How It All Happened
How Thomas Road Players Came To Be
This whole thing started when I returned from living in Germany. My brother Joe needed me because he became ill. I went home. Since I was returning to my ancestral farm, I had roots with the neighbors. It did not take long to renew friendships.
The Wasons, the Kraegers and the Foxes had been living on this road since I was a child. The families were all still here, just a new generation. It didn’t take long to acquaint myself with Vicky, Joe Kraeger’s wife. I had known Joe as a baby, his brothers and sisters that I had grown up with, had mostly moved away, except for Ginger.
Irene Fox and her sister Dorothy had been childhood friends, and we resumed the friendships.
As soon as the snow was gone enough to get into the building I climbed over the junk and got basic measurements. I sketched a rough floor plan and took a trip to Ohio where Ruth, my sister in law and her friend Tom lived. We spent three days planning how to use the space best. The biggest problem was that the ceiling wasn’t high. There was a second story, but being of barn construction, if we took out that floor the building might be in danger of collapsing. For that reason, the stage is only raised 24 inches from the floor.
This whole thing started when I returned from living in Germany. My brother Joe needed me because he became ill. I went home. Since I was returning to my ancestral farm, I had roots with the neighbors. It did not take long to renew friendships.
The Wasons, the Kraegers and the Foxes had been living on this road since I was a child. The families were all still here, just a new generation. It didn’t take long to acquaint myself with Vicky, Joe Kraeger’s wife. I had known Joe as a baby, his brothers and sisters that I had grown up with, had mostly moved away, except for Ginger.
Irene Fox and her sister Dorothy had been childhood friends, and we resumed the friendships.
- My brother Joe (who was also a retired teacher) and I had always done things together, and we dropped back in to the same mold.
When I learned that Vicky was home schooling her children, I offered my help, since I am a retired teacher. I love teaching, but did not want the responsibility and headaches of doing it as a job. Now it should be fun.
While I was in high school music was my thing. Knowing this, Vicky asked me if I could teach Anna piano lessons. This surprised me since I now thought of myself as an artist rather than a musician. When I found that the nearest teacher they could find was about thirty miles away, I agreed to give her beginning lessons. The original arrangement was that I would devote one afternoon a week to come to their house and teach anyone that showed up for lessons. To encourage practicing, I charged five dollars a day no matter how many children showed up.
- It wasn’t long before Sarah, Anna’s younger sister wanted lessons. Eddie her brother, wanted drum lessons. Later another family of Kreagers joined us on lesson days and Matt took up the drum. I also did some early childhood music with the “babies”. Some days both families met for art lessons. Our group had taken off.
It was while planning our first production that the name of our group evolved. We became THE THOMAS ROAD PLAYERS.
The winters are devoted to music lessons and art classes as well as some industrial arts that Joe taught. We threw in science once in a while if Joe or I thought something interesting to teach.
This remained fun for Joe and Me. As the teachers we had the respect of every child, and there were no role models of bad behavior. The one time someone made a snide remark, the whole class was shocked and sent him home in disgrace. Discipline was just not a problem. If you are a teacher you know what an amazing concept that is.
By the second year more families had joined our group. We continued with our original rules:
- 1. No teasing or put downs.
2. Help with the work
3. Be dependable
4. If you are in the group you get free piano, drum, painting and drawing lessons, but you must be active in the show.
5. Respect everyone regardless of age.
- The Recital
Our first production started as a recital for the music students at Christmas time. As more children became involved we wrote a play to offer more.
- Luau
Toward Spring Joe and Paul and I went to Hawaii to see our son who was meeting us from the Philippines.
Of course Joe and I, being teachers picked up “stuff” that would be good for teaching about Hawaii. On returning we presented our lessons. Believing in the principle that “Play is learning and learning is fun” it was not long before the idea of having a Luau was born. This involved researching food, music, and entertainment.
Joe had been working with the older children with vibrations and sound. They invented what we labeled a Sawsaphone. We had found huge round saw blades in the old workshop on the farm. The larger ones were as big as 36 inches in diameter the others varied in size. After a lot of testing and rearranging they found that a metal post extended through the center holes and suspending them from the ground enabled each blade to produce a musical sound. Some of those sounds were very nice. By using different sized saw blades, a musical instrument evolved. Anna used a big rubber mallet to play an original composition. I’m afraid it was not written down; she was just learning to read music.
We had graduated to having programs, printed on the computer. At the Luau all of the children in our group participated in the show. Hula dancers, drummers, skits, anything that might be in a Luau show.
It was the Luau that started the idea of having a community meal as part of the festivities.
We had learned from the Luau that we needed to improve the acoustics. People just couldn’t hear in the outdoor setting the wind was too loud..
I did a rewrite of Humperdinks “Hansel and Gretel”. We decided to have this play in our two car garage. We put up curtains and Joe made light bars. We experimented with hand held microphones.
My sister in-law Ruth and Tom her co-worker, had run a student drama group in Ohio. They came and stayed for a couple of days before the play so we had a chance to rehearse. Tom was a wonderful musician and was able to work with our singers as well as being our accompanist..
This production was well received and we played to a full house, with most of the audience outside the huge double door of the garage. We were lucky that we had put up a tent there because it rained furiously. It was so loud that sound was a real problem.
We continued with our pot luck idea.
We rehearsed and performed our next one in the local church. This solved our sound problem, but we still needed a better place to perform
At this time I was on the board of directors of the local library. It was decided that we could use the library, as part of the library programs. This was OK for rehearsal, but not for the performance. It just wasn’t big enough. Where could we find a stage? The owner of a local campsite offered his remodeled barn for performances. This was better. There was plenty of room for an audience, and there was a “kitchen” for the pot luck supper. The campers provided a built in audience.
The stage was a band stand, and not really adequate for us, but better than we had before. However, it had a huge beam right in front of the middle of the “stage.”
When we found that there had been a wedding reception scheduled the day before our performance we thought “No problem, we can rehearse the morning of the performance”. That day we discovered that the wedding lasted until 12:00 noon on the day of our performance. When we went to the barn at noon, the reception clean up committee had just started, and it was 3:00 P.M. before they were out of there and we could set ups our scenery. Our production was advertised to start at 7:00.
NO time to rehearse, or even have a dress rehearsal on site. This was very difficult but “the show must go on.” In spite of the problems, we had a standing ovation.
The barn owner was cooperative and offered us the opportunity to rebuild his stage to our specifications. Joe was a carpenter and one of our families ran a sawmill.. We would do it next spring.
That fall Joe died. Everything was on hold for a while.
- We Have a Theater
As soon as the snow was gone enough to get into the building I climbed over the junk and got basic measurements. I sketched a rough floor plan and took a trip to Ohio where Ruth, my sister in law and her friend Tom lived. We spent three days planning how to use the space best. The biggest problem was that the ceiling wasn’t high. There was a second story, but being of barn construction, if we took out that floor the building might be in danger of collapsing. For that reason, the stage is only raised 24 inches from the floor.
- As it warmed up enough to work outside the Thomas road Players set to work clearing out the junk. As we got nearer the floor (or ground as it was then) we discovered piles of good lumber that Joe had stored there. We also found almost everything that we would need to wire the theater. We even found two pillars for the proscenium. Two twelve year old girls made a floor in the areas that was dirt. They used some lumber that was on the discard pile from the saw mill. It took only a little work on the part of our carpenter to straighten it up. Family members, both fathers, mothers, and brothers and sisters came to our aid. Whatever needed doing, we had a professional there to do it. Electrician, carpenter, and finish carpenter. We even had our own building inspector. In less than three months we had the skeleton of a theater