The year 1943 was not a happy, nor a prosperous one for the people of Jamestown.

The last vestiges of the Great Depression were still lingering in the air. Our nation was at war on two enormous and widely separated fronts. The addition of millions of armed service members was putting an end to unemployment, while the urgent need for factories to produce tanks and jeeps and artillery shells and uniforms brought people into employment who might not have wished to be employed in the manner in which they were.

Of course, the lowest ranking of those service members earned $21 per month, and were required to pay $7 of those dollars for life insurance. That didn’t leave them much money to send home to the wife and kids. Rationing was making it hard for most Americans to find any luxury items, let alone to purchase them.

The Depression had wiped out many people’s life savings. Many people had lost their homes. Jewelry had been pawned or sold.

And, do you know what they did? They built.

The Lucille Ball Little Theatre of Jamestown, which was then just the Little Theatre of Jamestown, was less than a decade old, and by 1943, they were performing 13 productions per year, although directors were straining their brains, searching for productions with only women in the cast, or women and men too young or too old or not eligible for military service. They sold 1,300 season tickets their first season, in the mid-1930s.

Members of the Jamestown Concert Association filled every seat in the Jamestown High School Auditorium that year. People who wished to buy a season ticket had to put their names on a waiting list, until current members either died, became too infirm to attend performances, or moved out of town, for whatever reason. Artists such as Sergei Rachmaninoff were featured performers on the Jamestown stage.

Also, in 1943, four residents of Jamestown who loved music and thought that performing music, as well as listening to it, was crucially important, met together at a local violin studio in town and decided to form a community, or civic, orchestra.

The violin studio belonged to Vivien Lawson, who earned her living, teaching her art to members of the families of those separated, war-oppressed and financially recovering people. It was located on Third Street, above a shop called The Corn Crib.

The four musicians were Ms. Lawson; Floyd Bloomstran, a gifted trumpeter; and Walton and Esther Huestis. Walton was skilled on several string instruments, and taught music in the Falconer School District. Esther played the oboe.

When I was teaching, I used to encourage students by telling them that there might be excellent reasons why they might fail at something, but my advice to them was to succeed if they possibly could, even if they might be completely justified if they failed.

We live in an age in which it has become acceptable to fail. I can name a long list of area arts organizations that have discussed closing down, selling precious assets, reducing seasons. This is true, even in the midst of what is being touted as an economic renaissance in Jamestown.

I recently was approached by Mary Anne Harp, a community activist, a skilled musician, and a retired music teacher in the Jamestown Schools. Harp plays trumpet in the Community Orchestra, the continuing organization which the quartet described above had created in 1943, and she had recently come across a scrapbook dealing with the founding and the early years of that local organization. She suggested that it might form the basis of an interesting column for me, and for my readers.

The scrapbook was kept by Esther Huestis, and I have found it a treasure trove of the arts in our community, and what ourselves, our parents and neighbors have done to keep the opportunity for local people to not only listen to, but to make music, for themselves and our community. Almost everything in this week’s column is borrowed from Mrs. Huestis’s writings. I hope you find it as interesting as I do.

1943

The first question approached by the founders of the orchestra was where an orchestra might rehearse. There were many theaters and large halls in Jamestown, but they usually wanted organizations using their space to pay rent. The members of the new orchestra had no money, so they understood the importance of encountering as few expenses as possible, until ticket sales could provide a working income.

In the building adjacent to Ms. Lawson’s studio, there was a meeting hall of the Baha’i Faith. Baha’i is a relatively small, international religion, having today approximately 5 million members, living all around the world. The members of the organization were willing to allow the new Civic Orchestra to rehearse in their meeting space, as long as its rehearsals did not interfere with their practicing of their faith.

Sheet music was borrowed from the library of the WPA Orchestra, in Buffalo.

A second important question would be who should conduct the new orchestra. The miracle of an orchestra is that a group of individuals, sometimes numbering more than 100 members, can reproduce the music which once abided only in the brain of a composer.

That’s why an orchestra needs a conductor. Because talented individuals can form their own ideas of what a piece of music must sound like, how fast the sounds must come, how loudly, etc., and someone with at least a hint of authority must get them to agree on a single understanding of the music, at least for now.

Even with a community orchestra, where people are volunteering their time because they love making music together, there is always the possibility of some individuals approaching a piece of music from very different points of view, and producing confused noise instead of music.

Vivien Lawson and Esther Huestis both knew Jan Wolanek. He had already founded community orchestras in Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Lawson was a student of his. When the Buffalo Philharmonic was incorporated, Wolanek became the orchestra’s first concertmaster, and first assistant conductor. Before coming to Buffalo, Wolanek had studied with Ignance Paderewski.

Wolanek agreed to conduct the new Jamestown ensemble. Walton Huestis agreed to serve as assistant conductor. The weather to be encountered in Western New York is by no means a new phenomenon. A Jamestown conductor living in Buffalo must sometimes rely on an assistant.

The founders realized that a board of directors would be needed. The first president of the board would be Russell Chall. Other members were Lorabelle Lepar, Ruth Galbraith, Merndine Bloomstran, Herbert Hern Sr., La Verne Johnson, and Andrew Anderson. Soon four more members would be added. The orchestra was represented on the board by Walton Huestis, Floyd Bloomstran and Vivien Lawson.

The word of the orchestra’s creation began to circulate among music lovers in town. At the first rehearsal, 17 musicians showed up at the Baha’i Meeting Hall. Wolanek had selected a program which was made up of the overture to Rossini’s ”Barber of Seville,” Schubert’s ”Unfinished Symphony,” Lehar’s ”Gold and Silver Waltz,” and was prepared to offer an encore of Johann Strauss II’s energetic ”Tritsch Tratsch Polka,” if audience enthusiasm justified its inclusion.

By the time of the first performance, 50 musicians had joined the orchestra. The board and musicians launched a one-week fund drive, in which they tried to convince the community to buy tickets to three concerts. The price? Season tickets cost $1, plus a wartime sales tax of 20 percent, requiring an investment of $1.20.

By the end of the drive, they had sold 1,650 season tickets. They had to schedule performances at the Jamestown High School Auditorium, the seats of which they filled.

The increasing number of musicians made the Baha’i site impractical, but the sale of so many tickets meant that the orchestra could rent rehearsal a pace in the high school’s music suite.

By 1945, while the war staggered to its grisly end, musicians from nine Chautauqua County communities were represented in the orchestra’s membership. The first concert of the 1945 season, held on Jan. 17, they performed with their first guest soloist: a 14-year-old pianist from Canada named Joan Rowland.

In 1945, ”Billboard Magazine” printed in its annual yearbook a compilation of information about 122 civic orchestras throughout the United States. The Jamestown Civic Orchestra was listed, along with the orchestra of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, the orchestra of the Juilliard School in New York City, and others. Mrs. Huestis quotes the ”Billboard” entry:

”Nobody’s paid. Nonprofessional and non-profit. Limited rehearsal time, since the entire personnel’s made up of working people.” The orchestra’s net worth is listed as $2,325.05, which included a surplus of $308.70, after rent and other costs were paid. By 1945, season ticket prices had soared by an additional 10 cents per concert.

Guest soloists who followed the very young Miss Rowland to perform with the orchestra included Mischa Mischakoff, concertmaster of the Chautauqua Symphony; operatic baritone Bertram Rowe; violinist Ruggiero Ricci; and a highlight, John Gurney, a basso from the personnel of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Gurney was the brother of Daniel Gurney, who had come to town to work at Gurney Ball Bearings.

By 1950, the orchestra featured performances by 66 musicians. By November of 1953, a letter had been received by the orchestra from Francesca Rappole, a member of a family still influential in our area. Mrs. Rappole had been approached by a member of the orchestra’s board, wanting to discuss issues dealing with the orchestra.

The letter, which is included in the scrapbook, inquires how she had come to be a member of the orchestra’s board, and asking the board, if she in fact had been voted into membership, to accept her immediate resignation, as she didn’t know she was a board member, and didn’t feel she had the time to fulfill the obligations of one.

The stamp which got Mrs. Rappole’s letter to officers of the board is clearly marked ”3 cents.”

The scrapbook is filled with printed programs from the orchestra’s decades of performing. To name just a few of the works of music which they have performed over the years, there has been ”Elijah,” an oratorio by Mendelssohn; ”Die Fledermaus Overture” by Johann Strauss II; excerpts from the opera ”Carmen,” by Bizet; ”Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat,” by Tchaikowsky; ”Finlandia” by Jean Sibelius; ”Dance of the Hours,” from the opera ”La Giaconda,” by Amilcare Poncielli; ”The Peer Gynt Suite” by Grieg; and an endless list of other works.

The scrapbook contained a letter that had been sent to the orchestra by a person signing the name E. Gay-Tifft, recommending that they consider employing a soloist named Georgiana Woodard, who is described as ”A young, colored mezzo-soprano, of Buffalo.” The writer reports that Ms. Woodard had performed the aria ”Mon Coeur S’Ouvre a Ta Voix,” by Saint-Saens, in her home city, resulting in cheers and a standing ovation from an open-air audience of more than 14,000, to the accompaniment of the Buffalo Civic Orchestra.

The young singer was contracted to repeat her aria in Jamestown, plus a spiritual: ”City Called Heaven.” The letter was written before her performance here, and there is no review in the scrapbook to record how she was received.

I can only hope that Jamestown’s appreciation matched that of Buffalo.

One of the things which impresses me most about this rich record of our city’s artistic legacy, except for a few of the statistics from the 1950s, is that all of this information deals with events from before I was born. And, that was a very long time ago.

AND SO…

Societies are only able to exist as long as people can adopt reasonable compromises. Successful societies begin to crumble rapidly when people start picking at each other’s hearts’ desires.

The Community Orchestra stopped performing some years ago. I have combed the library at the Post-Journal, and have not found the precise statistics.

I know that they resumed performing around 30 years ago, when First Covenant Church of Jamestown began performing ”The Living Christmas Tree.” Each year since then, a large chorus of more than 60 voices, joined by actors, dancers, soloists, and a volunteer orchestra, have performed a Christmas-related cantata which draws 4-5 full house audiences, some of whom come from many miles away to enjoy the performances.

The orchestra members from the holiday event found that they enjoyed the opportunity to use their musical gifts, and they enjoyed the fellowship with their fellow musicians. It is easy, in Jamestown, to become convinced that if you love learning of any kind, that you are an isolated and unwise individual. Nothing cures that foolishness like intelligent company.

The orchestra decided to adopt the history described above, and to re-create the Jamestown Civic Orchestra, or as it is more often called today, the Jamestown Community Orchestra. They give two concerts per year, in addition to the accompaniment of the Christmas cantata. There is no charge to attend, although the orchestra has expenses attached to its performances. For some reason, the Buffalo Civic Orchestra no longer allows them to borrow its sheet music, free of charge. As a result, a free will offering is taken at each performance.

Andrew Coccagnia, a local music teacher and performing musician, has served as conductor for the past several years.

People have always had reasons for not supporting organizations. For example, I know a person who won’t attend performances at Chautauqua Opera because she can buy a CD of whatever they perform, sung by the finest singers in the world. It’s true that a Chautauqua performance may not be of equal technical quality to a performance at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, or the Vienna Staatsoper. On the other hand, it may very well be more thrilling. I know. I’ve been to both.

Also, Chautauqua is one step on the ladder to the Met. Artists learn their craft there, so that they can perform in the great houses in the great cities. Nobody graduates from high school prepared to headline at the Met.

If you saw through the lower steps of a ladder, you are likely, sooner or later, to find the people from the very top steps tumbling down onto your head. Amateur theaters, local dance companies, small community arts organizations, local art collections, all are part of what we are, and what we want our children and grandchildren to become.

If we don’t model our values for our culture, they will quickly pass away. You need only to study the fall of great cultures, such as that of ancient Rome, to see it proven.

There have always been barbarians at the gate. We think we don’t have time to teach the children how to read or how to dance or how to create music or how to love art. In biographies of Beethoven, there are often printed reviews which decry his masterpieces as too old, too loud, too trendy.

There have always been economic pressures. There have always been high taxes. There have always been false (but extremely self-impressed) prophets who say that what we value is old fashioned, unappealing, stupid.

The history of an organization such as the Jamestown Community Orchestra can remind us of what we have been, and what we might be in the future, if we continue to walk uphill in our lives, instead of hunkering downhill, under a bush.

Do you want, some day, to be telling people, ”I loaned a group a place to perform,” ”I bought one of the first tickets,” ”I didn’t have the talent to perform, but I volunteered to set up chairs,” ”I brought in a casserole so artists could eat without leaving rehearsals?”

Or would you rather your tombstone said, ”I talked my friends out of going,” ”I voted to deny them the use of the hall,” ”I made a lot of money by selling their equipment,” or ”I got up a petition to stop teaching that subject,” and all the hundreds of thousands of other sandbags which get tossed, and have always gotten tossed?

One of my economic professors, in discussing the Great Depression, taught us that when the stock market crashed and the nation’s economy began to tumble, and employers began to throw people out of work by the thousands, there was no big furnace which burned up money, no nationwide failure of the soil’s fertility, nor any other reason, really why the horrors of that black period needed to happen. We just lost faith, in ourselves and in what we believed should happen.

I was inspired, when I read though the scrapbook. I hope our community can move forward and upward, and not betray our history.