Early Life and Professional Career
Richard Simonton was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1915. His father died when he was three, and his mother subsequently moved to Seattle, where he grew up in the difficult conditions of the Depression. He showed an early aptitude for music and audio engineering, earning money in high school by tuning pipe organs. He later worked for the Masterphone Sound Company, which installed sound systems in silent theatres adapting to the new talking pictures. Always of an inventive and entrepreneurial mindset, before the age of twenty he had patented a circuit for electronic organs. In time he made his way to Southern California, where he was licensed as a professional engineer by the state and worked for Peerless Transformers and subsequently for RCA.
In 1939, Simonton went to New York to meet with the founders of the Muzak Corporation, which had been founded some five years before. He proposed that Muzak begin franchising, which it had not previously done, and ended up buying the franchise for the seven Western states, which he held until the 1970s. On the strength of this success, he began acquiring holdings in TV and radio stations, which included KRKD radio in Los Angeles and KULA radio and TV in Hawaii, the ABC affiliate.
He became a successful businessman and built an elaborate home in Toluca Lake, California, where he lived until his death in 1979 at the age of 64. The house included two organs and a 63-seat home theatre, where he showed movies to large audiences every week for many years. Outgoing and sociable, Simonton was popular in the Hollywood community. Friends and visitors included people such as Groucho Marx, Laurence Olivier, and the composer Aram Khachaturian. His best friend for many years was the silent film star Harold Lloyd; he was a trustee of Lloyd's estate.
In 1958, Simonton purchased a controlling interest in the Mississippi riverboat Delta Queen, rescuing the enterprise and turning it towards profitability. He also owned a large part of California Communications, a firm that rented motion picture equipment to studios.
Simonton was married and had four children. He was an involved family man, taking his family to live in Hawaii for some months and on other travels. They regularly spent summers on board the Delta Queen. His older son, Richard Simonton Jr., also an audio engineer, should not be confused with his father. His other children included a younger son and two daughters.
In the early 1970s, Simonton had an emergency operation for complications of appendicitis; the operation went wrong and he suffered brain damage as a result. He spent several years struggling to regain full command of basic skills, including control of his speech. At this point, he largely retired from public life, although in time he was able to continue his love of travel and his wide community of friends. He died in 1979 from a heart problem, likely related to the damage sustained in the operation.
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