Watching Other People Work: Volume Three of an Autobiography

By Peter Carnahan

WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE WORK, volume three of an autobiography by Peter
Carnahan, covers the 18-plus years the author worked as Director of the Theatre and
Literature Programs of The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. This time, from 1972
to 1991, was a period of enormous growth for the arts in Pennsylvania and the nation.
Reflecting that growth, the PCA budget grew from $286,000 to $12 million during the
period. During the second decade covered by this volume, Carnahan began his next
career, as a writer, publishing his first nonfiction book in 1989.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479735624

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Copyright © 2012 by Peter Carnahan.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

Bureaucracy

Politics

Maya Schock

First Council Meeting

Other Life

At The Office

CHAPTER TWO

Harvard

Back Home

First Deadline

Sanibel

Back at Work

Back to Writing

CHAPTER THREE

Resigning

Muskoka and Maine

Mother

Program Director

Christmas in Sanibel

Resignations

New Leadership

People of the Revolution

Moving Day

Williamsburg, New Orleans, Mobile

CHAPTER FOUR

Personal Writing

Cruising New England

Summer 1976 into 1977

Fran’s Muskoka, 1977

Elvis Presley Dead

The Bermuda Caper

Black Performing Arts

A Whole New Concept

Home Improvements

Controversy

CHAPTER FIVE

Interim Director

Arts to the People

Staging the Governor’s Entrance

Three Mile Island

New Guidelines, New Programs

Under New Management

Colleges

CHAPTER SIX

June Batten Arey

Father

Nova Scotia

Colleges, Colorado

Second Nova Scotia

The Pennsylvania Writers Collection

Updike

Spring, Summer 1983

Ketchum

Nova Scotia—David Stevens

Ted to Cornell

Pennsylvania Writers Kick-off

Under Full Steam

Nova Scotia—Schooner Races

Summer 1984 into 1985

CHAPTER SEVEN

The World of Book Publishing

Meanwhile, Back at the Office

Brian and Trish are Married

The World of Book Publishing-2

Arthur Hall in Camden, Maine

Fall 1986

Greece

The World of Book Publishing—Breakthrough?

Spring, Summer, 1987

England—The Isles of Scilly

Publication

England Again, 1988

Spring, Summer 1988

Fall, 1988

CHAPTER EIGHT

Acting Director

CHAPTER NINE

The Penultimate Year

Greece, 1990

Summer, Fall, 1990

1991, Closing Out

APPENDIX

Holy Sites

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Thanks to the current staff of The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and Executive Director Philip Horn. Particular thanks to Deputy Executive Director Brian Rogers, and to friends from my days there, Charlotte Flynn Michalski, Jewel Jones-Fulp, Deputy Director Heather Doughty and Charon Battles.

A special thank-you to Jeanne Schmedlen, another former colleague, with whom I had a brief reunion while researching in the PCA offices. Jeanne’s newsletters during the late 1970s and 1980s, carried on at various times by Patrice French, Marcy Carey, Elaine Fuller, Gwenn Trout and Paula Czajka, proved a mine of information.

Thanks to the staff of the Pennsylvania State Archives, who once again provided much of the research material for this book.

Thanks to friends and colleagues Nancy Stevens, Mary and Clarence Pace, Elizabeth Dowd, Kate Scuffle, George Miller, Bill Lafe, Helene Morrow and Peter DeLaurier for filling in holes in my memory. And for searching records, Karen Newell of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Matthew Jackson of the New York State Council on the Arts, and Stephen Orner of Mansfield University.

Thanks to Doe Levan and to Jean Creznic for reading the proofs; their sharp eyes saved me many an embarrassment. Fran helped with the endless numbers of the Index.

Richard O’Connell’s poems and translations are from Atlantis Editions, Philadelphia, 1972-1987.

Quotes about the Independent Eye are from Co-Creation, a memoir by Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller, WordWorkers Press, Sebastopol, CA, 2011.

Several opening lines are quoted from Rachel Simon’s book of short stories, Little Nightmares, Little Dreams, Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, Boston, 1990.

The opening lines of The Iliad are from Robert Fagles’ translation, Viking Penguin, New York, 1990.

Two lines are quoted from Robert Frost’s Once by the Pacific, in The Poetry of Robert Frost, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1969

Richard Wilbur’s brief poem Wyeth’s Milk Cans from New and Collected Poems, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Some details of the Philadelphia Drama Guild’s tenure at the Walnut Street Theatre are from America’s Longest Run, A History of the Walnut Street Theatre by Andrew Davis, PSU Press, University Park, PA, 2010.

Despite the admonitions of my redoubtable copy editor, Jean Creznic, not to mention the Microsoft Word dictionary, I persist in spelling theatre with an re ending. The New York Times has been promoting the er ending for years and will probably prevail. Theatre companies of my time almost universally used the French ending, re.

The complete texts of some essays and poems referred to in this volume can be found on my website: www.petercarnahan.com.

In Memoriam

I’ve reach the time of life when people who have shared parts of this journey with me have begun to fall away. I thought it important to note the passing of some who have appeared in these pages.

David Rogers, my dear cousin, The Spirit of Muskoka, who bravely, and cheerfully, fought cancer for 18 years. I’ve never known a more likeable person.

David’s brother-in-law and my cousin, Charlie Stevens, hydrologist, and avid reader and sailor; Charlie helped me by vetting my book Schooner Master for technical accuracy as it was going to press.

Bill Hall, the shy Englishman with whom we somehow kept in touch, in Bangkok, Cambridge and Harrogate over a period of 43 years.

Bill Lasich, the old army buddy. My poem Happy Lasich, discovered via the Internet, brought a telephone reunion. We picked up a conversation from Fort Knox in 1953, and had several in-person visits.

Ceci Proctor, my friend and colleague at the Harrisburg Community Theatre. We shared a love of theatre, and of the English language. She helped me with the manuscript of Accumulating Lives.

Mary Chamness Rackstraw, Fran’s friend and mentor at the Mobile Press Register, whom we reconnected with on her 90th and 95th birthdays.

Lastly, my brother Michael, the oldest of our generation, whom I moved closer to as the years went by. Our last meetings were very warm.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

—George Orwell

People remember what they want to the way they want to, and call it history.

—Christopher Dickey

I’ve done my best in what follows to put my life down with accuracy and without exaggeration, as memory and research have prompted. Yes, Mr. Orwell, even the disgraceful bits—some of them. But as Mr. Dickey notes, memory is notoriously self-serving. If you find yourself in these pages and don’t like what I have remembered about you, I apologize. I was after the truth of my own life and everything else was subject to that.

My memory is pretty good and I think it has served me well here. But I did return to Mobile, Alabama, in 1976, fifteen years after I had lived there, to find that the enormous, block-long police headquarters building, which I very clearly remember on the south side of Government Street, had been moved to the north side. I wonder how they managed that.

—Peter Carnahan

P.S. I wrote the above disclaimer for volume one of my autobiography, and have reprinted it in each volume since. I intended, among other things, to point out that no one person’s view of the past was the complete story. There is always another side, or two, or three. But as I proceeded into the third volume of this tale, I found myself getting more opinionated, if not downright crotchety, perhaps because I’m dealing here with the higher levels of power in my field, and power has to be questioned. Or perhaps it is just the crustiness of old age, the impatience that age feels with a world that never did quite agree to live up to one’s youthful vision for it. Whichever. I hope the reader will have patience with my crotchets, and enjoy them for what they are, personal views.

—P.C.

INTRODUCTION

During the years that I worked for The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, I would sometimes have this conversation:

"You mean you actually get paid for going to see plays?"

Well, in a manner of speaking…

Lucky bastard.

I was lucky, certainly, after 18 years of working in theatres and staging over 90 plays, to be able to lift my gaze from the close focus of production, look around a large area, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 300-some miles from east to west, and 150 from north to south, encompassing 12 million citizens, to see what my colleagues were doing. If you’re working in the theatre, you rarely see other people’s plays. You’re busy most nights.

But they were not the carefree nights out that my questioners envisioned. For one thing, I went less frequently to the good and accomplished theatres. Support for them was not in question. I spent a great deal of time, many sometimes hard weekends, checking out the small, the beginning, the ambitious-to-be theatres and the out-of-the-way theatres in obscure rural corners of the state, or down alleys in the low-rent parts of the cities. During my time with the Arts Council I know I sat through more hours of bad acting, funereal pacing, flaccid plotting and general theatrical incompetence than any other citizen of the Commonwealth. I learned to sit upright while my eyes were relentlessly closing, learned, I hope, not to snore, since I was one of nine in the audience and the noise would disturb the actors, and learned to go backstage afterwards, smile disingenuously in response to the inevitable question and say, I’m sorry. I never comment on plays that I’m auditing.

That was a lie, since if I had seen something good—and there were many surprises, and some jewels—I always praised, or praised those bits that I thought were promising. Either way, my real purpose in being there was to sit down with the people afterwards and talk with them about where they were as a developing company. For that, I only needed to see about fifteen minutes of the play, to see what level they were on. In fifteen minutes I could see the relative skill of the actors they could attract, whether their director had any ideas that compelled the play forward, what their abilities were in costume, scenic and lighting design. That was what I needed to know. I didn’t really have to wait until eleven o’clock to find out how the story came out.

Because of the logistics of travel—It would take me Friday afternoon to drive to, say, Pittsburgh; I could see a play that night, if I were lucky a matinee, and another Saturday night, drive home on Sunday; there went the weekend, with only two or three theatres seen—I took to trying to see parts of several performances in one evening, first act at Theatre Y, second act at Theatre Z, a move that was unpopular with the theatres, since, in their minds, only if I could witness the whole three-hour buildup to the climactic final scene, could I fully appreciate their genius. One humorless director of an avant-garde theatre would bar me from admission after the show had started and take me out for coffee instead.

In short, watching other people work, especially after a full day at the office, was not as rosy as it sounds. I use the phrase as the title of this volume because it catches for me the sea change from my immersion in the world of a particular theatre, which had been my lot for the previous 18 years, to standing back and looking around, at one remove from the searing heat of production. It was a relief, and a lot of things became clear. I was tempted to start handing out opinions. Oh, you only have to do this. And then I would remember that it was not that simple to do this, if this were at the bottom of a list of ten urgent things that confronted you on a given Monday morning.

That is why Bob Bernat and I agreed right at the beginning of our tenures at the Arts Council that we would hire only program directors who had been out there in the field, creating art, selling it, making curtains go up. It was too easy to forget how hard it was, and to begin to pontificate from the lofty, often clouded, Parnassus of The State.

CHAPTER ONE

Bureaucracy

Now things get bureaucratic. The minutes of the November 16, 1972 meeting of The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in Pittsburgh reveal that I was approved as assistant director on the recommendation of Bob Bernat, recently appointed as executive director of the Council. Things get bureaucratic because for the 18 years I was with the Arts Council the minutes of the meetings are most of what I have to go on, plus notations on my daily desk calendar and my Month-at-a-Glance Calendar.

The word bureaucratic has become a pejorative. It will be my job in this volume to reclaim it. Our purpose, Bob Bernat’s and mine, from the very beginning was to make the agency open and approachable, even helpful to the arts constituents around the state we were charged with assisting. We intended to put a face to the faceless bureaucracy, and I think over time we succeeded.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The first thing that I experienced was more general: office life. I had had an office in at least some of the theatres I worked for, but much of the day I was on my feet, checking things out on the stage, backstage, running around town to see people or pick up things. When I was directing plays, I was only in a theatre seat for half minutes at a time, before I was on my feet, in the aisles, up on stage, exhorting, praising, demonstrating. There was no time for calluses to grow behind.

Now I found a well-padded chair a necessity, and fortunately the assistant director before me, Greg Gibson, had rated a tall-backed, substantially upholstered, if in vinyl, executive’s swivel chair. I discovered this, and the other office amenities that still prevailed at that time, when I couldn’t wait to get to work. I was to start officially on, I think, the Monday after Thanksgiving, when Bob Bernat, who was in the process of moving from Indiana, Pennsylvania, where he had been a music teacher and composer-in-residence at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, would be back in the office. But after four months between engagements, I was eager to get started, and told them I’d like to come in a couple of days the previous week, without pay, just to get oriented.

That was OK with the women who ran the office, Connie Herrold and Doris Jenkins. There was a third staffer, Crystal, a quiet young black woman who typed, but both Connie and Doris were middle-aged, long-time state workers and used to running things while the men did whatever it was they did—going to meetings and the like.

Connie functioned, unofficially, as the fiscal officer and general administrative officer. Probably in her early forties, thin, brown-haired, glasses, with a lively manner, she was one of those people who knew everyone in state government. She knew the people at Personnel, at the Comptroller’s Office, at the Office of Administration in the Governor’s Office, which, as a miscellaneous agency, we were a part of, and knew how to get around them all. Connie could fix anything. On weekends, she sang with one of the local dance bands, which gave her her own place in the world of the arts. So she was familiar with my theatre work in Harrisburg and treated me as a colleague.

Doris Jenkins was officially the secretary to the executive director, but she was the typist and keeper of the minutes book, the only record of the Arts Council in those years, and generally managed the record-keeping of the office. Doris was maybe in her early fifties, white perfectly coiffed hair, a sturdy, matronly appearance, despite the fact that she was unmarried and lived with her parents. Doris was a quiet, solid, unflappable presence. If you saw Doris express the faintest irritation about something or someone, you knew she was furious. But she kept her own counsel among all the wild doings in that office over the years, being a pillar of support to me or whoever was in the director’s chair, until 1981, when with the appearance of yet another new executive director, she announced simply, I can’t adjust to another one, and retired into that life she had kept so private. Predictably, we heard nothing from her thereafter, but she remains in memory one of my good, if thoroughly impersonal, friends.

My first day in the world of office work began when I got up that morning and looked in my closet. For the past 18 years, I had dressed in old pants and shirts to go to the theatre. You never knew what kind of dirty work you might be doing that day. But on this job it would have to be white shirt and tie, and at least a tweed jacket. The tie felt constraining. In my poem Suitable, written a few years later, I envisioned a tie-less retirement:

. . . nothing would encircle my turkey neck again

Until Death put his blue plastic tubes

Up my nostrils and around my throat.

Dressing for work was one of the minor annoyances I would put up with for the next 18 years.

I drove down Front Street toward the Arts Council offices, and turned up the alley just before the building, looking for a parking meter in one of the narrow back streets. Connie had alerted me to bring some quarters, and when I found a spot, I put four hours’ worth, the maximum, on the meter. Connie would go out before 1:00 p.m. and plug my meter for the rest of the day.

Sitting in my big swivel chair at my handsome desk in an alcove in the hallway between the Director’s office in the back and the big room in front, I found everything neatly arranged. Every morning, Connie would make sure that I had a container full of perfectly sharpened pencils at my right hand, and within a minute after sitting down, she would appear with my cup of coffee, two creams, no sugar, just as I liked it. This was old style office etiquette that Connie took seriously. When she left the Arts Council, this ritual left with her, never to reappear in my lifetime—or anyone else’s.

All right, so what does the Arts Council do? Well, they have a bit of money and they make grants to nonprofit arts corporations. (A nonprofit corporation is not one that doesn’t make a profit, although in the arts they rarely do, but one in which the profits do not accrue to the owners or shareholders but are poured back into the organization to pursue its goals.) We had had a Council grant to do the Harrisburg Arts Festival the year that Averill Shepps, Dean Blair and I staged it. If I wanted to find out what was going on, I had better read some of the grant applications. Doris put a batch on my desk, a pile of folders, some thin, some bulky. I asked for a copy of the Guidelines for Grant Applicants, and she gave me a single sheet of paper, typed on both sides.

This paper rambled along, explained that the grants had to be matched by local money the organization raised, and somewhere in the paragraphs said to write the Council a letter explaining the project, what it would cost and how much of a grant was wanted. That was it.

Upon opening the folders that Doris had piled on my desk, I found that some people did this quite expeditiously, moving right to the project, describing what it was and would do, and what it would cost, sometimes in as little as two pages. Others wrote a 30-page essay on the arts, their art form, the history of their organization and how good they were for their community. Somewhere in the middle of page 29, they said, I think we need about $2,000 for this. It was Doris’ job, as delegated by Vince Artz (the first executive director, see Accumulating Lives), to read through these applications and when she came upon the money request, whether on page 2 or page 29, to underline the amount in red pencil. That saved Vince the work of reading the application.

(I don’t know how much difference reading the applications would have made. In those early years, under the first chairman, Ted Hazlett, and the first year under Jay Leff, without any reports from the field, grants tended to go to organizations the people on the Council knew. One early Hazlett-Artz year almost a third of the budget, $50,000, went to a single organization, the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, that did a summer program of musical comedies. The decision process was obscured in the minutes, but it was later said they were a Pittsburgh institution that was in trouble, and why not concentrate the Arts Council’s meager budget so that it could do someone some real good? Well, yes—but a third of the budget? In those days, before any formal review procedures were set up, it helped to have friends at court.)

The two-page Guidelines for Grant Applicants was about all the Arts Council had to show in the way of procedures after five years in business. I decided right there at my desk on the first day that what we needed was a little bureaucracy. We needed deadlines, so grant applications didn’t drift in randomly all year. We needed something as simple as an application form. Application forms can be daunting—John Hightower, former executive director of the New York State Council on the Arts, referred to their 9-page form as Kafkaesque—but they save the reviewer immense amounts of time by having all the same information in the same places: name and address of applicant, artistic discipline, project dates, amount requested, matching monies, instead of having to pile through 30 pages of self-promotion to pull this out. And there was no reason why the forms couldn’t be simple, one sheet front and back, project description on the front, budget on the back.

In my first days in the office with Bob Bernat the following week, I proposed this, and he immediately agreed. In fact, Jay Leff had already called for an application form, and had instituted, as a temporary measure, a grant summary sheet, so that the Council members as well didn’t have to deal with those 30-page applications.

The other thing that Bob agreed with right away was that it was unconscionable for applicants to be turned down simply because no one knew them or the quality of their work. Within the week, I made my first field trip, 25 miles down the road to York, PA, to meet with a small, community-based black theatre, the Princess Street Players, and to meet two young black ceramicists at the Crispus Attics Community Center, to assess that their work was serious and showed some talent. (I was not professionally qualified in the visual arts, but with just two of us, Bob and I had to split the arts world between us. He took music, museums, dance; I took theatre, arts festivals and councils, literature and anything else. Without competence in the visual arts, I had still been to enough museums and worked with enough visual artists to be able to make rough judgments if the work were serious. And very soon we had help in all these departments.)

Another bureaucratic matter that needed fixing: when grants were awarded they were typed on what were known in the legal trade as blue-backed contracts, that is, a standard legal contract with a lot of boilerplate, usually several pages long. The problem was that all these blue-backs had to have an original, typed in the office, with several carbons. There was no such thing as an automatic typewriter, around our office at least, and word processing was a distant not-even-dream. After a Council meeting, Connie, Doris and the little secretary would sit at their typewriters for days, pounding out blue-backed contracts. They were skilled typists, but even skilled typists make mistakes, and mistakes were corrected by going in with a hard eraser and erasing the original and all three carbons, then retyping the word. Ah, young readers, you don’t know what eons of tedium the computer has spared you.

The answer to all this wasted energy was quite simple. Bob and I conferred with Connie, and subsequently requested the Comptroller to accept the State’s Service Purchase Contract instead of a blue-back. He was agreeable, and the SPC, which contained name and address of the organization, a brief description of the project and a grant amount, became standard.

This change had one disadvantage. The blue-back made it dramatically clear that a grant was a contract with the State; the recipient had a legal obligation to provide the services described in the contract. But this only became an issue when organizations would default, out of fecklessness or because they were overwhelmed and failing, and such incidents in my time were very few.

The other office service that was a real plus was the telephone WATTS line. I don’t recall what Ma Bell’s acronym stood for, but essentially the State rented long distance lines at a monthly rate, so we could call anywhere and talk as long as we wanted without additional charge. (I’ve kept reminding readers, throughout these volumes, that in the old days, which I’m still writing about, long distance was measured in drops of gold. We all, all our lives, kept it short on long distance.)

More important than just being able to talk at length with constituents 200 miles away, was the fact that we could encourage them to call us.

I’ll call you back on my WATTS line.

Or for the most impecunious, they could call me person-to-person collect. I would refuse the call, and call them back.

This service was crucial in starting the dialogue we needed with arts organizations of the state. It was not just a matter of answering their questions about grants, but of getting to know them, who, what, where they were, what their history and ambitions for the future were. And to encourage them to chat, to talk about their problems, to bounce ideas off us, ultimately to get a perspective on what they were doing by seeing it through the eyes of someone at a distance.

Ten years later, my day would be largely spent on the telephone. I would come in at 9:00 a.m., the phone would ring; I would look up and it would be five o’clock. But in this enormous state, we got to know who was out there.

Politics

Next Monday Bob Bernat appeared, and things took off like a rocket. For those who have not read the last pages of the previous volume, Accumulating Lives, I’ll quote here my first impression of Bob when I met him during the interview process:

Bob Bernat was not prepossessing to look at. He seemed a small, thin man, although he was actually as tall as I and had powerfully muscled shoulders and arms. A long face atop a long neck and a rather unhealthy complexion gave him a fragile look that was deceptive. There was a keenness and confidence about him that brushed aside any thoughts of frailty.

While the Arts Council and the whole of state government were terra incognita to me, Bob seemed to know exactly where he was and exactly what he was doing. He told me later that he had been one of a committee formed five years before to lobby for the creation of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Previous to that time there had been only half a dozen state arts councils in the nation, the largest and most significantly funded, the New York State Council on the Arts. In 1965, the federal legislation establishing the National Endowment for the Arts specified that 20% of the funds appropriated to it would be reserved for the states—if the states would create agencies to receive the funds. Not surprisingly, the next year there were 50 state arts agencies. This was emblematic of the leadership role the NEA played during the first 25 years of the arts council movement in the U.S. In the early 1990s, they came under attack from Senator Jesse Helms and other conservative members of Congress, their budget was cut, and their leadership role diminished.

If Bob were involved in the formation of the PCA, why was he not made executive director then? Probably politics. Republican Raymond Shafer was governor and he appointed distinguished Pittsburgh attorney and arts supporter Ted Hazlett as the first chairman of the PCA, and so on from there. Why was Bob Bernat executive director now? The answer was most certainly politics again. If the arts were Bob’s life, and I believe they sincerely were, his hobby was politics. He loved to play in it. One of our first days in the office, we walked out to lunch up State Street, past the headquarters of the State Republican Committee. Bob greeted a man by name who was walking down the sidewalk past us. The man looked a bit startled but Bob went over, shook his hand and I heard him introduce himself as the new director of the Arts Council. After a quiet confab that went on for several minutes, he rejoined me.

That was the chairman of the State Republican Committee.

Sometime during that first month, Bob told me how he got the job.

It was a surprise, he said, I didn’t know it was coming. I’d done some campaigning for Senator [the state senator from his district in Indiana, PA], and Senator worked for Shapp on his gubernatorial campaign. After Shapp was elected, he asked the Senator what he wanted, and he said, ‘I want the Arts Council for Bob Bernat.’

Bob spread his hands wide, with his practiced look of innocence, Why he said that I have no idea. A complete surprise.

One unrelated story from my sudden immersion in politics that month. We were to get together with Council Chairman Jay Leff, the banker from Uniontown, in the western part of the state. (From Accumulating Lives: a small man with a frequent, if not very warm smile. It was obvious from the incisiveness of his questions that he was highly intelligent, although his steady gaze could seem a bit predatory. Not unlike the man [Bernat]I had just met in the front office.) He wanted to discuss some Council matter, so late one afternoon, we walked up the two blocks to the Democratic Committee headquarters on Third Street. Jay had taken over as treasurer of the State Committee, and Bob told me he was at the headquarters because the books were a mess, and he was trying to straighten them out. We found Jay in an upstairs back room, sitting at a desk, laboriously making entries by hand in an old-fashioned ledger book.

He flashed us an embarrassed smile. "I hire people to hire people to do things like this," he said, continuing grimly with his numbers.

His remark has become a family classic, expressing how we all end up doing our portion of shit work in this world.

Bob and I had a lot to talk about those first few days. I’ve already mentioned the bureaucratic items, guidelines, deadlines, application forms, Service Purchase Contracts. In addition, it just naturally fell to me to oversee the office administration, so notes on my calendar say things like Summary sheets mailed to Council members, looking forward to the next Council meeting on December 21.

But one conversation took me aback. It couldn’t have been more than our second day in the office when Bob called me in in the morning, and as I sat down at the head of the long conference table that ran up to his table desk, said, What are we going to do about Marc and Alan ?

(From Accumulating Lives, these descriptions: Marc Mostovoy, a musician, who was Governor Shapp’s Advisor to the Arts by dint of his friendship with the Governor’s son, Richard Shapp, who was pursuing a career as an opera singer. Marc was a boyish young man with a loud and frequent laugh, who conducted his own orchestra, The Concerto Soloists. Accompanying Marc was Alan Spielman, an attorney who had been made an Assistant Attorney General and assigned to the Arts Council. Alan, another very bright mind, was functionally blind as a result of a chemistry lab accident in college, but with only a minimal ability to read by holding papers up to his eyes, he managed to stay on top of the paperwork required of a lawyer.)

What? I said in reply to Bob’s rather startling question, What do you mean ‘do about’?

He said something like the following: These guys are out to control the Arts Council. They’ve had it all their own way for the nine months or so they’ve been around. And we’re never going to get anything we want to do done as long as they’re in the background, potentially blocking any projects. I think we have to challenge them head-on. I’ve felt out Jay and I think he’ll back us. If they go to the Governor, I don’t know. What do you think?

I was still sitting there open-mouthed. This was our second day in the office. And I didn’t have any idea what he had in mind, or why he would start off his first week by picking a fight with well-connected people.

What I said was, I think if you’re going into a fight, you better be sure you have the guns.

I don’t recall that he commented on that, but I learned in short order that picking a fight was a Bernat technique. By the following summer, he had publicly criticized Nancy Hanks, the much-admired chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, referring to the possibility that she might become "the Tsarina of the arts in the U.S." The remark made him an instant celebrity in the arts council world. Who was this guy from Pennsylvania? And why was he biting the hand that fed him? I, too, thought he had gone a little crazy, so I was surprised to find that a special guest at our November Council meeting in New Hope, PA, would be none other than Nancy Hanks. And at breakfast in the Holiday Inn that morning, there they were, Bob and Nancy, tête a tête over coffee and rolls, like the jolliest of buddies. Nancy Hanks was a superb politician too. She knew how to play the game.

Maya Schock

December of 1972 was the month that Maya Schock opened the Gallery Doshi in Harrisburg. I described Maya in volume one, Opposable Lives, when she came to advise me on a Japanese tea ceremony for my production of A Majority of One. Originally a dancer in Japan, whose physical development was impaired by wartime food shortages, she had become an actor, but when she married an American soldier, Floyd Schock, and moved to Central Pennsylvania, there was little outlet for her talents. A couple of years after I met Maya, we went to a showing of art works by students of the York College of Art and were blown away by Maya’s bold, near-life-sized oils of nudes. She went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Now she and Floyd had bought a former neighborhood store about ten blocks up Second Street at Reily Street, and turned it into an art gallery, with a Japanese tea shop in the back. Doshi was the Japanese word for fellowship.

I took Bob up one day for lunch and to see the opening show. He and Maya took to one another right away, and he could see, from glancing around at the show, that the work was sophisticated and of more than local quality. The Gallery Doshi became a leader among the few but growing number of nonprofit galleries in the state that promoted the work of Pennsylvania artists. (Part of the problem with the Council supporting visual artists was that their venues tended to be commercial galleries, ineligible for grants. Grants to museums didn’t help them in any direct way, and the Council would not even consider making grants directly to individual artists. Just give artists money? Unthinkable. The nonprofit gallery was something close to the artists that we could fund.)

While Bob was chatting with Maya, I was wandering, with amazement, among a series of her paintings that hung in the show. They were, like the nudes, large oil paintings, many three by five feet. All had, floating on a surface of Japanese writing, one version or another of a Noh mask. Each painting was a different combination of background colors, calligraphy and mask. They were beautiful and mysterious, haunting. When I asked what the writing was, Maya said it was pieces of her autobiography. She called the series Self Journey Within.

I was enchanted with these paintings and kept returning to the Gallery whenever new ones in the series were hanging. Bob and other staff members, when we developed a staff, often came along. At one point Maya said she wanted to give me one of the paintings, whichever I chose from the series, that had grown to over 25 works. But by then, Doshi had become a grant applicant to the Council, and Bob pointed out that as a staff member, I shouldn’t accept gifts from a grant applicant. He was right, of course, although I would have no influence on their application—and despite the fact that during my time at the Council I did see a few people bend the ethics line a bit, here and there, to advance their own careers with friendly Pennsylvania arts groups. Regretfully, I declined Maya’s offer.

In the next couple of years, her paintings became darker in mood—one self-portrait was titled Portrait of a Fool. One evening when I was not home she called up and talked to Fran for nearly an hour, a disjointed and disturbing conversation. The downward spiral continued. Six months later she was dead. We went to the viewing at the funeral home, but all I could do was mutely shake Floyd’s hand. The loss of this talent was too great to be expressed in words.

First Council Meeting

The first Council meeting I attended was convened on December 21, 1972 in the board room of the William Penn Memorial Museum, part of the state complex of buildings in Harrisburg. The museum was a rather handsome round building and the board room, on the top floor, was consequently a wedge-shaped space with windows looking out west to the Susquehanna River. The table ran toward the windows, so whoever sat in the chair had his back to the light and could only be seen in silhouette by the others squinting down the table.

Jay Leff was not in the chair at the moment. Otto Dekom (from Accumulating Lives: a self-styled polymath, who was theatre and restaurant critic for a chain of suburban newspapers in Philadelphia, which, in practice, meant that he spent his time reviewing dinner theatres.) called the meeting to order. The minutes were approved, I was introduced and made some brief remarks about what I hoped to do in my job.

The first substantive discussion was of the Poetry-in-the-Schools program. This was a project of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), to give poets employment by having them do one-day residencies in elementary and secondary schools. It was currently being run by Jack Meehan over at the State Department of Education, but Russell Getz, a good-natured Pennsylvania Dutchman and head of Fine Arts at the Department of Education, was a regular attendee at Council meetings, and I believe Bob had already negotiated with him for us to take over the program. It would require matching funds from the Council, so the matter was tabled, but Bob had made his point in preparing the Council for the change.

Dr. Edward Arian, former Philadelphia Orchestra bassist, author of a book about the Orchestra, Bach, Beethoven and Bureaucracy and head of the new graduate program in arts management at Drexel University, reported on a questionnaire he had sent out to 27 community arts councils in the state. Six responses so far. Ed’s hope was to get in touch with them all and form a community arts council panel to advise the Council.

Bob reported on his work to establish criteria, something to replace that one incoherent sheet that I had dealt with in my first days in the office, to give applicants an idea how to form their applications, and to give the Budget & Finance Committee, which currently reviewed applications and made recommendations to the Council, some standards to judge applications on beyond just personal knowledge, preference or ignorance. Bob said he was reviewing criteria used by the NEA and other state arts councils. This will give you an idea how primitive things were in the fifth year of the PCA. We were really starting from scratch.

Jay Leff arrived at 11:15 a.m., took over the chair and immediately took the Council into Executive Session. The Council was subject to the State’s sunshine law, and its meetings were open to the public. When particularly sensitive matters were to be discussed, often personnel matters, the Council could go into executive session. This meant that any public viewers and the staff left the room. I have no idea what happened in these executive sessions, which became more frequent over the years of the Shapp administration. No minutes were kept. Lots of personnel problems, yes, but how much of the political work of the Council was conducted there as well?

When open session reconvened, Bob gave his report and at the end announced his hope that Mr. Carnahan would be able to go to Harvard for four weeks in July to attend an Institute of Arts Administration.

Bob was often difficult to work for, but he was generous in spreading the perks of the business around. He not only sent me to Harvard but to any number of other national conferences and training sessions.

After Bob’s report, Council member Howard Watson, a painter from Philadelphia, one of two black members of the Council, reported on the formation of a visual arts panel.

There was a motion to appoint Dr. Berman to the Budget & Finance Committee (at this point, the inner circle or de facto executive committee of the Council).

Dr. Muriel Berman was a cheerful middle-aged woman from Allentown, PA. Her husband, Philip Berman, owned Hess’s department store, famous up and down the east coast for glamour, in the way that Neiman-Marcus was famous. The Dr. in front of Muriel’s name was for optometry, and she maintained her license until 1984, although she and Philip spent their time as world travelers and art collectors. I always found Muriel a warm and sensible person. Her husband, whom I never met, was a modern art enthusiast, who filled Allentown’s parks with the kind of steel girder sculpture that reminds you of things unearthed in the far corners of a scrap metal yard. His gifts were greeted with some scorn by the residents of Allentown, and he turned his attention to Philadelphia, where he eventually became chairman of the board of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a world-class institution. Today, a gallery there bears his and Muriel’s names.

Next on the agenda, grants were presented. Sixteen were approved in amounts ranging from $300 to $7,750, reflecting the modest $239,000 budget of the Council for that year.

Last on the grants list was a Philadelphia organization called Prints in Progress, $2,500. Bob had already made a site visit there and come back enthusing about their program, which took print makers into local schools to work with kids, and maintained a gallery in center city where the best of the work was shown. He also enthused about the young black woman, Anne Edmunds, who ran it. I would eventually meet and do a lot of work with Anne, a small, quiet, cutely beautiful young woman, who had one of the best organizational minds I’ve encountered. In my efforts in future years to develop successful arts organization in the black communities of the state, administrative ability was at a premium, and Anne became a key resource in that effort.

Other Life

Here we are up to Christmas 1972, and I have no pictures in the family album of kids and presents around the tree, although with two salaries now coming in, I expect we could be more generous than usual. Was it this year that we went to the first toy department store, a predecessor to Toys-Я-Us, and did all our shopping for the kids in a single evening? They stocked everything on the list, so we loaded up the cart and checked out, for just over a hundred dollars. I was elated at the one-stop shopping and appalled that we had actually spent a hundred dollars at a single store in a single evening. That’s how times have changed. Today that’s a modest tape for a week’s groceries for two.

Life had altered at home with Fran at Early American Life magazine and me at the Arts Council. It was a bit hard for the kids at first. They were used to the services of a full-time mom, and there was a bit of grumbling. They also became, at ages seven and nine, latch-key kids. They arrived home an hour before Fran got there from the office. For Christmas holidays, Fran’s boss, Bob Miner, the editor and publisher of the magazine, generously allowed her to work from home. As the months passed, the kids adjusted to the fact that they had not one but two over-achievers in the family. A few years later Brian, as a teenager, was heard to mutter, "When I grow up, I’m not going to work all the time."

Despite such resolutions, genes and training tell. We’re pleased to say both of them grew up to be not only hard workers but impressive achievers. Gratifying to us, and we hope to them.

For my first few months at the Arts Council, there is a frequent notation on my daily calendar: 8:00 a.m. Dr. Ackerman. I realize, looking back, that this was my first encounter with periodontal, i.e. gum, surgery. I had been complaining to my elderly dentist for sometime about my gums, and he eventually sent me to the only periodontist then in town. It was a new specialty. He did a full course of surgery, all four quadrants, so incompetently that nine years later, I had to go to a more skilled periodontist, Gary Wetzel, and have it all done again, this time successfully. But looking at my desk calendar, I realize that in those early months at the Arts Council, I must have frequently arrived at my desk with a quarter of my face frozen up.

What a busy time of life! In addition to our two new jobs, I was taking on another project. Martin Murray, a man about my age, was a local architect, running the well-established firm of Murray Associates he had taken over from his father. Martin had been on the board of Arena House, and then on the HCT board, where he had sketched out for me a very innovative design for a small, studio theatre that could fit alongside the auditorium of the main theatre. I’d never seen a design quite like it, based on an X, with the playing space in the upper quadrant and audience in the other three. If I had stayed longer at HCT, I would certainly have tried to build it.

Murray Associates had been the architects for the campus of the Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC), and when, a few years after the main construction, they were asked for plans for an arts center, containing a large and a small theatre, Martin contacted me (I think it would have been about the time I left HCT, since my calendar notes for December 31, 1972 indicate I’m sending him an invoice for services.) to consult on the design of the two theatres.

His plan for the large theatre, about 360 seats, had the same pleasing symmetry as his X theatre. This time it was based on two intersecting circles, one for the auditorium, one for the stage. The stage circle surrounded a large, full-stage turntable. I could see a few small problems and one glaringly large one. At the cost of breaking up his beautiful symmetry, I explained that the area down stage left, just behind the curtain, was not only the stage manager’s traditional post but also the single most heavily trafficked space for entrances of actors and scenery. The wall that he had drawn there, curving away to form a circular backstage, would be in the way of everyone, forever. It would also make it very awkward to roll scenic wagons in from the scene shop, which was on that side. Martin reluctantly broke the circle and sent the wall straight back at 90 degrees into the wings, but he couldn’t bring himself to do the same on stage right. To this day, the website for the Rose Lehrman Arts Center at HACC has under Stage Specifications the note wing space extremely limited on SR.

I don’t recall if they ended up building the turntable, a massive piece of machinery that is not often used. I did advise him that the curved back wall of the auditorium could produce some peculiar echoes, and I think they installed baffles for this.

Backstage needed additions, of course. Designers never allow comfortable room for actors, make-up, costume construction and storage, props areas, etc. After I had added some of these, the backstage area began to look like a warren. Martin cleaned it up with one brilliant stroke, creating an open center space, the green room for the actors, with the service areas around the fringe.

It’s an old trick, he said, If you start getting too many doors and corridors, you invert the space. Whatever it was, it worked.

I spent a lot of my time on the second theatre, what is known in the trade as a black box. This means an open space, no proscenium arch, audience and actors in the same room. Martin had drawn a square with audience on three sides, on movable risers, a square playing area against one wall. All to the good.

This will be your most popular space, I said, It will have five days use for every day the main theatre is used. But it’s too small.

Martin said the director of the theatre program had okayed it, so I talked to the man. I pointed out that he had a playing area that was 12 feet on a side, with three rows of seating on a side.

That’s about like performing in a large living room. It’s going to limit what you can do.

The director admitted that he didn’t have much sense of scale and agreed to an expansion. I think we ended up with about five rows of seats per side and a playing area that was about 20 feet square. It worked well. A few years later I saw a production there of the musical of Studs Terkel’s Working, done by Open Stage of Harrisburg, and it was very comfortable in the space.

I really enjoyed my brief fling in theatre design, my second, really, since I had designed the Joe Jefferson Playhouse in 1960. I later worked on Martin’s plan for a theatre at Messiah College, a few miles southwest of Harrisburg, making some suggestions for changes, but I never saw the completed theatre, so I don’t know how they worked out.

At The Office

On January 2, 1973, I see from the notes on my desk calendar, I called Leonard Randolph in Washington. Leonard was an old friend from my early HCT days (see volume one, Opposable Lives). During a stint as speech writer for then-Governor David Lawrence, he had become one of the Community Theatre’s premier actors, doing several shows for me, including Malvolio in a cutting of Twelfth Night, and Lincoln in Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Leonard had a sharp, somewhat mordant intelligence, and he and Fran and I became good friends until he went off to Washington the following year. Now, it seemed, Leonard was head of the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). I told Bob that he was an old friend, and he suggested that we invite Leonard to be the guest speaker at a meeting we were planning for poets in the state to announce our taking over the Poetry-in-the-Schools Program from the Department of Education.

Leonard congratulated me on my new position, and intimated that in a few years, I might make it down there to the federal level of arts work. He also agreed readily to come to Harrisburg and address the meeting.

The next day, January 3, I met with Peter Cullman, the administrative director of Center Stage, the resident professional theatre in Baltimore. They had received an NEA grant to tour in Maryland and adjoining states, and had turned up some interest in the small city of Sharon (population 16,000), on the western border of Pennsylvania. Peter had started coordinating the residency with Greg Gibson, who had succeeded Vince Artz as executive director, and was now picking up after the disruption of our transition. He laid out their plans for me, and it was my first look at what a residency by a performing company entailed. They would bring a mainstage production, Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest, along with some smaller productions that could play in classrooms and community centers. They would be in town for three days, during which they would offer a number of residency services, acting classes, classes on production and scene design, and informal performances. All these would build interest and audience for the mainstage production on the final night.

It sounded good to me, and I, in fact, met with representatives from the Sharon Redevelopment Office the following day to coordinate. PCA would also make a modest grant toward the project.

But I was most interested in quizzing Peter Cullman about Center Stage. It was one of the new breed of nonprofit resident professional theatre companies now springing up all over the country, with the help of my former acquaintance from ANTA, Ruth Mayleas, now head of the Theatre Program of the NEA. The theatres usually had agendas that included classic and serious plays. Peter invited me to come down to Baltimore and see the production they were about to open, called Two Saints.

I think it’s beautiful work, he said, particularly the mime scenes in the second play.

The program, he explained, was two short plays, the first a stage adaptation of Isaac Singer’s Gimpel the Fool, the second based on Gustav Flaubert’s The Legend of Saint-Julian The Hospitaller.

Later that month, Fran and I drove down to Baltimore on a Saturday to see a matinee. At that time, Center Stage was in what I think was an Art Nouveau movie theatre on a commercial street in the outer reaches of the city. At least I remember the building had some beautiful stained glass windows. The production was splendid, the Singer piece colorful and charming, the Flaubert mysterious, with breathtaking scenes of Julian in the forest confronting the animals he was hunting. The animals were created by the actors’ movements, and they were quite wonderful, as Peter Cullman had said. This was theatre of a high order.

Afterward, we went downstairs—the dressing rooms in the narrow building were in the basement—to meet the visiting director who had done the show, Larry Arrick. I enthused over his work, and compared it to the work of my mentor, Tyrone Guthrie, which I think pleased him. I would meet Larry a number of years later, when he became, for a couple of seasons, resident director of the Pittsburgh Public Theatre. In the meantime, we came away very impressed with Center Stage, and I looked forward to their residency in Sharon.

On January 13, I made my first field trip to Philadelphia. Bob had been there a number of times and was already telling me about theatres I should see. My first stop that afternoon, while Fran went shopping, was the Walnut Street Theatre, on lower Walnut Street, a few blocks from Independence Hall. They call themselves the oldest theatre in America, having opened on February 2, 1809. The claim can be disputed. The Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, SC, first produced a play in 1736, but its life was interrupted by various fires.

Walnut Street is probably the oldest continually operating theatre, or more precisely, theatre façade in America. The handsome, neo-classical façade is all that was left of the original building when the Rohm and Haas Foundation, an early and important investor in the arts in Philadelphia, bought and refurbished it. Inside was an entirely new structure.

Having saved the historic theatre, they needed to do something with it, and their solution was to invite the Philadelphia Drama Guild to be the resident company. The Drama Guild was a community theatre, albeit one with an artistically ambitious schedule. I had met and rather tangled with its producing director, Sidney Bloom, over the matter of an amateur theatre competition a few years before. (See volume two, Accumulating Lives.) Now Sid had fallen into a tub of butter. What theatre company doesn’t want to have a major foundation come to them and say: we have this historic theatre; come and outline a season you’d like to do?

It was like a gift, Sid told me, I proposed we do a season of classics with Broadway stars. I found you could get them to rehearse in New York and come down here for a couple of weeks to play. They get to do the classics and we get stars.

The show I saw that afternoon was Jean Anouilh’s Waltz of the Toreadors, and I don’t remember the stars, maybe Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, or anything about the production, except that it was adequate. More about the problem of adequacy later, when I saw a lot more of the Drama Guild’s work. For the moment, Sid was riding high.

After the performance, I was walking up Walnut Street to meet Fran at our hotel, when I saw her across the way. At least I thought I saw her. What I saw was this tall blond woman in a dramatic red coat with a fur collar that blazed up, white and grey-pointed, all around her head. She looked glamorous as hell. When you haven’t had money for a long time, shopping can be sweet.

Our visit that evening was occasioned by one of those remarks at a Budget and Finance Committee meeting that had riled me. When the modest application from something called the Painted Bride Art Center came up, someone from Philadelphia, Alan Spielman, I believe, said, Oh yeah. I’ve heard of them. But I don’t know anything about them.

Tabled, without further comment.

I fumed. It was our responsibility to find out about them. I called and found they had a pianist doing a recital that Saturday night, and reserved two tickets.

Fran and I found our way down to South Street, a rather dark east-west street a dozen blocks below the center of town, and walked along until we found a canopy out over the sidewalk that said, The Painted Bride. It was a former bridal shop, the business