makes a hall seating 9,000, feel
as cozy as your own living room. The orchestra opened the concert
with Pomp and Circumstances March, followed by the Meistersinger
Overature, but from then on it was all fun. Miss Smith Played a
ballet piece by Kabalevsky, Anderson's Fiddle Faddle, Debussy's Clair
de Lune, and March of the Wooden Soldiers, all of course accompanied
by little stores carried to the audience by a microphone placed on the
organ console. It would be difficult to list all the things she
played for the delighted audience kept calling her back for endless
encores. At the following concert, Elmore Bacon of the Cleveland
News metioned that he haflf wxpected the listeners to shout "We want
Ethel !"