Stories

Read Wayne’s Story and Sample Some of His Most Creative Moments! 

Although Wayne is no longer actively performing in public, he is still involved in creative projects, including songwriting, recording and writing stories for people of all ages. From this location online, you can connect to nearly 100 original songs, all downloadable FOR FREE.

As you continue to explore the STORIES on this page, you’ll find photos, videos, recordings and more samples of Wayne’s creative work through the years! In addition, Wayne’s YouTube Site is loaded with many videos of Wayne performing on episodes of a local PBS show produced by the Minnesota Association of Songwriters. Another section of YouTube videos capture his performance in a 1980 production of Side By Side By Sondheim! Links to all of the above are included on this page.

FIRST LOVE:  LIVE PERFORMANCES ON STAGE

Wayne’s fondest performance memories take him back into those age-old elementary school “plays” that were written and staged by the students in each class, one at a time, for all the OTHER classes. Though they weren’t supposed to be competitive, each class definitely tried to “out-do” the others! Some students, like Wayne, had those competitive “hooks” go so deep into them that they were forever affected in every artistic effort of their lives.

Try as he might in sports or jobs or other activities, the urge to “perform” was never to be denied. This undeniable urge began as a high school Junior, when a female classmate named Mary Pagliero grabbed him by the wrist, looked him in the eyes and said:  “You’re coming with ME!” He was summarily dragged to the high school auditorium and told exactly what to do at his first audition for “THE HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL.” In this case, he was told he was auditioning for “a part” in My Fair Lady. The next day, he discovered he had earned the part of “Colonel Hugh Pickering”. This, apparently, was “a comic lead role” and required him to use a British dialect and sing a solo titled “You Did It”!

Unfortunately, neither his character nor his name was included in the beautifully printed program for the show. Rather, they appeared on a cheap, blue-ink mimeograph sheet that was folded into every program. At the top of the sheet was the word “OMISSIONS”. Strangely, none of this bothered the young man, who was met with great applause and laughter at each performance and couldn’t WAIT for auditions for THE HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL in his Senior year!

That Senior-year musical was Carousel. And the young man once again earned “a comic lead role” as “Enoch Snow”, a character with a round-bottomed boat, an adoring wife (played by Debbie Twardy), nine children, and yes, a solo about his job as a herring fisherman. So performing in high school musicals was where his love for theatre actually began.

Wayne with Debbie Twardy as Mr. and Mrs. Snow at AHS in 1965

To round out Wayne’s high school story, he also worked (if you can call it that). He organized a six-piece rock-and-roll band (he sang and played drums) that played all over the DC and Baltimore metro areas and got paid good money for almost four years. That band, the TorKays, consisted of three musicians from Woodson High School (Ernie Bickers, lead guitar, Kirk Bressler, rhythm guitar and Tom Germaine, bass guitar) and three from Wayne’s own Annandale High (Wayne on drums and Bill Lowe and Mike Dattilio on saxophones). The six members of that band were like brothers. Rehearsals were the “rec (short for recreation) room” at Wayne’s house every Saturday afternoon. New songs were learned, rehearsed and usually played that same night at a gig somewhere within fifty miles of Wayne’s house. Wayne’s mother, happily helped by his sister, served lunch on the patio out back. Mama H would dance her way through the day upstairs and occasionally yell down the stairs, “That’s a good one!” when the guys got it right.

Once or twice a summer, on an “off” (no-gig) weekend, Dad and Mom H would pack up the five Hamiltons in two cars on Saturday, invite the guys in the band, and lead a five-car caravan to Ocean City, Maryland or Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where they’d rent enough on-beach campsites for everybody, build a driftwood campfire, call hot dogs and s’mores a meal, swim in the ocean and get sunburned. Then they’d do more of the same until about noon on Sunday before wearily making their way back home for a few hours rest before work or school Monday morning.

The band was such a central part of Wayne’s life throughout high school, no one in his family could mistake its importance to him. One problem was hauling a lot of gear. His drum set obviously had a lot of pieces and accessories. Plus, as lead singer, he took on the responsibility for hauling around the PA (public address) system, which included a mixing board, speakers, mics, mic stands and cables. The other guys helped him set it all up and tear it down, but he carried it from gig to gig. That’s where dad came in. He had a buddy who had inherited a 1937 Plymouth P4 (known as a “luxury model” auto in its day), and dad saw a solution. It had PLENTY of room for all of Wayne’s band gear, so he bought the car for Wayne. However, Dad told him, “It’s still MY car.” In 2021, Wayne released a song he called “Old Nellie” about this car. Looking back, it was just what he needed in the 1960s!

Old Nellie

One of the six TorKays found himself working in the middle of rock royalty in the early 1970s, years after the band members had gone their own ways. Kirk had joined the Marine Corps after the TorKays broke up in 1965. There, he became an expert in avionics, able to wire any Marine aircraft to fight and fly. In 1972, Kirk was a civilian living in Tulsa, Oklahoma when legendary rock star Leon Russell bought an old stone church there and announced his plan to turn the church into a recording studio.

         

Above:  Leon Russell’s Stone Church Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Russell put out the call, near and far, for help in making that happen, and nobody was any closer than Kirk. He had a hand in wiring up every sound board, microphone, speaker and amplifier. For the next decade, all the famous rock performers wanted to record there, so Kirk rubbed elbows with the biggest stars, from Petty to Clapton and Dylan to Joplin. When the studio was sold in 2021, Tulsa World magazine published a commemorative article and interviewed former employees, including Kirk. He was asked if he was ever in a band or if he was strictly interested in the engineering side of the recording process. Kirk replied, “In high school, I played guitar in a band that majored in R&B.” The TorKays, perhaps?

L-R:  Wayne, Tom, Ernie, Kirk.
Kneeling, Mike Dattilio. Not pictured:  Bill Lowe.

In summer months, Wayne was also an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) competitive swimmer from age 12 to age 18. His family belonged to the popular Greater Annandale Recreation Center (GARC) where Wayne’s coach, Ed Solotar, regularly led GARC swimmers to the championship of the Northern Virginia Swimming League (NVSL). Just a few years later, Coach Solotar guided swimmers from around the country to Olympic Gold Medals.

Wayne’s Swimming Coach Ed Solotar

As soon as he was eligible, Wayne earned his Red Cross Senior Life Saving and Water Safety Instructor certificates and got paid to manage swimming pools, coach AAU swim teams and teach children how to swim. Wayne loved his summers!

Wayne headed for his next shift on the guard chair

He woke up early, put on a swimming suit, a T-shirt, some flip-flops and was at the pool where he was coaching before 9 am. It was coaching, then class lessons, then private lessons, then the pool opened at noon. Thirty minutes for lunch and/or dinner, depending on his schedule, and he was back at “his” pool for a final backwash, then lockdown and lockup at 9 pm.

Some of Wayne’s memorabilia from swimming, coaching and being a lifeguard

It was during those golden days of summer that Wayne befriended a fellow NVSL coach named Dennis Shaw. Dennis, four years older than Wayne, was not only a friend, he also advised Wayne to “check out” his own undergraduate alma mater, Emory & Henry (E&H) College, located in the Southwestern corner of their home state of Virginia. After Dennis graduated from E&H, he became a teacher and coach at T.C. Williams High School in his home town of Alexandria, which boasted the first racially integrated football team in the state. In 1971, T.C. Williams won the state championship in football, and Dennis was on the coaching staff of that remarkable team. It was so remarkable that it resulted in the release, in 2000, of a major motion picture starring Denzel Washington titled “Remember the Titans”.

Dennis Shaw

In his early teens, Dad had Old Nellie at his job in Arlington, Mom worked retail hours, which no one in the family could figure out, and his brother had his own car and after-school job. Wayne could sometimes share a car with his sister, but the company he worked for staffed pools that were all close to his family’s house.

Wayne’s Lambretta V200 scooter

So the money Wayne made from the TorKays enabled him to buy an old Lambretta scooter to zip around in. It was all beat up, but he never had far to go and a tank of gas lasted him a long time. And in those days, gas was only 25 cents per gallon, so he could always get where he needed to go!

As a senior, he earned a part in the non-musical Senior class play, The Girls in 509, won a prize for doing something in the school’s talent show, and was inducted into the school’s chapter of the National Thespian Society. He also sang baritone in the school’s choirs and competed on the school’s wrestling team for two years. With all that activity, he somehow managed to pass all of his classes and graduate with the other members of his class.

Wayne (L) as Winthrop Allen in The Girls in 509

But Wayne never understood nor questioned how the officials of his high school pulled off what Wayne called “two HUGE honors” for the Class of 1965:  somehow, they had the connections or the money or whatever it took for Annandale’s Baccalaureate Service to be held at the NATIONAL CATHEDRAL in Washington, DC! He was a member of a select choir that sang from the chancel at the front of the cathedral that day!

The High Altar at the National Cathedral

In addition, the actual graduation ceremony also occurred in Washington, at the largest concert hall in the city, CONSTITUTION HALL, with more than 3700 seats, owned and operated by the Daughters of the American Revolution! What a sendoff for the members of his class; the memory still brings back pride and gratitude.

Constitution Hall

THE NEXT STEP:  A CHAT WITH HIS DAD

Here was Wayne, a high school graduate in the mid-1960s with a war raging in Southeast Asia and, like most of the males in his generation, facing what they called “the draft”:  MANDATORY service in the United States military and possible postings in deadly war zones to protect America’s interests. As early as age twelve, Wayne thought he might follow in his father’s footsteps and join some branch of the military as a life path. However, at age 15, his freshman year in high school, he was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, known today as T1D. This disqualified him from service in any branch of the military.

Nevertheless, after he graduated from college, he was “called up” for a physical, which ordered him to report fo a specific address on a specific day at a specific time. If he passed the physical exam, he would receive a “1A” rating and would be ordered to report for duty in the United States Army, perhaps on the very day he had been declared “1A”! When he was notified to report, he called his endocrinologist and got an appointment, where he was given a signed statement testifying that Wayne was a Type 1 Diabetic and should be classified as “4F, Ineligible for Service”.

Every man was ordered to “strip to the waist” and was given a sheet of paper that showed a series of “checkpoints” each man was supposed to visit, things like WEIGHT, HEIGHT, etc. When you had visited all the checkpoints, you went into a big room where everyone was gathered, give your sheet of paper to a grizzled old sergeant, put your shirt back on and waited.

The weird part for Wayne was that he still had his statement from his doctor in his hip pocket. None of the checkpoints gave him an opportunity to share that information!

Suddenly, the grizzled old sergeant stood up and said, “All right, you grunts! Outside that door (and he raised his right forefinger ominously) are a number of green US Army busses. If I do not call your name, you will exit the building through that door (again with the forefinger) and take a seat on one of those busses. You will be taken to our state capitol of Richmond and inducted into the United States Army TODAY! If I DO call your name, consider yourself ineligible for service in this man’s Army. You are relieved of your obligation to serve.”

At that point, the sergeant spoke about 5 names and finished with:  “That is all! Now MOVE!” Wayne’s name was not one of those he spoke. Wayne was stunned. He pulled the note from his pocket as he stumbled toward the sergeant’s table, saying, “I’m sorry, sergeant, there must be some kind of misunderstanding…”

“MISUNDERSTANDING? DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MANY TIMES A WEEK I HEAR THAT FROM GRUNTS LIKE YOU? What is your problem, mister?”

“Sir,” Wayne croaked, hoarsely, “I’m a Type 1 diabetic. I have a note here from my doctor…”

“WHAT? Gimme that note!” The sergeant practically ripped the note from Wayne’s hands. He read it, dropped it on the table and tore into the checkpoint sheets until he found Wayne’s. He skimmed the front side, then the back side and stopped about halfway down. “Crap! DUMMY! You never stopped at the doctor’s checkpoint! Number seventeen! Get back there now and pray he’s still here! Git!”

Wayne half ran, half stumbled back into the checkpoint maze, found the doctor and without even explaining himself, handed the doctor the checkpoint sheet and his doctor’s statement. The doctor, first smiling, then chuckling, said, “Don’t feel bad, man. You’re the fifth one this month who’s missed me with some kind of 4F problem.” He scribbled something on the checkoff sheet, stapled the two sheets together and handed them back to Wayne. “Take this back up front. And don’t worry about the Sarge. He’s a pussycat… GO!”

Wayne couldn’t get “back up front” fast enough. There, the sergeant gave him a card that he’d stamped “4F” on and told him he’d get a letter from the draft board within two weeks making his ineligibility official. Then he sat down at his table and ignored Wayne. Wayne quickly left the building and drove home.

Like many men in his father’s generation, Wayne’s dad willingly enlisted for service in 1941, when Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor dragged America into World War Two (WWII). His parents quickly married, and mom followed dad around to his training stations in South Dakota and Texas, living off base with couples offering free room and board to Army Air Corps wives as dad worked his way toward becoming a Technical Sergeant in B25 bombers.

Two years after that war ended, Wayne was born, and his childhood was deeply affected by both his parents:  the heroism and traumas of his father in what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the positive coping influences of his mother through her love of popular post-War era music. The 1950s brought mom fraternal twins and dad’s technical expertise earned him a civilian job in the Veteran’s Administration. Dad was the first programmer of the first mainframe computer ever purchased by the Federal government (it was a Sperry Univac)!

Now 18, Wayne had some choices to make, and he went to his dad for advice. Wayne knew dad was smart. He once got a peek at dad’s high school report cards…straight A grades. Wayne was good at figuring out problems, but not if they involved numbers or scientific formulas. Wayne was better with personal, human, or organizational problems. Because dad needed to earn an income as soon as he left the military in 1945, he never got a chance to attend college. Therefore, Wayne would become the first member of the Hamilton family to ever attend, let alone graduate from, college!

Dad was not only smart, he was also generous. He told Wayne he would pay for tuition, room and board; however, he warned Wayne that if he flunked out or dropped out, all resulting expenses would have to be paid by Wayne. This was an excellent incentive to SUCCEED!

COLLEGE AWAITS AND OPPORTUNITIES ABOUND

Wayne was told by counselors at Annandale high school that the smaller the school he chose, the more personal attention he could expect to receive from his professors. The first school that accepted him was twice as far away from home and had 20 times the number of students as the second school, so the choice was easy. He chose the smaller, closer school, Emory & Henry (E&H) College (now University), named for Methodist Bishop John Emory (1789-1835) and Virginia patriot Patrick Henry (1736-1799). This was the school recommended to him by his coaching friend, Dennis Shaw. Affiliated with the Methodist Church, the school is located in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, within sight of the highest geological point in the state, Mount Rogers, just 30 miles from the Tri-Cities (Bristol, Kingsport and Johnson City) area of East Tennessee. At that time, the entire student body numbered less than 800.

It turned out to be the right move. Wayne’s official “Major” was Economics, the equivalent of today’s Business degree. His “Minor” was English. There was no Theatre major. They only had one professor, H. Alan Pickerell, who taught theatre classes (including acting, directing, technical theatre and theatre history), and he only had a budget for producing two plays per year, one of which was typically a musical. So for the next four years, Wayne took every theatre course offered and performed in every musical and about half of the “straight” plays mounted at the college. They included plays like Becket, by Jean Anouilh, The Drunkard, by William Henry Smith, The Fantasticks, a musical with lyrics and book by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt, and Guys and Dolls, with script by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows and music and lyrics by Frank Loesser. Wayne also directed a mainstage production of Picnic, by William Inge, his first opportunity in that position. Pickrell, this same versatile theatre professor, also was the only professor teaching classes in Speech, which proved in later years to be lucrative for Wayne, since he also picked up a considerable amount of training in Stage Dialects and the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Costuming in small-college theatre was always a challenge, and that was true in Becket. He had to borrow a pair of boots to complete his “Baron” costume. They were too big for him, making it difficult for Wayne to keep his balance and even walk normally. So when the murder scene arrived, Wayne and the other murderers burst onto the floor of the audience level and rushed to a staircase that led to the center of the stage level, where the Archbishop was leading a service. UP the stairs all the murderers ran! Except for Wayne the last murderer in, who slipped in his too-large boots and fell flat on his ass, right in front of his father and brother in their front-row seats!

The fall was so comical and out of place that the entire audience exploded with uproarious laughter. They KNEW this wasn’t supposed to happen, but they simply couldn’t contain themselves! Wayne scrambled to his feet, saw his family members laughing, HEARD the entire audience laughing and, as he flew up the stairs with his wooden, painted-to-look-like-steel sword, jammed that faux instrument of death into the belly of the character he had been directed to “kill”, played by good friend in real life, Bob Rathburn. Then, as directed, Wayne grabbed the tunic of the still laughing, supposed-to-be-dead Rathburn and slammed him, face-first, to the floor of the stage behind a large, painted “stone” (made of plywood), ostensibly where the audience could no longer see him.

Oh, would that it were true. With the murders done, and the carnage evident everywhere, the audience started to settle down, take it all in, and be quiet. But seconds later, the poor dead lad simply couldn’t help himself. On his belly, thinking he was out of sight, Bob began to laugh again, which made his sandal-clad feet begin pumping up and down, up and down, faster and faster. The laughter began to rise again, both in the audience and on the stage! Fortunately, the Stage Manager at that instant called for a blackout to end the scene. For days thereafter, Wayne was met with smiles and chuckles as he passed others on the campus sidewalks. He simply kept his head down and kept walking. His friend Bob forgave Wayne for the injuries he inflicted upon him, which included a large bruise on his midriff and a bloody nose. For that, Wayne was grateful.

Though Wayne was no academic fireball, he was inducted into the college’s Alpha Psi Omega National Dramatic Fraternity as a Sophomore and served as its President during his Senior year. He was also chosen to be a member of the Blue Key National Honor Society, which recognizes college Seniors for all-around excellence in scholarship, leadership and service.

 
< Elizabeth (Libba) Cotten

Doc Watson>

 

 

Pete Seeger

Wayne admitted to a bit of hero worship at E&H when he had opportunities to meet and talk with musical favorites like Pete Seeger, Elizabeth Cotten and Doc Watson and modern playwrights like Arthur Kopit, who attended a rehearsal and spoke to the cast of his play “Oh Dad, Poor Dad Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad“, then in production at E&H.

Arthur Kopit

His part in Kopit’s play (Jonathan) was a turning point for Wayne, but only because it was reviewed by a young English professor at E&H named R. Lamarr Smith, who wrote a review of the show for the college newspaper, The White Topper. In part, Smith wrote:  “A great part of the success of the production…is a consequence of the quite brilliant and inspired acting of Wayne Hamilton in the role of Jonathan. From the moment of his appearance on stage…his is a flawless performance. …If I have singled out Mr. Hamilton for special recognition it is because he most perfectly met the ‘sole demand’ I make of an actor; that he permit me to believe in the character he is creating. Each actor in Oh Dad had for me his great moments…for Wayne Hamilton it was first line until last — a remarkable performance.”

Wayne also became a fan of Shakespeare at E&H, thanks to the Chairman of the English Department, Dr. Marius Blesi (pronounced “blay-see”). Dr. Blesi taught ALL of the Shakespeare courses, and Wayne took every one he could get. Blesi’s approach was to assign parts to his students in whatever play was under scrutiny and READ THE PLAY OUT LOUD IN CLASS! He would only stop the reading to explain a word or phrase from Elizabethan English, after which reading would recommence, followed by the usual English-class discussion, papers, etc. Borrowing something from Johnny Carson, Dr. Blesi called his readers “The Mighty Blesi Art Players”. Wayne loved it, of course, because Dr. Blesi typically chose him to read!

Sports-wise, E&H offered no wrestling and no swimming, so Wayne’s extracurricular activities were limited to theatre, choral music and fraternity endeavors. That is, until Wayne decided to put together a “soul” band! This was late in 1965, and a time when many small schools, especially in the Southern states, admitted only Caucasian students. His band, “The Glad Hand”, was kept VERY busy playing gigs throughout Southwest Virginia and East Tennessee at the many high school and college campuses that populated that part of the country. This provided an incomparable source of income while he attended undergraduate school! The picture below was taken early in the band’s existence. The Farfisa keyboard was replaced by a Hammond B3 organ with a Leslie tone cabinet, the horn players pictured (sax and cornet) also included a trumpet, there were TWO lead singers (the organist and the drummer), and every other player in the band sang backup!

L-R:  Jody Huskey, Ken Bondurant, Wayne, Harvey Perkins,
Heath Jones, Claus Carr. Not Pictured:  Bill Lamb, Harvey Johnson

Wayne also auditioned for the choral program at E&H. In high school, anybody could sing in a choir – no audition required! Each student who was accepted into the college’s choral program was required to sign up for a one-credit course EACH SEMESTER and meet for an hour-long class by section (lyric and mezzo sopranos, alto, contralto, baritone, bass, first and second tenors) each week with the choir director. Freshman students sang at weekly convocations and Sunday church services, rehearsing the music at an additional meeting each week. Wayne’s goal was to get through the first year and then audition for the TOURING choir, the CONCERT choir, the BEST choir on campus, where he would perform for the remainder of his college career and tour annually to some far-off destination at some point during the spring semester each year, usually during Spring Break.

Charles R. “Chick” Davis

Ordinarily, the one choir director on campus, Charles “Chick” Davis, would work with every student enrolled in choral studies. This year (65-66), however, Mr. Davis was completing his doctoral studies in music on the campus of Indiana State University, then and now one of the finest vocal music programs in America. So, Wayne’s first year would be under the tutelage of a substitute, one of Mr. Davis’ former students, a Mr. Henley Denmead, who, like Davis, had already earned his MMus degree.

Wayne was scheduled to meet with Mr. Denmead one hour per week with other baritones in “Class Voice”, where they would learn not only the finer points of vocal production, but also the Baritone parts of every piece of music the choir was scheduled to sing.

During their initial class meeting, Mr. Denmead had each student sing a vocalise up the scale, matching pitch with the piano in order to determine that student’s “range”; e.g., the lowest and highest notes the student could effectively sing. When it was Wayne’s turn, he started out at a comfortable point with Denmead at the piano and moved up the scale a half step at a time. Eventually, Mr. Denmead stopped and said, “Well, Mr. Hamilton, I don’t know who’s been telling you that you are a baritone, but to MY ear, you have a vocal range that’s more in line with a second tenor! Let’s talk about changing your schedule so you can meet with the tenor voice class.”

As it turned out, this discovery by Mr. Denmead was a distinct advantage to Wayne. Not only was Denmead a tenor, but the director of Wayne’s vocal future, Mr. Davis, was also a tenor. Wayne believed this fact accelerated his vocal development during the next four years and made him a far better singer!

On top of all that, the music “inside” Wayne was limited. Through high school, he had been a drummer and singer. But he felt an increasing urge to create new songs of his own. He had no trouble creating lyrics and melodies, but didn’t play an instrument like guitar or piano that would solidify the melody and “tie” it to the lyric. When he arrived at E&H, he found himself surrounded by young men who played every kind of stringed instrument imaginable. Of the 24 men on his residence hall, (the third floor of Matthews dormitory) he was one of four who did NOT play some kind of stringed instrument. But he concocted a plan to change that.

While he was home during Christmas break of his Freshman year, Wayne drove over to visit one of his old band mates from the TorKays, Mike Dattilio, who was one of the two sax players. He was on his Christmas break as well, from Northern Illinois University. Wayne remembered the six-stringed Harmony guitar Mike had hanging in his room at home, but didn’t remember ever seeing him play it. After comparing notes on their first college semester, Wayne offered his old friend twenty bucks for the old guitar decorating his room. Without a word, Mike pulled the guitar off the wall and Wayne handed him a twenty dollar bill.

The guitar had been made for steel strings, but somebody (maybe Mike?) had used a fingernail file to widen the nut slots so they could accommodate thicker nylon strings. That made learning chords easier for a novice player. Even then, Wayne played the instrument until his fingers ached. Given the talents of the men in his dorm, he had free guitar lessons available to him whenever he wanted them. By 1968, Wayne was writing songs and to this day, most of his chord progressions have been developed with his twenty-dollar Harmony guitar, which hangs on the wall, not in a case, ready to “go to work” 24 – 7!

Wayne has been a member of ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) for decades and invites readers to visit his MUSIC page on this site.

The day after he graduated from Emory & Henry College in May of 1969, Wayne did not immediately rush into a new civil service career in the Washington, DC metro area. Rather, he had made a commitment to Dr. Davis when he started his Senior year for what seemed to be an exciting adventure in music. Throughout Wayne’s Senior year, Dr. Davis had been planning a three-week tour by the Concert Choir from Southwest Virginia to Vancouver, British Columbia and back. And not only was Wayne invited to participate, but he was also given a solo to perform in the program!

On that journey, Wayne brought a “steno pad” and childishly vowed to keep a meticulous record of the trip from his perspective. Though his effort is incomplete, it is detailed, accompanied by pictures and, because it was only completed recently, audio files. Wayne has often said that those three weeks were like an additional year of study at E&H, in terms of what he learned about America and the wonderful people who live here. In story, photos and audio files, it tells the tale of that three-week trip and some of the adventures that unfolded while the group was on the road. Readers may open (click) the PDF link below and read it from this site OR download the entire PDF document to your device OR save it OR send a link to friends. It’s a true story titled CROSSING AMERICA. It is dedicated to all members of the E&H Concert Choir, past, present and future.

CROSSING AMERICA.pdf

HOME AGAIN TO A DIFFERENT LIFE

High School and College were successfully completed, and Wayne had just returned home from a tour of his country that taught him much about the geography of his nation and the people who populated it. He was grateful for that opportunity and called it his “fifth year of college”. 

But now he faced adulthood in a career that nothing he had studied so far had prepared him for:  programming mainframe computers. And for the United States Navy no less! He was trained in COBOL and Autocoder, and while he was in training, Wayne was investigated by Naval Intelligence and the FBI, who interviewed people at Annandale high school, at E&H College and his neighbors in Annandale. He was given a Top Secret clearance and assisted in the transition from IBM 7080 class computers to 360 class computers. His office was at the Navy Annex on Columbia Pike in Arlington, Virginia, which was originally a warehouse near the back entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, Marine Corps Headquarters at Henderson Hall and Robert E. Lee’s home, the Custis-Lee Mansion. The Annex was on high ground that overlooked the Pentagon, the Potomac River and the city where Wayne was born:  Washington, DC.

The US Navy Annex in Arlington, Virginia (1941-2013)

Right out of school, Wayne was living with his parents. He had met his future wife at E&H, an Education major and alto in the Concert Choir. She hadn’t yet finished her degree work, and she wanted to teach, so she and Wayne agreed to wait until she completed her education before they married. Almost 400 miles away, Wayne worked and waited. Since their separation began in mid-1969, the least expensive form of contact was writing letters. Many letters were written, accompanied by infrequent phone calls. When opportunities occurred, he or she would drive, hitch a ride with friends or take a train ride to spend a weekend at the other end of the line.

But the music was always there, and the big city was loaded with places to go and listen. Moreover, many of Wayne’s work colleagues were young enlisted men in uniform who were about Wayne’s age. When they found out about Wayne’s experience working in bands, they invited him to go with them to the NCO (non-commissioned officers) clubs the Navy had set up all over town for them. Wayne’s TorKays band had played at a few NCO clubs and USO (United Service Organization) Clubs when he was in high school. At some point, a couple or ten of his new buddies would tip the band leader to get him to invite Wayne up to sing a couple of songs with the band. Sometimes “a couple” led to “several”. Naturally, Wayne was only too happy to comply. A few of the band leaders or band managers wanted to hire Wayne on the spot to join the band! But while Wayne was enjoying the limelight being back on stage, he couldn’t afford to be out late every night performing. That was bound to negatively affect his job performance. So he declined such performance offers.

Wayne wanted to “get back in the groove”, but only in a situation he could control, where HE could be the band leader and only book occasional gigs. And that’s what he did. One of his sax players from high school and his B3 player from college were available and interested. They put an ad in the Washington Post classifieds and quickly found an excellent bass player. In less than a week, he’d assembled a cool quartet and given them an appropriate name:  FOUR!  Living and working in Arlington, he started to hunt for small restaurants and clubs that wanted music. He was lucky to find a well-known Arlington restaurant, Weber’s, that was famous for serving “aged beef”. They wanted music on Friday and Saturday nights, and they paid handsomely. 

Soon FOUR also had an invitation to perform at the Prospect House on Sundays after the Washington Redskins games. The venue was unique. Like Weber’s, it was in Arlington, Virginia, just outside the National Cemetery grounds and right behind the Iwo Jima Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was a high-rise building with a glass wall on the north side of the top floor. This top floor housed a restaurant that held an “after party” after every game, win or lose. And FOUR was hired to provide the music for each party!

The view from the top floor of the Prospect House

Many people are unaware of the fact that the city of Washington, by Federal mandate, restricts the height of buildings within the city limits. Roughly, no building within the District may be higher than 13 floors. THIS building, across the Potomac river in Arlington, was at LEAST that high. And with its glass wall, the view of the city was unparalleled. With the check from the venue owner and the tips from the wealthy clientele, the pain of moving their gear from Weber’s to the Prospect House and back again was well worth the price.

By the time Wayne’s fiancee graduated, he had found a brick apartment complex dating back to the 1930s, located less than half a mile from the Navy Annex. It had been well maintained, was in a secure part of Arlington and was affordable for young working couples. Wayne moved in and a few weeks later the couple was married in her home town of Kingsport, Tennessee. After a brief honeymoon in Montego Bay, Jamaica (Wayne’s second trip outside America), the single-car couple set up housekeeping in the little apartment, she found a job teaching and Wayne walked to work each day, rain or shine.

The first year of marriage brought a fair amount of change to the life of Wayne the musician. FOUR broke up when the B3 player quit, and Wayne was recruited into a trio for a brief time that consisted of drums, B3 and tenor sax. But eventually Wayne was not involved in any type of band. Life was simply the job and the marriage – no reason to complain about that, right?

Wayne made a habit of reading the Sunday Entertainment section of the Washington Post. One Sunday he saw an ad for auditions for a new kind of theatre he’d never heard of:  DINNER THEATRE. Patrons paid one price for a buffet-style dinner, with or without alcohol, followed by a full-length performance of a Broadway musical! This was AMAZING! Wanted:  Experienced singers, dancers, musicians! All would be PAID, but this was a non-Equity production!

Actors Equity is the Professional Union for Actors, ensuring them a specific level of payment for the roles in which they are cast. Wayne was not a member, but this production company was not looking for Equity talent. They were simply looking for TALENT! After a brief discussion with his wife, he decided to audition.

This new entity was called the Longworth Dinner Theatre after the restaurant on the ground floor of an Arlington office building. As Wayne chatted with other attendees, he learned that the new producer was a well-to-do DC advertising agency owner named Lew Resseguie, whose wife Barbara was a talented soprano, who would play Laurey. The upcoming production was going to be Oklahoma! Mr. Resseguie would play the villain, Jud Fry, and there would be TWO actors playing the hero Curly because they were BOTH in the Army Chorus and might never know when they’d be ordered to perform.

Wayne felt confident and relaxed as he auditioned. He got a call two days later and was offered a part as a cowboy in the chorus. He accepted and was told about the first read through, where he’d receive the complete rehearsal and performance schedule.

When he arrived at the read through, the Assistant Director pulled him aside and quietly told him, “Wayne, we’d like to offer you a few more bucks per performance.”

“Thank you,” Wayne said. “But why?”

“Because we’d like you to be the understudy for Curly.”

“But you already have two Curlys. Why do you need a third one?”

“Well, the Army Chorus has these things called ‘Command Performances’ that require ALL members to appear and perform when somebody like the President holds something like a state dinner. At that point ALL the singers are ordered to get into full dress uniform and all, so if that happens, we’d need…well, YOU!”

OK then, thought Wayne. And during the six-week run of the show, he did have several opportunities to perform the role of Curly for his new Army Chorus friends. And, by the way, he crossed paths with both of them in future years, after they left the Army Chorus. One, John Stevenson, became a dinner theatre superstar, performing many roles in many different shows (and held down a job at Voice of America as well). The other, Mike Schwartzkopf, went to Indiana University, earned his Masters and Ph.D. degrees in vocal music and taught voice there for the remainder of his career!

When Oklahoma! closed, most of the cast was simply asked if they would like to stay at “The Longworth” for the next production,  How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Most said yes, but new lead players were brought in. “Rosemary” would be played by the beautiful and talented Lonnie Lohfeld, who was also very nice and easy to work with. “J. Pierrepont Finch”, the male lead character, would be played by popular DC radio personality Johnny Holliday. HE was the person Lew Resseguie was counting on to bring in the audiences. And although Wayne was grateful when Lew asked him to be Johnny’s understudy, Wayne felt the pressure of letting the audience down when they saw “understudy” WAYNE on stage after they had paid to see “celebrity” JOHNNY!

Johnny Holliday

Lew and his wife Barbara introduced Wayne and his wife to numerous Washington theatre folk, which often led actors at the Longworth to parties in Georgetown social circles. Lew called on talent from many past production companies to help him with everything from costumes to lighting to makeup to set construction. One such individual was Bill Weisel, who helped Lew with lighting for both Oklahoma! and How to Succeed. An ABC-TV unit manager, Bill shared a huge house in Northwest DC with two doctors and a dentist. The house had a beautiful backyard garden that sloped downhill and ended at a black, wrought-iron fence. On the other side of the fence, the landscaping continued downhill to the back patio of an even larger home owned by wealthy socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post.

There was recorded music playing outdoors at Bill’s house, but louder music coming from Ms. Post’s abode. At first, it sounded like a recording of singer Tom Jones singing “It’s Not Unusual”; however, the more you listened, the more you realized it was actually Tom Jones himself, singing the song for guests at the Post party! The tuxedo-draped security force, complete with sunglasses, were outside the Post mansion, watching to ensure none of us would try to crash THAT party!

But back to Bill Weisel. Having mentioned his occupation, Wayne learned a singular story about the man. A few years earlier, Bill and his film crew were walking right behind Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968 when Sirhan Sirhan shot and killed RFK at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Weisel was standing behind Kennedy and was shot in the abdomen by a second bullet.

Now, years later, at home on a Saturday night, Bill invited all takers to his mother’s oceanfront beach house in Ocean City, Maryland (ONLY 150 miles away), where there was plenty of room to crash. He passed out cards with directions to the beach house and it was off to the races the next morning for the DC partygoers!

A BIG DECISION LOOMS

As might be expected, the more time Wayne spent in theatres and being around theatre folk, the more he felt disenchanted with his civil-service employment. Although that was by far the source of most of their income, he knew that only an advanced degree would qualify him for a college or university faculty position, teaching and/or working with undergraduates on performing arts projects. To get that degree, Wayne would have to resign from his secure, well-paying government job.

After discussions with his wife, they decided Wayne would apply to the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree program in Theatre at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). This was a relatively new university (at least by name) in Richmond, composed of elements of the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) and the Richmond Professional Institute (RPI) in 1968. His area of concentration would be Theatrical Direction. Assuming he got accepted, the goal, after acquiring the degree, was to seek employment on the theatre faculty of a small college somewhere in the southeastern United States.

He was accepted into the graduate program at VCU and resigned from government service.

When Wayne told Lew Resseguie about his plans to move to Richmond, Lew tried to talk him out of it. He told Wayne that he had enough talent to be a “regular” in the dinner theatre circuit and eventually to get his Equity membership card and get work in New York City. Wayne thanked Lew, but told him the wheels were already in motion.

The next day was Sunday. Wayne got a phone call from Davey Marlin-Jones, the Artistic Director of the Washington Theater Club (WTC). This was a huge surprise to Wayne, who did his best to maintain his composure. Mr. Marlin-Jones asked Wayne if he would come over to the WTC on Monday afternoon for “a reading.”

“A reading?” asked Wayne.

“Yes”, Davey replied. “It’s a type of tryout. I’ve seen your work at the Longworth, and although I don’t have anything for you at the moment, I’d like to get to know you and make sure you’re included in future casting calls at WTC. Would 2:30 work for you?”

“I’d be honored”, said Wayne. “Two-thirty it is. Thank you.”

It wasn’t until after “the reading” that Wayne woke up to what he’d just been through. It was an attempt by Lew Resseguie to get Wayne to change his mind and NOT leave town! WTC and Davey Marlin-Jones were hot theatrical commodities in Washington, and what could be more flattering than a private “reading” to sway one’s thinking? And it might have worked if the circumstances were different! Wayne WAS flattered, but it was just a bit too contrived, and his plans were simply too far developed. Besides, Wayne never heard from Mr. Marlin-Jones again.

DC director and critic Davey Marlin-Jones

Although Wayne’s parents, especially his father, were concerned about this career change, they realized that the transportation needs of the young couple were about to radically change. Fortunately, Wayne’s mom worked for Rosenthal Chevrolet in Arlington, Virginia. Somehow, she talked Mr. Rosenthal into selling a new (1970) Chevy coupe to Wayne at dealer cost:  $3,000. Perhaps Mr. Rosenthal agreed because of the car’s color. It had been sitting on his lot for months. Whatever the reason, they were now the owners of a brand new car that looked like this (without the black racing stripes on the hood):

Wayne’s sister made it easy to find a new place to live in Richmond, Virginia. She and her husband, both VCU undergrads, lived in a very affordable town house development south of the city. There was a vacancy there, so Wayne and his wife put down a deposit in June and began to move South in July. She quickly found a 9 to 5 accounting job near their town house with a trucking firm, and Wayne met with the new Chairman of the Theatre Department, Dr. Kenneth Campbell, in late July, who hit him with two surprises.

Most universities that offered the MFA degree in Theatre considered it to be a “terminal” degree; e.g., it is equivalent to the PhD. Both are the highest educational credentials one can achieve in that field. Therefore, one who holds the MFA in Theatre could not be denied rank, tenure or promotion in academe. Moreover, the MFA is, at most universities, a “practicum” degree; e.g., it does not require a thesis, which requires proof of a student’s ability to conduct independent, rigorous research. However, in their meeting, the Chairman told Wayne that because he came to VCU without an undergraduate MAJOR in Theatre, Wayne would be required to take three Senior-level undergraduate courses in Theatre at VCU to prove his qualification for graduate-school entry. When questioned about whether the VCU MFA was considered a terminal degree, Dr. Campbell responded, “Yes. Without question.” Wayne knew it was fruitless to complain, so he simply walked out of the Chairman’s office frustrated but determined.

At the end of the first semester at VCU (Fall of 71), Wayne’s grades for each of the three Senior undergraduate courses were A. As a result, Wayne was notified that he would begin the Spring, 1972 semester as a full-fledged MFA graduate student.

STUDYING, TEACHING AND WORKING IN RICHMOND

During the Holiday break, Wayne was surprised by a phone call from the Chairman’s office. Dr. Campbell wanted to schedule a meeting with Wayne and the head of the Speech component of the department. Wayne had forgotten that the OFFICIAL name of the Department he was enrolled in at VCU was the DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE AND SPEECH, just as it was at many other colleges and universities.

The main theatre building at VCU, a converted Scottish Rites Temple

At the meeting, Dr. Campbell made note of Wayne’s extensive experience with Speech courses, enrolling in every available Speech class at Emory and Henry College and earning A grades in each one, also pointing out Wayne’s exposure working with dialects. He explained that one of the speech instructors at VCU had recently resigned his position. There was insufficient time to do a formal search for a new instructor. Decision makers thought Wayne might make a suitable short-term replacement. Would he be interested? He would be paid not as a Teaching Assistant, but at the higher-salaried Instructor level.

The decision was an easy one. Wayne returned home that afternoon to report to his wife that the pay rate of his new job covered the cost of his graduate school tuition. And he was familiar with preparation for the first class he was assigned:  SPEECH FOR BUSINESS MAJORS. He had taken that class himself at E&H. The hardest part of the course was UN-teaching the southern drawl of most of the enrollees before teaching proper American pronunciations!

So Wayne was a Graduate student in the Theatre department and an Instructor in the Speech department. But that “student and teacher” schedule doubled the amount of time he had to be on campus. He needed some inexpensive way to move back and forth from home to campus and back. Six hundred dollars bought him a brand new 175 cc Honda motorcycle.

As a faculty member, he requested the use of an office in the Department’s Shafer Court Theatre building. There, he could shed his Nor’easter rain gear on rainy days so it could drip dry in time for the ride home.

Meanwhile, among other things during his two years of study at VCU, he performed as “Snout” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Billy Bibbit” in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “Orphan” in Celebration, soloist (“Tomorrow Belongs to Me”) in Cabaret, an Athenian man in Lysistrata, Vocal Coach and “Cardinal” in Hadrian the Seventh, “Amiens” (Shakespeare’s most musical character) in As You Like It, and Vocal Director for his thesis production of The Beggar’s Opera, where he taught a cast of 30 performers, men and women, a variety of dialects, including Irish, Scottish, King’s and Queen’s English and Cockney.

Wayne as “Amiens” with Sam Maupin in the background as “Jacques”

Wayne as “Orphan” with Rex Ellis as “Potemkin” and Suzy Smith as “Angel”

Wayne eventually stopped teaching Business majors altogether and taught classes in Voice to Theatre majors at the same Instructor rate of pay. But perhaps his most lucrative “earning” activity while he was at VCU took place completely OFF campus. Two sisters in the theatre department approached him one day and asked him if he would play guitar for them at an audition. They had planned to audition as a duo, but at rehearsals with Wayne, they decided to add his voice to the mix and audition as a trio.

On the day of the audition, he met the sisters at a place called “Alpha Audio”. It was a recording studio. In fact, he discovered later it was the ONLY 16-track tape recording studio in the state of Virginia! When he arrived, he was impressed with the size of the studio (large enough to seat an entire symphony orchestra) and the professional acoustic treatment given to the space (no external sound penetrated into the room). The trio performed three songs and thanked the studio owners. The sisters thanked Wayne and excitedly rushed out of the studio.

Wayne was packing his guitar in its case when the studio owners approached him, thanked him for coming and complimented him on the quality of his voice. They explained, “We’re attempting to build a stable of vocal performers to create radio commercials for businesses all over the East Coast. Not just the music, but the spoken parts as well. If you can act as well as you sing, we want to put you to work. We’ll pay you 20 dollars an hour. Are you interested?”

In 1972, 20 dollars an hour was an excellent wage! Without hesitation, Wayne said, “Yes, sir! I certainly am. Thank you!” Wayne was suddenly getting paid to teach classes in voice and speech at the University and getting paid to sing and speak in radio commercials for a professional recording studio with clients all over the Eastern half of America. What fun!

Here are just a few of the commercials to which Wayne contributed while he lived in the Richmond area:

Avis Auto Rentals:

National Central Bank:

Old Point National Bank:

The Sound Shop:

Think Green Public Service Announcement

After returning home with the news of another source of income, Wayne and his wife discussed the possibility of finding him a form of transportation that would keep him dry and warm while traveling to and from home and either classes or the recording studio. They agreed that was fair. So each day, he’d bring home a copy of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and scour the classified ads for “a new set of wheels”.

One day, his eyes fell upon these words:  FOR SALE – 1963 Porsche 356B $1800 firm. The words were accompanied by a name and a phone number. He called the phone number and spoke to the name and set up an appointment to look at and drive the car. It looked nothing like this:

It was gray, but it had no bumpers and no hood trim. It had a ten-inch-wide, pale purple racing stripe painted on it from front to back and 7.5-inch wide racing tires! The owner confessed that, at ten years old, it had been used as a race car for several years. It had a “roll bar” installed in the interior. In fact, the interior was completely remodeled, with new seats designed by a chiropractor. The dashboard was not stock, and although it had all the original Porsche dials, gauges and indicators, it was definitely “different”. But in a test drive, it handled like a dream and it had a Blaupunkt radio. Plus, the two back seats folded flat to make space for carrying groceries, and that was enough for Wayne’s wife. Besides, the Porsche had a clutch and a 5-speed manual transmission, which she didn’t know how to operate. So they wrote the owner a check and drove TWO autos back to their little town house. Wayne had a new car. Well, new to him!

Grad-student life was busy. When he wasn’t taking a graduate-level course, he was teaching an undergraduate Speech or Voice or Stage Dialects class or in rehearsal for an upcoming production or attending an afternoon-long seminar with an actor/guest speaker like E.G. Marshall or attending a lecture by Gloria Steinem or recording a new commercial at Alpha Audio for a bank or a roller skating rink or a department store.

Some of the grad students and undergrads were very talented and became famous for skills they either brought with them to VCU and/or expanded upon while at VCU. Some examples include Richard C. Hankins, our set designer for The Beggar’s Opera, who later won two Emmy awards for his design work on “Guiding Light”, numerous Emmy nominations and won the Lou Dorfsman CBS Outstanding Design award.

Richard C. Hankins

Ralph MacPhail, Jr. served his undergraduate alma mater, Bridgewater College, as Professor of Theatre from 1972-2005. He was also a nationally known scholar and speaker on British music theatre creators William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan.

Professor Ralph MacPhail, Jr.

Stephen Feuerstein, an undergrad from Norfolk, Virginia, went to Hollywood, connected with John Belushi and became Stephen Furst, appearing in National Lampoon’s Animal House (remember “Flounder”?), 1941 and other films. He also worked as a director, producer and writer during his time in Hollywood.

Actor Stephen Furst

Larry Verbit practiced entertainment law in Los Angeles starting in 1987.
Ellen Talles operated a dance studio in the Baltimore, Maryland area for many years.

In April of 1973, Wayne began work on his last project at VCU. He was Vocal Director (which included dialects and song) for the department’s mainstage production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. Documentation of his work on this production would meet Dr. Campbell’s requirement for an MFA thesis.

MOVING TO MARYLAND

As Wayne neared completion of his MFA coursework, he began looking around for the kind of college he wanted to work for. Though he hoped he could stay in Virginia, no theatre faculty positions were available. One afternoon he got a call from an actor friend John Degen, whom he had met at the Longworth Dinner Theatre in Arlington. A year after Wayne enrolled at VCU, John moved to Richmond and enrolled in VCU’s Theatre Department as an undergrad! A true “free spirit”, John had been performing in musical theatre productions at Montgomery Community College in Rockville, Maryland for years and had received his AA degree in theatre there. After visiting Wayne in Richmond to see some VCU productions, John decided to earn a BFA in Acting from VCU!

John knew of Wayne’s search for post-graduate employment, and he sounded excited over the phone. “Hey, Wayne, I’ve got some good news for you. I went home to visit Mom & Dad last weekend and on the way back I stopped off at Montgomery College to see Gerry Muller, the Chairman of the Music Department. I probably did more shows with him than I did in the theatre department while I was at MC.” Wayne knew that John grew up in Tacoma Park, Maryland and was, like Wayne, educated “inside the Beltway”, but on the Maryland side. Montgomery Community College was just OUTSIDE the beltway in the bustling suburb of Rockville, Maryland. “Gerry asked me if I knew any musically inclined Theatre MFA students at VCU. I told him about you, how we met at the Longworth and all the stuff you’re doing in Richmond. HE’S GOT A JOB IN THE MUSIC DEPARTMENT AND HE WANTS TO MEET YOU!”

As Wayne listened, it all sounded great except for two words:  MUSIC DEPARTMENT. That put Wayne off immediately! He replied to his friend, “Thank you, John. But I’m not really much of a musician in the formal sense. I mean, I sing, play drums and guitar, but I’ve never had any formal training, except in vocal production.”

“Man, don’t get ahead of yourself,” John wisely said. “I’ll tell you a secret. What Gerry really wants is HIS OWN theatre person!”

“What does that mean?” said Wayne.

“It means he wants a theatre expert in the Music Department to help him stage Music Department productions the way HE envisions them, not the way the MC theatre department envision them. Plus, Gerry also works with the college’s Community Services Department, which helps fund production of shows mounted by the Montgomery Light Opera Association, a Community Theatre Organization in Montgomery County that’s been around for years. So Gerry’s one of the most active Musical Directors and conductors in the Baltimore/Washington Metroplex. And he’s looking for a theatrical partner to help him present musicals HIS WAY at MC, funded by his own Music Department and the Community Services Department!”

“Thanks for explaining it to me, my friend. What did you say this guy’s phone number is?”

Wayne called Dr. Gerald Frank Muller, Chairman of the Music Department at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland. Because John had his direct number at the college, Wayne’s call went past the switchboard and directly to Dr. Muller’s office. Although he wasn’t in, Wayne left a voicemail asking him for an appointment on a Saturday afternoon because of his own teaching/rehearsal responsibilities. When he called back, it was clear he and John had been friends for years and he agreed. He gave Wayne a date and time, and asked Wayne to mail a copy of his bio. Wayne and his wife drove up to his parent’s home in Northern Virginia the Friday before the interview. Wayne found himself wondering why he felt so nervous as he pulled into the Music Department parking lot the next day. Then he decided it wasn’t nerves. He was just excited!

Dr. Gerald F. Muller

Gerry Muller had read Wayne’s bio, knew about his experience with four years of vocal training, his almost-finished MFA in Theatre from VCU, his teaching of voice and speech to undergrads and his acting experience in undergraduate and graduate schools and dinner theatre. Wayne might be just the person he’d been looking for. He simply had to meet the man personally. Gerry and Wayne might have been the only people in the Music building that Saturday afternoon. Wayne, for one, enjoyed every minute of it. Gerry obviously went out of his way to make the job he had in mind as attractive as possible. Gerry described Wayne’s duties as follows:

First, Wayne would be a Music faculty member, teaching one or two sections per week of “Class Voice”, where ten to fifteen undergrads would learn, from Wayne, the physical fundamentals of vocal production, including breath control and vowel-tone shaping, while performing songs in several languages that were chosen to assist in developing those fundamental skills. At each class, a professional piano accompanist would be present.

Second, Wayne would hold the position in the Music Department as “Staging Director” for all Music Theatre productions presented by the Music Department. This included everything from small productions, typically presented in the department’s recital hall, such as Puccini’s Il Tabarro (The Cloak) or Kurt Weill’s Down in the Valley, to mainstage productions of classic operas such as Georges Bizet’s Carmen or The Pearlfishers.

Third, Wayne would hold the title of “Administrative Director of the Applied Music Institute”. This was a program supported by the aforementioned Community Services Department, which enabled non-registered music students to use the college’s music facility and faculty to take hour-long, private music lessons in the Music building with Music faculty for a fee. Wayne would be the official registrar for all such students and assign space in the Music building (usually in the faculty member’s assigned office space) for all such private lessons. He would assign all space and collect all checks or other payment from the students or their family members and be responsible for delivering payment to the Community Services Department before lessons began.

Fourth, Wayne would posses the title of “Staging Director, Montgomery Light Opera Association”. The term “light opera” was new to Wayne, but he grew fond of it over the next three years. Again, the Community Services Department supported, both financially and from a marketing perspective, this large, very active group of both elderly and youthful performers, all of whom enjoyed working on the musical stories told at the turn of the 20th century written by composers like Rudolf Friml, Victor Herbert, and Sigmund Romberg.

Payment for those responsibilities would be less than the equivalent of a full-time Music faculty member. But it was clear that Dr. Muller was doing his best to give Wayne sufficient duties in order to give him TWO checks from Montgomery College:  one from the Music Department and another from the Community Services Department. But Wayne still had to pass one final test. They casually left Gerry’s office and began to stroll around the building, Wayne ostensibly getting a tour of the facility from “the boss.” Eventually they arrived on the first floor and Gerry opened a door, above which was a sign that read:  “Recital Hall.” The stage was lit and there were two grand pianos upon it. As Gerry climbed up the stairs, it was clear to Wayne what was coming next:  Gerry wanted to hear Wayne sing!

Sure enough, Gerry sat down at one of the pianos and said, “I heard you’ve sung this a few times,” and started playing the opening chords of “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning” from Oklahoma. Wayne smiled, nodded and began to sing at the appropriate place in the music. They got about two-thirds of the way through the song and Gerry said, “OK. Thank you. Very nice. It’s clear you’ve had some excellent training.” Then he stood up and asked Wayne, “Can you be here for the Fall Semester?”

By this time, they’d been talking for about three hours. Early on, Wayne had decided that he liked Gerry Muller, that he could learn from Gerry Muller and that he was glad Gerry Muller offered him a job, even if it was just an adjunct faculty position. “I’d like that very much,” Wayne replied, “assuming my wife doesn’t object. But I think I can persuade her.”

They shook hands and Gerry said, “I’ll consider it done. Welcome to MC. I’ll mail you some forms on Monday.” And it was done. They were moving to Maryland.

MONTGOMERY COLLEGE:  A THEATRE GUY IN THE MUSIC DEPARTMENT

Wayne and his wife talked it all out on their way back to Richmond the next day. He notified the theatre department of his job offer and move to another school. He had finished all his course requirements by the end of the Spring semester of 1973 and as long as he continued to pay VCU the tuition fee for “Graduate Study: Thesis”, he would still be considered an MFA “student” who was writing his thesis, which (after it was approved by the VCU Theatre faculty) he had bound. Then the VCU Theatre Department placed two copies in the University library system and mailed him his diploma. Wayne was officially granted his MFA diploma in August of 1975.

However, the couple had already left Richmond at the end of the Spring semester of 1973 and moved from Richmond to a beautiful “planned community” known as Montgomery Village in Gaithersburg, Maryland. They rented a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of the building. There was a mini-mall, gas station and a couple of restaurants a block away, and the apartment was about five miles north of the college where they’d both be working. Yes, they had learned of an opening in Accounts Payable at the MC Business Office, and her experience qualified her for it nicely. But because of his odd hours (classes, rehearsals, etc.) vs. her 9 to 5 “office hours”, they were lucky to have two cars to transport themselves to and from work.

As far as Wayne’s teaching at Montgomery College was concerned, there were no other voice teachers in either the Music or the Theatre department. He was scheduled to have one class that met for 50 minutes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and another class that met for 90 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays in both the Fall and Spring Semester. He and his accompanist, Mrs. Zvia Sheinman, got along famously, so everything was fine in that area for each of his three years at MC.

The other constant at MC came at the courtesy of the combined auspices of the Community Services department and the Music department. That was his service as Administrative Director of the Applied Music Institute. As described above, it was a strictly clerical position, collecting and turning in forms for each student, assigning teachers and lesson spaces in the Music building, collecting fees, etc. Somebody had to do it, and Wayne was happy to have the pay that came with the duty.

The final sources of income (Staging Director) were more sporadic calendar-wise, but just as important when it came to earning income and MORE important when it came to polishing the theatrical craft he’d learned at VCU. They included:
– Staging Director for three productions of the Montgomery Light Opera Association (MLOA) one each year:
The New Moon by Sigmund Romberg (1887-1951),

Romberg

Naughty Marietta by Victor Herbert (1859-1924), and

Herbert

The Vagabond King by Rudolf Friml (1879-1972);

Friml

These three composers are considered the triumvirate of American light opera creators. The producing group (MLOA) was a spinoff of the defunct American Light Opera Company of Washington, DC. The Romberg piece got a full-page spread in the entertainment section of the Washington Post newspaper. Unfortunately, although Wayne was quoted in the article, he was mis-identified as “a student”.
– “Libretto Director” for a joint production between the Theatre and Music departments of Fiorello! This was the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical story of Fiorello LaGuardia, the Mayor of New York City from 1934-1945. Jerry Bock wrote the music, Sheldon Harnick wrote the lyrics and the book was written by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia

– “Vocal Coach” for a joint production between the Theatre and Music departments of Guys & Dolls
– Staging Director during two different academic years for MC Music department productions of two Georges Bizet grand operas: Carmen and The Pearlfishers

Georges Bizet

– Staging Director for two Music department chamber operas:  Down In The Valley, composed by Kurt Weill,

Kurt Weill

and Il Tabarro (The Cloak), composed by Giacomo Puccini.

Giacomo Puccini

Wayne also earned incidental income as a performer while he was at MC:

– He played the starring role(s) of “Charley Wykeham”/”Charley’s Aunt from Brazil (where the nuts come from)” in an MC experimental dinner theatre production of Where’s Charley? For Wayne, this was an undeniably great deal of fun. Actually playing TWO roles (Charley AND his “Aunt”), the script required numerous off-stage quick changes, involving at least three costumers and makeup artists laying in wait for Wayne to exit one scene, whereupon they would rapidly remove one velcro-constructed costume and put on another while either adding or subtracting wigs and/or makeup to turn him into the character who was called for by the script in the NEXT scene! One popular hit song came out of Where’s Charley?. It was “Once In Love With Amy”. The way it was staged, “Charley” (Wayne) was directed to choose a female audience member, take her by the hand, lead her onto the stage and DANCE with her during the instrumental chorus of the song. The show was being performed “in the round”, so Wayne was never far from potential dance partners (though he never knew if the audience member he chose was a good dancer or not). His mother lived just 20 miles from MC and came to at least one performance of every show with which Wayne was involved. She was delighted when Wayne, as Charley Wykeham, led her onto the stage and danced with HER!

– In 1975, a friend Wayne had met at the Longworth Dinner Theatre in Arlington years earlier called and INVITED him to perform the role of “Curly” in Oklahoma! Itzy Friedman, who had been in both Oklahoma! and How to Succeed… for Lew Resseguie, was opening his own dinner theatre, the Saratoga, in Prince Georges County, Maryland. The active Prince George’s County press all praised the production and Wayne’s performance, best summarized in the Bowie Blade, which briefly reported:  “Curly is played by Wayne Hamilton, who turns in a fine performance in the delightful role.”

– During two of his three “Holiday” seasons at MC, Wayne was INVITED by his fellow music faculty members to sing one-night stands with a “pickup band” they assembled for the season. All of the players of the group were members of the Musicians Union except, of course, Wayne. Nonetheless, Wayne was paid “scale” for the few special gigs that were arranged for this band; he never asked and was never told how that was arranged, but he was grateful. Some of the members of the group were members or first-call substitutes of the National Symphony Orchestra, and another was a famous jazz pianist:  Bill Potts, who was also an arranger, composer and big band conductor. Bill worked, either on stage or in recording studios with people like Paul Anka, Eddie Fisher, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Woody Herman, Quincy Jones, Stan Kenton and Buddy Rich, to name but a few. He was a great talent and a great friend who lifted the spirits of everyone near him!

Bill Potts (1928-2005)

Meanwhile, on the home front, there was a guy from California living in the same apartment building as Wayne and his wife. This person made at least one offer a month to Wayne, attempting to purchase his Porsche. The number kept growing until Wayne couldn’t refuse. He sold the 356B to the young man and used the proceeds to buy a new, 1974 Karmann Ghia convertible. This was the last year Volkswagen sold the Karmann Ghia in America, and Wayne got the only model equipped with a white top. People called it the “poor man’s Porsche”, but Wayne didn’t care. He wasn’t playing drums in a band anymore and he really liked the way the car looked and handled.

1974 Karmann Ghia Convertible

After his first year at MC, the Gaithersburg and Germantown areas of Montgomery County were burgeoning. Both Wayne and his wife were happy with their jobs, and they couldn’t help but notice that a mortgage on a two-bedroom town house would be a sound investment at this point in their lives. They found a Pulte town house development that fit their finances, purchased one and moved the three miles from their apartment. The basement was unfinished, but it was set up to quickly allow improvement of the town house by adding a “half bathroom” and a recreation room. That happened during their first summer there, with Wayne playing a new role that he would repeat often in future years:  “Harry Homeowner”.

Our first home purchase — in Germantown, Maryland

Wayne installed studs and hung sheet rock to define the laundry and utility room in half of the basement, then put cabinets and bookshelves at one end of the new “recreation room”. Then he paid a contractor for wall-to-wall carpet there and tile floor in the bathroom. He put a toilet, sink and medicine cabinet in the bathroom and ran electrical switches, wiring and plugs from the breaker box through the new living space. Wayne finished the sheet rock and installed baseboard, door frames and doors, then got his wife involved in the painting process. With a bottle of champagne to celebrate completion, they felt like they were going to be in Montgomery County for quite awhile.

Wayne settled in to his teaching schedule, managing the Applied Music Institute paperwork and occasionally directing a theatrical production for MLOA or the Music department at Montgomery College. Whenever he heard of a theatre faculty position availability, he would apply. However, he hadn’t been called for an interview in several months. Nevertheless, Wayne kept learning about the historical forms and styles of the musical pieces he was directing for and with Gerry Muller and other Music department staffers throughout the time he worked at MC.

When Wayne’s friend John Degen finished his BFA in Acting at VCU, he came home to Montgomery County and unsurprisingly began getting work in his craft in both theatre AND film. In the middle of 1975 he was working at a theatre that was famous for having started the craze for “Dinner Theatre” in the Baltimore/Washington Metroplex back in 1968:  Burn Brae Dinner Theatre. Burn Brae advertised itself as “The Area’s First, The Area’s Finest.” It was so successful that many similar enterprises attempted to cash in on the art form. Having “been there” himself (at the Longworth), Wayne had already made at least one observation about dinner theatre:  it was, at least to Wayne, a peculiarly SUBURBAN art form, at least in the B/W Metroplex. There, no dinner theatre that opened inside the city limits of a town numbering over 100,000 residents could keep its doors open longer than about four months. It was like people who worked in the city didn’t want to go home to the suburbs and then RETURN to the city to be entertained. It just didn’t work!

Burn Brae was located in Burtonsville, at the extreme Eastern reaches of Montgomery County, making it equally accessible to the residents of both Washington and Baltimore suburbs. Perfect placement! And the show John Degen was cast in was perfectly timed for the approach of the American Bicentennial:  1776. The show opened in May of 1975 and closed on December 31, 1976!

The show eventually ran for 430 performances and was seen by 130,000 attendees. It still holds the national record for the longest-running Tony Award-winning musical outside New York City! At some unforgotten point during that run, original-cast member John Degen decided to leave the show and enter graduate school (MFA) study in Theatre at George Washington University in Washington, DC. At that point, Wayne got a call from John, who asked him if he’d like to join the cast of 1776 for the reason stated above. John was playing the part of Roger Sherman, Congressional delegate from Connecticut. John invited Wayne to visit Burn Brae to watch a performance and meet one of the owners, Bernie Levin.

Burn Brae founder John Kinnamon and partner Bernie Levin

Wayne took John up on his offer and watched the show, which was excellent. After sharing his performance resume (directing had no place here) with Bernie, he was offered John’s part, and Wayne happily accepted.

A couple of months later, Wayne was at “work” at Burn Brae as usual and preparing for the evening’s show. Word came down to the dressing room that Bernie wanted Wayne to come up to his office. Wayne went upstairs and made his way up to the bar, where Bernie was waiting.

“Hi, Bernie, what’s up?” said Wayne.

“Hey, Wayne. How are you? Are you still enjoying the show?”

“So far, so good, sir.”

“Great, great. I want you to know that John Stevenson is leaving the show, and JK (meaning founder and co-owner John Kinnamon) and I would like you to take over the role of Rutledge. Would you be interested in that? Of course, it would mean a considerable increase in salary. Are you interested?”

Wayne was stunned. John Stevenson, the former member of the Army Chorus, whom he had met years earlier at the Longworth Dinner Theatre, and who had become a star in numerous dinner theatre productions since, was “stopping the show” every night in Act Two of 1776 with his solo performance of “Molasses to Rum” as the delegate from South Carolina. As such, his character, historically the youngest in the Second Continental Congress, threatened to shut down the Declaration of Independence effort unless Adams and Jefferson agreed to remove the “all men are created equal” clause from the document.

Ironically, Wayne’s father was FROM South Carolina! Unknowingly, his relatives there became a resource to Wayne AFTER Wayne accepted Bernie’s offer. Wayne was frequently on the phone to them afterward, attempting to capture the essence of their dialect as he prepared for the role!

Naturally, Wayne learned the part by watching John Stevenson’s every move during John’s last few performances and promised himself he’d do his best to live up to the level of excellence that John had brought to the Rutledge part thus far. Wayne was amazed at the continuing popularity of the show, with sold-out audiences every night. He wrote to a friend in Richmond:

“…the show never lost its edge or its popularity, and the audiences continued to support it, some by returning often with a new group of friends each time. Undoubtedly, the most special show was the night of July 4th, 1976. The air was electric, the energy high. The audience was standing-room only, and when the overture started and the cast members took their places onstage in the dark, goosebumps proliferated throughout the room. …it was the thrill of a lifetime to play Rutledge in THAT show on THAT night with THAT company in THAT theatre! I will never forget it!”

Wayne as Edward Rutledge from South Carolina

Wayne’s time at Burn Brae exceeded all the other dinner theatre work he experienced combined. Although he only participated in one show at Burn Brae, he took a great deal of pride from having been there during the Bicentennial. Many years later, after the theatre had closed, he contacted John Kinnamon and offered to create a web site containing a chronology of every production ever mounted at Burn Brae (1968-2001). JK happily agreed, and visitors can visit those wonderful years here:  https://burnbraelegacy.com

On a sadder note, Wayne’s only regret about performing the role of Rutledge was that his father never saw him perform it, having died from throat cancer shortly after Wayne assumed the role. Wayne knew that his father was a patriot, a man who loved his country as much as he loved his family. Dad always made sure that the family celebrated July fourth together; it was his favorite holiday. Wayne was sure his Dad would’ve enjoyed a special 200th Independence Day in 1976. But he died in late April of that year.

Wayne felt as though his theatre career was just getting started, but he also felt he was too deep in the “performing” side and not close enough to the “teaching” side of where he wanted to be. At that point, fate stepped in to change his life again.

A few weeks before Independence Day, Wayne had sent credentials to several different small colleges, all within a hundred miles of where their new town house was located. He was, after all, the “product” of a small, private liberal arts college. He thought that might attract the attention of similar schools looking for faculty talent. Indeed, that apparently was a factor at one school that reached out to Wayne and scheduled an interview!

Logo of Mount St. Mary’s College

That school was Mount Saint Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Founded in 1808, “The Mount” is the oldest independent Catholic college in America. The word “independent” is important here; it means that the small group of French priests who founded the school were not affiliated with any specific “order” or Catholic “school of thought”, like Jesuit, Franciscan, Benedictine, etc. In fact, the only Catholic college of ANY kind in America that was older than the Mount was just 70 miles away in Washington, DC. That was the Jesuit-founded college of Georgetown University.

Mount St. Mary’s, AKA “the Mount”, was fraught with history. In addition to its age and religious affiliation, it was located in the Catoctin mountains of Maryland, roughly ten miles north of Camp David and ten miles south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Camp David is the presidential retreat established by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which he named for his first grandson, David. Gettysburg is, of course, the site of the epic Civil War battle on July first through third, 1863, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee invaded the North in a failed attempt to turn the tide of the American Civil War. Lee’s army marched through Frederick, Maryland and, further north, on “the Emmitsburg road” as it made its way northward. During and after the battle, the college’s buildings served as hospitals for the wounded soldiers of BOTH armies!

Wayne visited the campus of Mount St. Mary’s for an interview with Fine Arts Department Chairman Lewis McAllister. The arts were organized at the Mount in a single department that included two Art professors, two Music professors and one Theatre professor. McAllister taught most of the music courses (theory, history, orchestral). The other music professor was a priest, who taught voice and conducted the college’s SATB choir. Only those two music professors were tenured. Wayne met all of his fellow department members. No one spoke of this, but Wayne quickly observed that, in general, the arts seemed to be siloed, with one exception:  Musical Theatre productions, where McAllister and whoever was teaching theatre would work together.

Wayne was relieved to hear that his potential boss, Lew McAllister, loved musical theatre. The reason they were looking for a new theatre professor was the health of their current theatre professor who had, like Wayne, Type 1 Diabetes (AKA T1D). He had decided to resign his position at the Mount and focus his energies on writing plays.

Dr. John J. “Jack” Dillon

Lew introduced Wayne to the President of the College, Jack Dillon, the first-ever lay President of the school. Wayne was also introduced to Bernie Kaliss, the Dean of Students. Those two men sat down with Wayne and Lew for an hour-long, energetic discussion, which both the President and the Dean seemed to thoroughly enjoy. He learned in this discussion that the Mount had merged with Saint Joseph’s College, a girl’s school only a mile away, in 1973. That merger doubled the number of students on the Mount’s campus and made it a co-ed campus. St. Joseph’s had been founded in 1810 by a Baltimore widow, Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, who had moved to the mountain, become a nun known as “Mother Seton” and founded an order of nuns known as the “Sisters of Charity”. Moreover, just the previous year (1975), Mother Seton had been canonized as the first American Saint!

Mother Seton

Lew gave Wayne a tour of the campus, especially a former gymnasium that was built in 1903:  Flynn Hall. This was where virtually all Theatre practicum courses would be taught:  set construction, acting, lighting AND where all of the plays and musicals that Wayne would direct would be rehearsed and performed; THIS was, in fact, the theatre building. It was already listed on the National Register of Historic Places, like most of the other buildings on the Mount’s campus (and the campus of Emory and Henry). The second-floor “track” had already been removed from the interior of Flynn Hall, and it was beautifully finished in early 20th century hardwood and fieldstone. The “stage” was a crude collection of 4’x8′ plywood sheets supported by two foot tall two-by-four legs. Wayne tried to imagine a tap dance routine on such risers; it must’ve sounded like a herd of running horses!

Wayne was also to have an office on the third floor of the Administration Building, but it was clear that Flynn Hall would be his “Home Base”, and one that would surely require some work, at least in Wayne’s head.

Flynn Hall, built in 1903 as a gymnasium, was a theatre in the 1970s

There was one classroom in Flynn Hall. Lew led Wayne down the steps to this room and opened the door. Inside, there were eight or nine students waiting for their turn to meet the person who MIGHT become the next theatre professor at the Mount. Lew introduced Wayne to them individually in turn and then collectively as “the leaders of the Mount’s Sock and Buskin Dramatic Society” (S&B). Wayne had met with theatre students in previous interviews, but never with quite so many. He and Lew synchronized their watches. Lew said, “I’ll be back in an hour”, and Wayne’s discussion with S&B began.

For the most part, the questions centered on what one would expect. Q:  What’s your favorite theatrical form? A:  As a performer, musical theatre. As a director, musical theatre. Q:  What kind of stage do you most like to direct on? A:  I like them all, but in order of preference, I’d say Arena, Thrust, Proscenium. Sometimes the play demands the type of stage.

Then, from out of the blue, Q:  What’s your favorite beer?

Unexpected, but not totally surprising. Wayne had noticed the beer taps in the college cafeteria. Without hesitation, A:  “Miller Lite, I suppose. But I was raised around Hamm’s, my dad’s favorite. He bought it by the case and always had a full fridge of it downstairs in our rec room. My brother & I were his ‘beer runners'”, which prompted a collective laugh.

Something changed in the room at that point. Wayne noticed that the students seemed to be more relaxed. More personal questions were asked about what shows he’d done, either as a performer or director, and did he have children. Wayne asked them, “A few minutes ago, when you asked me about my favorite beer, where did that come from?”

The student who asked the question explained, “We asked to see your application when we heard you were invited to be interviewed. We noticed that you went to a Methodist college, so we went to the library and looked it up and noticed it was pretty strict and didn’t allow drinking and stuff like that. So we thought you were gonna be some kind of holy roller or something Sock and Buskin is not. At our strike parties after every show, we order enough pizza for everybody, tap a keg and party down!”

Wayne replied, “A holy roller I’m not. I WILL have rules, but that strike party sounds like fun!” In fact, Wayne thought, it sounded like most of the strike parties at VCU. Wayne went on to ask, “But tell me; I’ve been on a LOT of college campuses. You have what, twenty-five hundred students here and it’s evident that beer is everywhere! Why?

The students told Wayne it wasn’t always like that. “The rule used to be NO ALCOHOL on campus, so students did what they did everywhere else. They would sneak off campus and get trashed, then come back to the dorms to sleep it off. Trouble is, US Highway 15 runs right through campus and kids were getting into terrible car accidents and some had even been killed. So they brought the BEER on campus to keep the STUDENTS on campus. And it’s working!”

Only later did Wayne discover that this organization of students was actually Co-producers of almost all theatrical productions on campus. The Fine Arts faculty, led by the Theatre professor, worked WITH S&B to select shows, staff, advertise, schedule and pay for all aspects of each show mounted at the school.

When all was said and done, Lew arrived as promised, an hour later. To Wayne, it felt like three hours, because the questions kept on coming. But Wayne survived, parted amicably from Professor Lew and drove the forty miles back to his town house in Germantown. It had been a very long day!

TEACHING IN THE CATOCTIN MOUNTAINS

year one

Wayne and his wife had a lot to talk about later that week. He got a call from Lew McAllister three days after his visit to the Mount. Lew offered Wayne the Theatre faculty position in the Fine Arts Department. It was a full-time, tenure-track faculty position, and while the pay was not high, Wayne felt it was the kind of environment he had been looking for — a gateway to the future. He would officially be an “Assistant Professor”! Therefore, he accepted it. The most difficult part of leaving MC was losing his working relationship with Gerry Muller, an honest man he truly respected and one he felt would be a friend for life. And that’s what he told Gerry when he announced his decision.

While he was teaching at MC and working with Community Services and performing in dinner theatre shows, his wife quit her position in MC’s accounting department and took a position as Director at a large after-school childcare center at a Silver Spring church. She was happy, and that made Wayne happy, so all was well. It was something of a Homecoming for both Wayne and his wife, since they had studied for four years in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Geographically, the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland formed the Easternmost ridge of the Appalachian mountain range.

Though they shared the same home address, their work lives kept them separated by about fifty miles. They had just bought a house and invested several thousand dollars into finishing the basement at that house. Her job was about twelve miles South of where they lived and his job was forty-plus miles North of where they lived. She would be home by 6:30, fix dinner and be in bed by 10 pm, while Wayne ate dinner in the college cafeteria Monday through Thursday evenings, conducted rehearsals until 10, THEN drove 40 miles home. Fortunately, his new friend Bernie Kaliss ensured that none of Wayne’s classes began before 11 am!

That’s how life went for Wayne’s first year at Mount Saint Mary’s College. His office on the third floor of Bradley Hall was small, but it was big enough to accommodate a desk, a bookshelf, an office chair, a visitor’s chair and a fold-out sofa where Wayne could sleep in case the mountain roads were so bad with snowstorms that he couldn’t get home! Some of his colleagues joked about the new Theatre professor having a “casting couch” installed in his office, a joke Wayne was too new to think was funny. So he simply ignored it.

Bradley Hall, the Mount’s Administration Center

Lew had already determined which Theatre courses Wayne would be teaching that first semester in the Fall of 1976. Before he started teaching, Wayne spoke with Lew about the play selection process at the Mount and learned that multiple parties were involved. Since his first semester was scheduled for a non-musical show, Wayne made a short list of straight plays and shared it with Lew. If he approved it, Wayne took it to S&B, answered their questions about it. If THEY approved, Lew ordered scripts from the play service. Wayne was grateful not to be personally involved in withdrawing money from departmental funds.

Wayne announced audition dates when the play had been selected. He usually had the play cast before scripts arrived, and they met, worked together as a theatrical “company” as quickly as possible. When scripts arrived, Wayne hounded them to memorize their lines ASAP. With Plaza Suite, Wayne was actually directing three one-act plays on the same set, Suite 719 of the Plaza Hotel. He trusted Neil Simon’s genius with the words and helped the young actors with appropriate timing and expression when delivering them.

The school newspaper, The Mountain Echo, did a preliminary article about a month before the show opened. It recounted the success of Plaza Suite on Broadway, the success of Neil Simon in general, and laid out the plot for potential purchasers of tickets. After the five-performance run closed, the Echo gave the show its stamp of approval in a headline that included the words “A Smashing Success”. Every performance was an SRO sellout.

The daily commute was starting to take its toll on the Karmann Ghia. The value of the car was dropping as the odometer approached the hundred thousand mile mark. Wayne decided to take advantage of the car’s current value and trade it in. Therefore, he took another step down in the VW hierarchy and traded his green convertible in for a used, 1974 SuperBeetle. It had plenty of power, good gas mileage and an automatic transmission. It wasn’t pretty, but it was tough.

For Wayne, one of the things that excited him every day was going to work in a building that was on the National Register of Historic Places. That meant he could not request changes to any part of the building’s exterior. He COULD, however, request changes to the INSIDE of the structure. At Wayne’s request, the college agreed to paint the interior of the building and re-finish the hardwood floor. They also installed reverse window shades that would darken the interior of two-foot wide by twelve foot tall windows without the use of a ladder. Wayne personally framed show posters and hung them in the Green room after every show to boost Sock and Buskin and Fine Arts Department pride.

One of the wonderful things about Flynn Hall was that it could accommodate any kind of staging:  proscenium, arena, thrust, whatever. Plaza Suite was staged as a proscenium set on what was once the floor of a basketball court, facing the rear of the theatre, with audience members walking past the set and sitting on risers facing the FRONT of the building. Another feature of the structure that added to its flexibility was the removal of a short running track around the second floor of the building. This allowed the mounting of modern lighting batons and electrical wiring onto gigantic wooden crossbeams that supported the “open” second floor.

The same set/audience positions were used for the Spring musical. However, Wayne wanted the audience seating to start on the floor and rise toward the back of the building. The entire stage would be two feet above the “basketball” floor and the orchestra would be placed BETWEEN the front of the stage and the front rows of the audience.

The Fine Arts Department did not have the budget to build what Wayne envisioned. But he had learned of an off-campus organization, the Parents Guild, that awarded funds to worthy student-oriented projects on campus. Wayne applied for and received a grant to build a dozen boxes (4′ wide x 8′ long x 2′ high). To absorb sound, the interior of each box was filled with fiberglass insulation before closing the bottom and all four sides with fiberboard panels. To ensure ease of movement, 8 carpet patches were applied to the bottom of each box, allowing them to easily slide into position wherever they were needed.

These boxes, though heavy, could be stacked and used for audience seating in arena, thrust or proscenium configurations. They could also be used to create stage segments for performances. When placed in final position for performances, the boxes were typically “topped off” with 1/8″ tempered masonite that covered the entire stage, including the small gaps between boxes, providing a single, smooth performance surface.

The “performance boxes” described above that Wayne invented served audiences and performers for the next six years for every performance offered at Mount St. Mary’s. Future applications to the Parents Guild also enabled the purchase of newer, more powerful lighting control boards, spotlights and lighting instruments.

First show, first year, successful. Second show, first year, a little heavier fare in the form of a social statement. The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill was a musical, but one that was written in 1928 Germany. It was a biting satire of capitalism populated by low-life characters and featured music based on John Gay’s 1728 melodies and themes. When it came to choosing which musicals would be produced for public performance, Wayne learned very quickly that Lew wanted to be deeply involved it that process. And much to Wayne’s delight, Lew had a penchant for selecting musicals that were NOT the big-cast, big-name shows everybody knew by heart. Such was the case with Threepenny Opera. Obviously, this was material with which Wayne was extremely comfortable, since he’d spent so much time with the root work during his MFA studies. This was his first work with his new boss, Professor Lew. He quickly learned that Lew was very popular with the students, who referred to him as “Uncle Mac”.

Wayne chose to use “the boxes” as the stage for the first time with Threepenny, and presented the show in the thrust style. Lots of set pieces were lowered from the crossbeams by ropes. The show ran for five performances and the Mountain Echo called it “Sensational”.

One classroom item of note should be made here, only because it was so unusual. Once every academic year, typically in the Spring Semester, the Fine Arts Department offered a 12-week course titled “Introduction to the Fine Arts” to 120 students, which required that an additional fee be paid by each registrant. This was a required course for Fine Arts Majors. Each time it was taught, there were three sections, and each section met at the same time and place and on the same day of the week. Section 1 might start out with a Music professor, section 2 with an Art professor and section 3 with the Theatre professor. After four weeks, the three PROFESSORS each moved to another section and taught the same material to that section. Four weeks later the three professors would move to the section with which they had not yet met and taught the same four-weeks of introductory material to the last of the three sections. FINALLY, after all three sections had met with all three professors for four weeks, the college rented three buses and invited the remaining Fine Arts faculty members, their wives/husbands and certain select members of the Administration to join the three professors and the students on a 70-mile “day trip” on a Saturday to either Baltimore, Maryland or Washington, DC (the Mount was almost equally distant from both). The goal was to take all 120 students to an art gallery to view a special exhibit, a concert hall to hear a musical group in performance and a theatre to see a performance of a specific, professionally produced play before returning by bus to the college campus, usually after the hour of midnight.

Students FLOCKED to get into this class, and it was great fun for everyone involved. Oh, there were rules, but few tried to break them, because 1. it was too much fun and 2. we were their ride back to campus. This course was a fabulous part of every academic year Wayne spent on the faculty of Mount St. Mary’s College!

That summer of 1977 Wayne got a call from an actor friend named David Harper. David was a regular understudy for the John Adams role at Burn Brae during the Bicentennial. He told Wayne he was both directing and performing the title role in Man of La Mancha at yet another dinner theatre in Maryland, called Colony 7. David INVITED Wayne to perform the role of “The Padre” in a six-week, summertime run of that show. Wayne agreed, mostly because his character sang a solo called “To Each His Dulcinea” in each performance. Needless to say, he informed everyone he’d met at the Mount and at MC about the show’s location, dates and times as quickly as possible.

While all this was happening, Wayne was approached by the college about his living arrangements. It seems that, during WWII, the college hosted a US Navy flight training program on its campus that was designed to train members of its all-male student body how to fly and, after graduation, were inducted as Second Lieutenants and pilots in the Navy. To that end, the Navy built a large aerodrome to house and service the planes (probably biplanes) on the college side of US Highway 15, where there was a huge field for planes to take off and land. After the war, the college closed the two open ends of the aerodrome with fieldstone walls, put in bleachers, a wooden floor, two locker rooms and two baskets and had a fine basketball arena.

On the OTHER side of Highway 15 and parallel to that road, the Navy built five, one-story cottages for the officers of this enterprise, each of which included two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, and a large kitchen/dining room. Each cottage had a full unfinished basement, ostensibly for workouts and/or laundry. After the war, those houses became homes for college faculty members.

When Wayne arrived on campus, the middle cottage was raised off its foundation, enabling a new foundation and concrete basement floor to be laid. Now, in the Summer of 1977, the cottage stood empty on its new foundation. Knowing Wayne’s residential situation in relation to the college, Professor McAllister convinced the administration to rent that “middle cottage” to Wayne and his wife for $150 per month.

After lengthy discussions with his wife, and after consideration of the increase of value of their town house resulting from their finishing of the basement level, they decided to sell their Germantown property for a considerable profit. Wayne’s wife quit her job at the child care center in Silver Spring and she and Wayne moved into the middle cottage on the campus at the Mount before the 1977-78 academic year began. Unfortunately, they had to supply their own washer and dryer.

Much turmoil and change was happening at the Mount at this point in time. College President Jack Dillon was diagnosed with cancer and had to resign. The college’s Board of Trustees found a new, young President (only five years older than Wayne) by July 1. History tells us that their choice was actually the youngest college president in America at that time. Wayne was sad to see Jack Dillon leave the campus he loved so much.

Jack Dillon’s replacement was a young man who had never had an academic rank higher than Wayne’s current rank (Assistant Professor) and who brought in two former colleagues from the Big Ten University where he earned his PhD in English, a male to be his personal assistant and a female to be the Mount’s new Dean of Women. Both would be Wayne’s neighbors, as each took occupancy of one of the five cottages across US Highway 15. This new President also hired a popular former Mountie basketball star to replace Bernie Kaliss as Dean of the College.

year two

The first half of the 1977-78 academic year, at least from a theatre directing perspective, drew on Wayne’s experience with the Montgomery Light Opera Association. In November, for the Fall production, Wayne and Lew selected a 1959 Off-Broadway musical called Little Mary Sunshine, which was actually a PARODY of the operettas of Romberg, Friml, and Herbert! The show also poked fun at the films of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. The plot featured mounted police, Indian chiefs and tough, smart women who are oh, so sweet! All this, Book, Music and Lyrics, were from the pen of one man:  Rick Besoyan, who followed the form of those turn-of-the-century composers hilariously!

Sunshine proscenium photo here

Once again, the new boxes served as the stage (this time a proscenium type) and the orchestra pit was on the floor between the front of the stage and the audience. Lew and Wayne had as much fun mounting this production as the students did. It was another sellout.

Another academic phenomenon provided an option for the Fine Arts department to offer a third performance opportunity each year to its students and its on and off-campus audience base:  it was called “The J-term”. The name stems from the end of the Fall semester occurring BEFORE the start of the Christmas break, with some (not all) students returning on January 2 and taking a single, practicum course ALL DAY LONG, FIVE DAYS PER WEEK in JANUARY to earn three Fine Arts credits. The Spring semester would then start later than usual, in early February, and would end in June rather than May.

Expecting lower enrollments for this performance opportunity, we chose small-cast productions, the first of which was a musical version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest entitled Ernest in Love. Enrolled students completed all the work required to mount this J-term show, set in the late 1800s:  build and paint the set, assist with costume construction, design and implement the lighting requirements, learn the lines, the music and perform the show and finally, set Flynn Hall up as an ARENA theatre, four entrances onto the performance space, surrounded by audience members “stacked” on all four sides (a first for the “box system” devised by Wayne).

Ernest arena photo here

The Mountain Echo sent its most experienced theatre critic, Pete Horton, to review Ernest in Love. He wrote, in part:  “Director Wayne Hamilton has woven a tapestry of professionalism and art in this musical production as he has brought the best talents together tor a tightly-knit job. Under his competent direction, the production never lagged, but rather gained momentum as it went along, each scene better than the one preceding. His blocking of characters and movement was superb, utilizing the ‘theatre-in-the-round’ technique to its fullest capacity. His casting was uniformly  perfect, and he was rewarded with the best his performers could give, the fullness of their talent, making Ernest in Love a labor of love as well as one of the finest productions this company has ever done.”

Horton closed his review with this paragraph:  “Ernest in Love was indeed an evening of theatrical magic, an evening the audience hoped would never end. Those of you who missed Ernest in Love missed a warm and funny experience. Those who were fortunate enough to catch this performance will know what I mean. If Sock and Buskin continues to present plays of this high caliber in the future, our little town of Emmitsburg will become the home of one of the finest collegiate acting companies on the Eastern Seaboard.”

High praise indeed. But Wayne could not keep from smiling as he read these words. He had proven himself four times over and was happy to have found a musical partner who apparently enjoyed working with him and who was an excellent teammate. And to top it all off, Lew and Wayne had the good luck to find two excellent costume mistresses. All of the late-19th century women’s costumes for Ernest were designed and created from scratch by their two spouses!

During the busy Spring semester of 1978, while he was working on the J-term show, Wayne was visited by a faculty colleague who wanted to talk to Wayne about a business proposition. His colleague owned a campground near Thurmont and wanted to offer his customers some theatrical entertainment while they were camped at his establishment on the mountainside. Could Wayne think of a way to help make that happen?

As it turned out, Wayne could. He quickly consulted with college officials for permission, borrowed a couple of pickup trucks from the college to haul the necessary set pieces, lights, control boards and other gear and recruited students to get involved, FOR PAID POSITIONS in the enterprise. All this effort would take place in the summer of 1978, when Wayne’s little company of players would re-stage a mobile version of Neil Simon’s hilarious third act from Plaza Suite, “Visitor from Forest Hills”. In this act, a bride gets cold feet at her own wedding and locks herself in the bathroom of the suite, creating panic among the members of two families. Wayne made arrangements with Dramatists Play Service for licensing and began to search for the right people to make this happen.

Wayne identified members of Sock & Buskin who chose to stay near (not on) the Mount campus to keep jobs they held down while getting their education. Other students were already commuting from nearby homes to attend the Mount. In short, Wayne had all the on- and off-stage talent he needed to re-create this part of Simon’s play. As for a set, Wayne and his tech students developed a wire frame to define the room, with a door at either end. Stage right was the entry from the hotel hallway into the suite. Stage left was the locked bathroom door. Curtains were hung on the wire frame for walls and light, easy-to-move furniture pieces furnished the room. The whole set with lights and controls could be assembled or disassembled in forty minutes.

Wayne’s faculty colleague agreed to hire Wayne’s OUTDOOR COMEDY company twice. Once in June and once in August. He was also President of a regional Association of Campground Owners and agreed to promote OUTDOOR COMEDY to other members of that organization. They did about 10 performances of “Visitor from Forest Hills” that summer, and charged $800 per performance. Each of the ten company members got an equal share of the fee.

Shortly after the Spring semester began and students returned to campus in 1978, Wayne and his wife were informed by her doctor that they should expect to become parents at some point in October. She began to shop for clothes to accommodate her changing shape and took a job as secretary to the Mount’s archivist to help pay for them. She also pointed out to Wayne that getting an infant and his (or her) necessities in and out of a two-door car would be, at best, inconvenient. He dared not disagree, and introduced her to his new friends at the Nissan dealership in Gettysburg. After looking at all the different models offered, she naturally chose the top of the line, 5-door, fully automatic, six-cylinder station wagon, the all new Datsun 810! She also had a choice about WHERE she would give birth. A large, modern hospital existed in Frederick, Maryland twenty miles South of their cottage. But only ten miles North of the cottage was a small but “adequate” hospital in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. She liked her obstetrician in Gettysburg and he was ten miles closer, so to her, the choice was easy, her child would be born there. With that choice, our child would become the first from either family bloodline to EVER be born North of the Mason-Dixon line! So be it.

The Datsun 810, soon to be renamed “The Maxima”

Her 1970 Chevelle had zero trade-in value, but a recent Mountie theatre graduate, Bobby Golibart, asked if Wayne and his wife would sell the old Chevy to him. He had just landed a job as an on-stage narrator for a Pepsi-Cola sponsored Skateboard Show that was traveling up and down the Eastern seaboard. Bobby said he needed “personal transportation” to travel with the show and had “always admired” that car. Wayne never asked what happened to that car, but he and Bobby stayed in touch throughout Bobby’s career.

As for the next show at the Mount, Wayne had considered, for no specific reason, making a subtle statement about alcohol. Not to chide the student body. Rather, to point out that it was, to one degree or another, a problem that had been around for a very long time. He started with an 1868 temperance play called 10 Nights in a Bar Room. Then he mixed in elements of dialogue from an earlier 1844 melodrama called The Drunkard. The result was a non-musical comic melodrama with 19th-century characters and costumes and staged in the proscenium style. The audience was seated at round tables, like an old-time saloon, and beer and wine were available at additional cost. Finally, Wayne took the central role as the “Snidely Whiplash” villain. The show had a five-performance run in mid March (before Spring break) and a three-performance run in early April (after Spring break).

Two 10 Nights photos here – proscenium curtain closed & “rowboat” shot

The proscenium stage was taken to a new level for this production. Placed at the back of the space and facing the front door, Wayne created a “hallway” of black curtains between the Green Room and stage along the complete length of the theatre, thus masking any movement of offstage actors from the audience. The proscenium arch actually had a curtain that opened and closed at the center, and in one scene, a rowboat was mounted on wheels with a blue curtain, representing “water”, masked the crew members behind the curtain pushing the boat across the stage. It was “hokey”, by modern standards, but it was also quite “nineteenth century”!

year three

International history visited the Emmitsburg area for thirteen days in September (5-17) of 1978. In an effort to broker a peace agreement, America’s President, Jimmy Carter, hosted two heads of state whose countries had been at war for centuries:  Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel. Those three men met at the Camp David presidential retreat from September 5th through 17th. The negotiations took place just a few miles from where Wayne’s family lived, but Wayne was personally involved in some associated activities.

First, Wayne was at Flynn Hall in the late afternoon cleaning up after a “tech class” on a Thursday (September 7th). The big glass entry doors were propped open (Flynn was not air conditioned), so Wayne could clearly hear the sound of a helicopter flying low over the campus. He ran to the front porch, down the steps and around to the back of the building to watch a large black helicopter set down on the baseball field directly behind Flynn. A man with a headset and a walkie-talkie hopped out and ran up the rise to where Wayne was standing and asked, “Can you tell me where the turnoff is to the Madonna and Grotto road?” He nodded and pointed to a very long limousine on the access road parallel to US Highway 15.

Wayne knew the road he wanted was narrow and went up the mountain and through a small forest to those religious shrines. The road would be invisible from the air. “Sure,” Wayne said. “Tell him it’s the second left from where he’s sitting right now. Why?”

“We’re Secret Service. The President and his guests would like to visit the shrines. It’s our job to do some advance work to see how safe the site is.” Then he radioed Wayne’s directions to the limo team. Wayne watched the car head up the mountain road to the shrines. A few seconds later, the agent put his free hand up to the earpod on his headset and said, “10-4.” Then he turned to Wayne and said, “Thanks” and started to leave.

Wayne said, “Wait. Are they going to visit us or not?”

“No way” said the agent. “Not safe. Road’s too narrow. If the limo was attacked, there’s no way we could turn it around and get it out of there. Nope. Not safe. Thanks for your help.” Wayne watched him jump into the chopper and strap himself in, then watched it and the limo disappear toward Camp David.

During the next few days, the newspapers announced that the three heads of state would visit the famous Civil War battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, September 10th. Wayne was pretty sure they’d have a large entourage going with them on the 20-mile, one-way trip to the battlefield, so they’d be likely to drive straight up US Highway 15 RIGHT THROUGH THE MOUNT CAMPUS AND RIGHT PAST WAYNE’S HOUSE. Therefore, Wayne encouraged his students to make up some non-political welcome signs for the event and come to his house that day to wave at them as they drove by. He even invited his neighbors and mowed his lawn!

Sure enough, that Sunday the network TV “Camp David watchers” showed the caravan of automobiles leaving Camp David and heading North toward Gettysburg on US 15. Wayne and his wife had about 25 students, most with signs like “WELCOME TO THE MOUNT” and “STOP AND VISIT” and “COME SEE US” standing on the roadside. Wayne’s “crowd” was not more than twenty feet from the highway, and it was easy to see, in the lead limousine, in the back seat, plain as day, left to right, Sadat, Carter and Begin. Everybody standing in Wayne’s yard cheered, yelled and madly waved their signs. The entire caravan numbered 27 vehicles! Even Carter’s daughter Amy went along for the ride. It was quite a day!

Sadat, Carter (with Amy) and Begin listen attentively to the Park Services Guide
Israeli General Moshe Dayan (right foreground) seems unimpressed

The next day, Wayne got a call from the College’s Athletic Director with a surprise request. It seems that the White House press corps, who were all staying at motels and B & Bs in Thurmont, waiting on the latest word from the Accord negotiations, were spending their daytime hours at the VFW bar. They were getting bored and decided to challenge the Mount faculty to a softball game. Wayne was asked to help coordinate the affair, and he happily agreed to do so.

The A.D. reached out to faculty members to solicit players and donated softball equipment (balls, gloves, bats, even bases). Wayne bought three large, styrofoam coolers and drove around Emmitsburg soliciting free beer (in cans only) and ice donations from bar owners around town, not hesitating to point out the historical importance of their donations. Wayne promised the bar proprietors he would give each reporter a list of everyone who donated beer to the players. And he did!

The game took place the next day in the afternoon, a Tuesday (September 12th). While “Uncle Walter” (Cronkite) was not present, journalists for major news outlets like the New York Times, The Washington Post and major TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) showed up to play. Everybody there had a great time, with both teams laughing and shouting insults at each other with every error. They would play a couple of innings, then stop playing for a “beer break” at home plate, accompanied by joke swapping, then go back to playing. Soon, no one could remember the score and it was obvious no one cared. This field had no lights, so the only thing that stopped the game was darkness. In short, a good time was had by all and it was an afternoon to remember!

A month later, on October 12, 1978, Wayne’s wife gave them a beautiful baby boy. Wayne was delighted and happy that his now three-person family was all together in the same house. However, pressures still surrounded Wayne, despite his teaching and artistic successes at the Mount. Perhaps it was being the only one of the three artistic disciplines in the Fine Arts department with only one person (Wayne) to manage everything having to do with that discipline and having the most public face in the department, but Wayne sat down with Lew during the early summer of 1978 to ask for some help. Lew suggested that, while he began negotiations for funding with the new Administration, Wayne should visit small colleges in our area with small theatre programs like the one offered at the Mount and interview graduating Seniors about a part-time theatre “assistant” position. In short, both professors were successful, and in October of 1978, EVERYONE, including Wayne’s new assistant, went to work on Bye Bye Birdie.

Two Birdie set piece photos here

The stage set was unusual, but it had what most directors love:  LEVELS! The director’s job was to create interesting pictures on stage. That’s easier to do when you have multiple levels on which to place actors! Counting the floor it stood on, actors could be placed on five different levels. In addition, it utilized quick-change, replaceable panels and translucent screens onto which images were projected from backstage cameras. The stage itself allowed very fast scene changes, which were quickly performed by company members in full costume and in low-light conditions. Minimal three-dimensional set pieces were placed on different parts of the set, but the projections and panels made scene locations very clear to audience members. All of that added up to a fast-paced show, which was important in 1963 when the show first appeared in New York. Birdie had its own, somewhat odd, historical place in musical theatre as well. Some critics claimed it was, at least thematically, Broadway’s first “rock musical”. However, many others took issue with that opinion. The version offered at Mount Saint Mary’s at that time was popular and, as such, successful.

For some long-forgotten reason, the Fine Arts department at the Mount chose NOT to offer a J-Term production in January of 1979. Nevertheless, there were other opportunities for the extensive talent pool there to find other nearby places to perform. After the four-day Thanksgiving break at the Mount, Wayne got a call from a popular Gettysburg restaurateur  inviting Wayne and his students to audition for a new dinner theatre at his establishment, named Stonehenge, where he planned to stage two small-cast comedies:  Plaza Suite and Absurd Person Singular.

Having already done the former show, Wayne auditioned for and was cast in the latter, Absurd Person Singular, a British comedy by playwright Alan Ayckbourne. He was very proud that one of his theatre majors, Roberta Rooney, was cast in Plaza Suite and another, Florinda Reid, was also cast in Absurd Person Singular! Wayne played the part of Sidney and was delighted to use his best British dialect in the part. The play was set during the Christmas holidays, so (with the director’s permission), Wayne deconstructed an old clip-on bow tie and rebuilt it with green felt “holly leaves” and red plastic “berries” that usually got a laugh at his first entrance.

Absurd photo here

The Gettysburg newspaper did little more than announce the two plays, the names of the cast members for both shows, what nearby towns they lived in and the dates the two shows would be performed. For Wayne, it was a trip back in time to collect a check for performing a comic role in a non-musical show.

By February, however, Wayne was back to his teaching responsibilities and preparations for offering the Mount campus a serious drama in April:  Look Homeward, Angel. This was the stage-ready version of Thomas Wolfe’s highly autobiographical novel by Ketti Frings. Wayne knew he had excellent material to present to his community. Ms. Frings had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 for her work in transmogrifying Thomas Wolfe’s novel into a stage play. Wayne’s set-construction students did a beautiful job of ingeniously combining the EXTERIOR scenes of Wolfe’s North Carolina childhood home with scenes that took place INSIDE behind a back-lit screen. In addition, his students who were more bent toward the acting arts surpassed themselves and managed their serious roles with excellence! Still, every seat was filled for every performance. The play ran from April 3-7, 1979.

photo of LHA set here

year four

There was no summer production in 1979, which was something of a relief to the Hamilton family of Emmitsburg. Wayne and his wife were feeling increasingly fond of the Emmitsburg community and began to think of it as “home”. Wayne was invited to join the local Lions club, his wife changed jobs on campus from being on the staff of the Archivist to being secretary to the Chief of Campus Security, and their son was enrolled in a child care facility operated by Mother Seton’s Sisters of Charity. Wayne and his wife felt very confident about his chances of advancement to tenured status on the college faculty, so much so that they began to scout the local real estate market for a different, larger house.

And as fate would have it, they found one. It was on St. Joseph Street, a corner property one block away from the St. Joseph Catholic Church (everything in Emmitsburg was Catholic). The elderly gentleman owner had just passed away, and his daughter was looking for a quick sale of her inheritance, a half-acre lot with a three-story, three-bedroom house that had been built in 1928. After two visits to the house, the Hamiltons decided that it needed too much improvement for that price point. They made a lower offer and she accepted it immediately.

The Hamiltons said goodbye to the cottage built by the Navy and moved into town. Wayne purchased a used International Harvester “lawn tractor” to mow the lawn. The property was fenced in except across the front, which had an ancient, double-wide driveway leading to a wooden, barn-shaped, one-car garage with an attached lean-to that was wide enough to accommodate a small, second car (like Wayne’s B210). All Wayne had to do was cut out the front wall of the lean-to, re-attach it with strap hinges on the left side and farm gate latch on the right side. Then he ordered a dump truck load of gray gravel, bought a steel rake and spread the gravel by hand across the interior of the garage and across the space between the front of the garage and the street. Et voila! A new driveway and a two-car garage!

         

The house only had a tiny bathroom on the second floor, so they took a 12 foot by 12 foot room with two windows at the front corner of the FIRST floor and made it a LARGE bathroom! Upon completion, the room had ALL the fixtures and a double-wide linen closet. They re-painted the entire interior of the house and hung a double-wide wooden swing on the front porch.

Wayne loved his work in the classroom and in the theatre, but after nearly a decade, he thought it might be time to add to his skillset, whether or not it led to another degree. Earlier this year, he’d gotten a letter from the main campus of the University of Maryland in College Park. The letter announced a new interdisciplinary PhD program in Public Communication, in which students would be required to take courses in Radio, Television, Film, Speech, Theatre and Journalism. The new program would begin in the Fall of 1979. It sounded complicated and challenging, but Wayne applied for the program and was accepted.

He quickly learned that faculty members could also apply to the Dean of the College (the former basketball star) for funding advanced-degree study. So Wayne’s involvement in at least the first semester of this Public Communication degree program was pretty much paid for. That made Wayne smile inside.

When students returned to the college campus in the Fall of 1979 and Wayne began his normal routine of teaching, advising and working on the next production with Sock & Buskin, he felt like his work load had been cut in half. Then Lew McAllister suggested they produce their most ambitious musical ever:  a little-known show titled Something’s Afoot. Wayne was unfamiliar with this show, but when Lew finished describing it, the challenge was clear, because the SET kills off the entire cast! It was first performed in 1972 and played all over America with DIFFERENT CASTS before opening in New York City in late May of 1976 and closing there after only 61 performances.

This musical spoofed the detective stories of Agatha Christie, in particular her Ten Little Indians tale. Staircases explode, giant vases swallow people whole, telephones gas guests, light switches electrocute others. Clever, funny lyrics kept the audience laughing and no one felt threatened, despite blackouts, lightning storms and loud noises, including gunshots. It  was a two-story set that had audience members wondering which part would be the next to claim the life of a character!

Wayne took the pictures, filled out the paperwork and submitted them to the American College Theatre Festival (ACTF) officials in Washington, which resulted in a visit to Flynn Hall by ACTF adjudicators. Students and faculty who worked on Something’s Afoot were both happy and proud when ACTF sent its first-ever Commendation Award to the Fine Arts Department and Sock & Buskin Dramatic Society, dated January 11, 1980, recognition that was well-deserved. Performances at the Mount occurred November 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6, 1979.

Despite Wayne’s busy schedule, with teaching, doctoral study, introducing new courses, helping out with a toddler, and counseling students, he was always looking for ways to make the PhD program work FOR him, not AGAINST him. He had already arranged his teaching schedule to enable teaching in Emmitsburg early on the same day as taking a course later in College Park.

One day, while driving south on two-lane US highway 15 to the University of Maryland, a full-sized yellow Ford station wagon suddenly turned left in front of Wayne. Wayne T-boned the Ford at 55 miles per hour, totaling both autos. Wayne was not wearing his seat belt, so he went head-first through the windshield of the VW. At the same time, his right knee hit the dashboard and drove his thigh bone backwards, shattering his right hip bone. The recoil from the impact threw Wayne back through the windshield opening onto the passenger seat. On the return flight, the back of Wayne’s head struck the rear-view mirror, causing a three-inch bleeding cut in his scalp, the only place on his body where blood was externally evident.

Wayne never lost consciouness, but he could not move. With the engine behind him in the Super Beetle, there was no fire, no smoke and only bumps and bruises on the two 8 and 12 year old children on the back seat of the Ford. Wayne waited for the Fire and Rescue crews to arrive and evacuate the Ford driver and her two passengers, then watched with calm interest as the “jaws of life” ripped the passenger door off the VW, carefully lift Wayne onto a wide board of some kind and slide him into an ambulance. The closest hospital was in Gettysburg, so off they went.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was not a time when hip replacements had yet been invented, but they must have had a pretty good orthopedic staff. After they X-rayed Wayne to a fare-thee-well and his wife signed off on the paperwork, they opened Wayne up on the right side, found all the pieces, used four screws to put him back together and, after a week in the hospital, sent him home with a pair of crutches and a bandage on his head.

Thanks to his wife, his friend John Degen, the College Dean, his students at the Mount (some of whom found an old wheelchair in the prop room) and the professors at the University of Maryland, Wayne caught up, then got back into the swing of his formerly very busy schedule that semester. Since the day of the accident, he never travels anywhere by automobile WITHOUT wearing his seat belt!

The police report laid the blame for the accident squarely in the lap of the Ford driver, and Wayne received a large settlement from her insurance company. With those funds, Wayne purchased a 1977 Datsun B210 hatchback, which turned out to be one of the most functional and friendly car he’d ever owned.

Wayne’s Datsun (now Nissan) B210 hatchback

Oddly, the course Wayne LEAST enjoyed teaching was Acting. His friend John Degen had long since finished his MFA in that field at George Washington University. Wayne and his wife had driven to DC one weekend to see a performance of his last production before graduation and to congratulate him. After checking with Lew, who approved the idea, Wayne called John to see if he wanted to teach Acting at the Mount. Fortunately, he was interested (it helped John’s resume and checkbook). John drove up from DC on Tuesdays and Thursdays to teach Acting 101 and Acting 201 on those days. And for no extra compensation, John “coached” performers at rehearsals who had earned parts in productions under way on campus. It was a big help to Wayne, who was grateful for John’s presence. From time to time during Wayne’s service at the Mount, he invited other theatrical friends from DC and Baltimore to the campus to conduct additional workshops (makeup, dance, lighting) with his classes.

January of 1980 brought forth another J-term production, an old musical favorite for almost everyone:  How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Because of the reduced number of registered students for J-term shows, Wayne chose to present this one in the arena style on the floor of Flynn Hall with “the boxes” stacking the audience around all four sides. This meant the set pieces were light, free-standing and simple and the costumes were likewise uncomplicated:  modern business attire for everyone.

Ticket prices were higher at the Mount for this production, because Sock & Buskin ambitiously negotiated with campus food services a modest buffet and wine meal before the opening “curtain” to make this a Dinner Theatre outing for patrons. Non-performing students serving as “waiters” and “waitresses” reported receiving many requests for “More like this, please”. The show ran January 31 and February 1, 2, 4 and 5.

The Spring, 1980 production was a straight play, recommended months earlier by Professor Ed Ryan, an avid theatre fan. One day, while Wayne was keeping his required office hours in Bradley Hall, Ed stopped by and asked, “Have you chosen the Spring play yet?”

“No, sir.” replied Wayne, taking note of a script Ed had in his hand. “Got any suggestions?”

Both men smiled as Ed extended the hand containing the play script to Wayne. “As a matter of fact…”

“Thanks, Ed,” said Wayne. “I’ll get this back to you ASAP.”

“No hurry,” said Ed. “Just don’t lose it. It’s one of my favorites.”

And with that, he was on his way home. That last sentence spoke volumes to Wayne. It was an endorsement for the play, suggesting that Ed thought it would work well on the Mount campus.

Wayne looked again at the cover. The Warrior’s Husband. With a title like that, it HAD to be a comedy. As he discovered, it was a 1932 play by Julian F. Thompson (and a 1933 film) about a fictional land of Amazons where women are the warriors and men are domestic. The plot follows the arrival of Greek soldiers, led by Theseus, who have come to capture the Amazon’s sacred girdle, and the humorous clash of cultures as the men are baffled by the reversed gender roles and a romance begins to blossom between Antiope and Theseus. Skimpy Greek-style costumes were constructed for all cast members, and to heighten the illusion of the Amazons as warriors, the purchased female sandals were “built up” with glued-on-and-painted plywood layers, making each actress up to FOUR INCHES taller than her normal height!

The play was presented in the thrust style. No critic offered an opinion in print about the piece, but each performance was met with copious laughter from the audience. Most important to Wayne was Ed Ryan’s comment afterward, which was:  “Well done!”

year five

The Summer of 1980 was a pivotal time for Wayne at Mount Saint Mary’s. That summer, his colleague, creative partner and friend Lew McAllister fell ill. Wayne hadn’t spent much time with Lew during the Spring semester, since the show at that time was a non-musical. But suddenly, although he’d have the summer to recover, he had decided to give up his chairmanship. As mentioned earlier, the only other tenured faculty member in the department was a priest, and that priest declined the responsibility of department leadership.

So what did the College’s Administration do? It appointed a tenured priest as Chairman of the Fine Arts department. And what did this priest know about the Fine Arts? Wayne had no idea. All he knew was that the courses the priest taught PRIOR to his ascension to the Fine Arts Chair were in the field of Theology. The first act of the new chairperson was to fire the two untenured Art faculty members in the department. No one knew why they were fired, but they were on the cusp of being considered for tenure. The new chairman quickly found qualified Art faculty to replace them, however, and was apparently quite happy to welcome them to the Mount Fine Arts department.

Wayne had no doubt that he had earned the recommendation for tenure. But he was far less certain that this stranger, who had no apparent connection to or expertise in ANY of the Fine Arts, and whom Wayne had never seen attending a theatrical performance at the Mount, would support him. In fact, most attempts to engage him in conversation were quickly brushed off. It was as though he wanted to surround himself with faculty he could consider “his own”.

But for the sake of his family and his own professional future, Wayne simply decided to ask his new boss the question. Wayne walked into the man’s office one day, closed the door, sat down and said, “As you well know, my time in service here qualifies me to begin the tenure application process next year. And as you also know, any effort to acquire the rank of associate professor and tenure almost completely relies on the positive recommendation of my department chair, namely you. However, at this point in time, your attitude toward me is anything but positive. Do you intend to support my application for tenure next year?”

The priest put down his pen, folded his fingers together on his desktop, looked at Wayne and said, “I do not intend to recommend you.”

Wayne left the priest’s office, went home and told his wife:  “We have work to do.”

As much as he loved his friend Lew McAllister, Wayne decided he would simply “soldier on”. Knowing his future at Mount Saint Mary’s College would be over at the end of the 1981-82 academic year, he began his search for an academic position at another college elsewhere. Also, not knowing where his next academic position might be, he decided to continue with his studies in Public Communication at the University of Maryland, but not be obsessive about completing the Ph.D. program there. After all, he already had a terminal degree. Finally, he resolved to attend as many academic and professional gatherings as possible in the next 18 months; e.g., places where he might have opportunities to speak with organizations which might be in “hiring” mode.

The next show that was offered by Sock & Buskin and the Fine Arts Department in the Fall of 1980 was a musical comedy based on the story of “The Princess and the Pea”, Once Upon A Mattress. On Broadway, it made a star out of an hilarious comedienne named Carol Burnett. S&B and the Fine Arts Department were fortunate to have the assistance of a wonderful set painter from the Mount’s Seminary. The set was BEAUTIFUL and the costumes were outstanding!

Mattress photos here

The producers signed this show up as a participant in the American College Theatre Festival (ACTF), held annually at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Wayne filled out all the forms and sent pictures of the set and costumes. Partially because of his trips to College Park for doctoral classes and partially because it was simply the right thing to do, Wayne shared directing credits in the program with his actor friend John Degen. ACTF representatives visited the Mount campus, took pictures and interviewed several people before returning to DC. The result was another Commendation award from ACTF for “Excellence in Set Design”.

Armed with that second ACTF Commendation, Wayne made an appointment with the Mount’s new president. Wayne wanted to ask, perhaps fruitlessly, whether Wayne’s record of success might cause the president to override a chairman’s tenure-recommendation decision. Unfortunately, Wayne’s suspicions were correct. The young president told Wayne that he would unlikely countermand a chairman’s recommendation. That was the last bit of energy Wayne spent on any attempt to stay at Mount Saint Mary’s College.

At the same time, Wayne was enjoying the professors and coursework he had undertaken at the University of Maryland. He studied with Roger Meersman in the Theatre Department, who was his “official advisor” in this interdisciplinary program, and Tom Aylward, a tech-savvy leader from the Television and Radio Department, with whom he had many enlightening conversations about future trends in those two delivery media. But his favorite professor was a woman who was only a year older than Wayne from the Speech Department. Kathleen Hall Jamieson was already famous because of her skill at analyzing and writing about presidential rhetoric, past, present and future. She conducted classes in her living room and proposed that several of her students, including Wayne, would each contribute a chapter to a book on rhetoric, which she would edit and for which she would would write an introduction and a summary. She had it all lined up with her publisher!

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Alas, before that book came together, Kathleen left Maryland for a position at the University of Texas at Austin before being appointed Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Kathleen has written or edited more than 30 books, co-founded FACTCHECK.ORG and received countless awards for her excellence in writing and teaching. She is one of the most interesting and admirable people Wayne has ever met.

Fortunately, the University of Maryland had a J-Term in its academic calendar, so when Wayne was approached by a professional performance company in Frederick about appearing in one of their shows, Wayne was available. The Octorian Theatre Company cast Wayne, along with one of his students, John O’Brien, and Frederick area residents Bob Baker, Debra Pond and Vanessa McCambridge as performers in their musical revue of Side by Side by Sondheim. Wayne was thrilled at the prospect of performing Sondheim’s songs, since he had never done a single Sondheim musical; yet here, he was being asked to sing the best songs from the great composer’s best musicals! Every performance was accompanied by two grand pianos onstage with the singers. The irony of this cast was that often, the wrong gender was singing the great man’s songs.

For example, Sondheim’s “You Gotta Have a Gimmick”, from Gypsy, in which three strippers seek to teach Gypsy Rose Lee how to succeed in the world of burlesque, the strippers were played by the three MEN in our cast. This might have seemed odd, but it brought terrific laughter in this production. In other words, it worked!

The Octorians performed this piece all over Frederick County, but it was never better received than the show that Wayne arranged and had videotaped at Flynn Hall on the Mount Saint Mary’s campus in January of 1981. Below are links to selected songs preserved on Wayne’s YouTube site for your enjoyment:

“Anyone Can Whistle”   https://youtu.be/2LPhSwsfe2k

“We’re Gonna Be Alright”   https://youtu.be/x1yYh_jLOlg

“The Little Things”   https://youtu.be/qua6xngHFtE

“You Gotta Have A Gimmick”   https://youtu.be/k5GkvCt8VMw

“Pretty Lady”   https://youtu.be/px4OPDIisR0

“Everybody Says Don’t”   https://youtu.be/OG-WUmQQGtA

“You Must Meet My Wife”   https://youtu.be/rK05lRYE238

year six

This last year at Mount Saint Mary’s was a hodgepodge of activity for Wayne. He was writing to colleges and universities across America where his talents might fit faculty openings.This was a waiting game, often taking weeks for responses. Wayne was fortunate to have had interviews at gatherings of theatre folk, like the American College Theatre Festival. But the schools that were most serious about employing Wayne actually invited him to visit their campus, typically for at least two days.

For example, early in 1982, Wayne was invited to State College, Pennsylvania, just 136 miles North of Emmitsburg, to visit the chairman of the theatre department at Penn State University. He was a guest at the Nittany Lion Inn. The theatre chairman explained that Wayne would lead a staff of three faculty members at the Penn State, New Kensington campus near Pittsburg. That campus, which Wayne also visited, was 200 miles West of Emmitsburg.

The University of Wisconsin Theatre Department invited three potential candidates to Madison and then took all of them to four different campuses all over the state, where they visited two-year, community college campuses for one day each. From there, theatre students finished their BA or BFA work at the University facility in Madison. This was too much like the one-person theatre department he was leaving at the Mount to be of interest to Wayne.

After leaving Wisconsin, Wayne did not fly home to Maryland. He made a much shorter flight Westward to Minneapolis, where he had been invited to interview with the Theatre department at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus. The chairman of the search committee, Lee Adey, told him he was the third of three candidates being considered. They had a modern, multi-theatre building on the West bank of the Mississippi river that included a black box, arena, thrust and proscenium stages. The Twin Cities had over 100 theatre-producing companies in the 7-county metro area, including the world-famous Guthrie Theatre, founded in the early 1960s. So it was an exciting theatre environment, with much opportunity. It was also a long, long way from home. Wayne was competing for one position on the Directing faculty. He interviewed with the search committee, consisting of students and faculty members, and with the entire faculty.

Then they gave Wayne twenty minutes to study a three-page scene of an unfamiliar play, took him into a theatre half-full of theatre faculty and students, allowed him to select two students from that crowd who identified themselves as acting majors and asked him to direct them through the scene.

Wayne must have done something right. Two days later, he got a phone call from Professor Adey offering him the position. The search committee recommendation to the faculty was unanimous, as was the final vote of the faculty. Wayne was expected to be on campus by August 1, 1982.

In 1981, Wayne was invited by the Fredericktowne Players to serve as their “Critic in Residence” for their 1981-82 season. He would attend dress rehearsals, usually within a week of a play’s opening, watch dress rehearsals and take notes to provide comments for EVERYONE. That included actors, director, designers, lighting techs, everyone. He was very careful to be politically correct, even gentle, and he could tell that everyone listening seemed grateful that he approached their work in such a professional manner. In short, everyone seemed to WANT at least ONE comment and everyone seemed happy that part of the comment they received included a compliment. Wayne tried to make sure of that, even though it was often like walking a high wire.

Learning that Wayne would be leaving the Mount and Frederick County in coming months, the Fredericktowne Players decided to say goodbye with a farewell banquet. In June of 1982, they catered a modest meal onto the Players’ stage, rattled off a list of “thank yous” from various members of their Board of Directors and finally presented Wayne with a beautifully framed etching by famous Frederick artist Joseph Osmann titled “Spires” (Osmann referencing John Greenleaf Whittier’s clustered spires in his poem “Barbara Frietchie”). The brass plate affixed to the glass read:

“Wayne Hamilton
From Fredericktowne Players
1982”

The words and art speak of the many church and civic building towers bursting through the trees in this 19th century Maryland town. This was a moving gift for Wayne, who had been collecting print-media art for years.

Back on campus at Mount Saint Mary’s, Wayne continued his teaching and directing responsibilities before leaving to report to the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis. Wayne chose to do both of his last two plays at the Mount in the proscenium style.

In the Fall semester (late October/early November), he and Lew McAllister did their last musical together, She Loves Me. Set in a European parfumerie during the late 1930s, it is a love story of mistaken identity. The set and costumes were designed to fit the time period, and the set was built upon a remarkable turntable to accommodate scenes inside and outside the shop. At the last minute, one of the cast members had to drop out of the cast and return home because he was stricken with what was then called “the kissing disease”:  mononucleosis. At the last minute, Wayne stepped into the role of a 15 year old messenger boy, rode an ancient bicycle onstage and sang a duet with one of his students, who was made up to look like an old man.

She Loves Me pictures here

In the Spring semester, Wayne agreed to direct a small-cast play that was based on a 1970 movie directed by Otto Preminger:  Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. A trio of outcasts who meet in a hospital decide to pool their resources, move into a small house and face a series of adventures together.

Junie Moon pictures here

And thus endeth Wayne’s six-year “experience” with America’s oldest independent Catholic college.

Well, not really. No explanation came from the chairman/priest as to his lack of support for Wayne’s tenure bid, but Wayne knew, as a matter of course, that the President would not intervene and/or override the priest’s decision. However, Wayne was aware that the Mount’s President had attended and received his Ph.D, degree from the University of Minnesota, and that his fondest wish was to return there as an Associate Professor. Wayne couldn’t help stopping by the President’s office on the day he picked up his last paycheck from the Mount.

Noting that the President was sitting at his desk in his otherwise unoccupied office, Wayne knocked on his door and, not waiting for permission to enter, simply opened the door enough to initiate the following conversation:

“Hi, Bob. Just wanted to stop in, say goodbye and wish you well!”

“Well, thanks, Wayne. Any news on your next position?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Thanks for asking. Interviewed at Penn State and Wisconsin, but got a solid offer and will be starting at a Big 10 school this Fall.”

“Really? Where is that?”

“I’ll be at your alma mater. Minnesota, Twin Cities! Wish me luck, Bob!”

TRANSITION:  MARYLAND TO MINNESOTA

Wayne and his wife were ready to leave Maryland and move to Minnesota. Unfortunately, the house they had purchased in the little town of Emmitsburg was not quite ready to let go of them. They hired a realtor and put the “For Sale” sign in the front yard, but Wayne was forced to put a trailer hitch on his B210, rent a small U-haul trailer and fill it with enough clothing and books to get him through his first semester at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

In late July of 1982, after a tearful goodbye from his wife and four-year-old son, Wayne drove for two days to reach Minneapolis. Job one was finding a room to rent. Wayne found one on the second floor of a house on Columbus Avenue in South Minneapolis. A second bedroom on that floor was being rented by a couple with a fifteen year old son who had driven to Minneapolis from Alaska!

Wayne showed up at Rarig Center, home of UNIVERSITY THEATRE and the Department of Theatre Arts on the West Bank of the Mississippi River. He was looking for Lee Adey, but he was surprised when the department chairman told him that Professor Adey was on sabbatical for the entire first year of Wayne’s two-year contract with the U of MN Theatre Department. Since there were only two Directing faculty in the department (Lee and Wayne) Wayne would be “on his own” in making his way through the ins and outs of America’s largest single campus, numbering sixty THOUSAND (60,000) students. Brick number one.

The department not only housed theatre as a major discipline, but also speech and dance. So faculty meetings numbered well over 20 attendees. The chairman of the department when Wayne arrived was an old-school Scandinavian gentleman in his early 60s from North Dakota named Wendell Josal, whose specialty was set design. Wayne immediately respected and admired him as a leader and as an individual who could be an unbiased resource, a person who could provide information without bias. On the downside, Wayne was quickly impressed with the deep-seated “belief” among his new colleagues in doing theatre “the U of MN way” and none other. Over time, Wayne became aware of the fact that only he and two other theatre faculty members did not earn ANY of their academic credentials from the department in which they were now teaching (academic inbreeding?). Brick number two.

In late October, Wayne got a call from his wife that their house in Emmitsburg had been sold. She had also managed to make the sale final AFTER Wayne could fly home for the Christmas break. He would help pack a 17-foot rental truck and drive it from Maryland to Minnesota with the whole family in the truck cab and her car in tow. Until then, it was Wayne’s job to find and rent a house in Minneapolis to put their possessions in when they got there.

That drive in the truck to Minneapolis was actually a little more of an adventure than Wayne had bargained for. On day three, temperatures dropped and the skies were overcast as they moved Westward through Wisconsin. Then snow began, and by the time they got to “Metro Minnesota”, the local radio told them they were arriving at the end of a three-day, seventeen-inch accumulation of snow. Wayne managed to get the truck and car-in-tow into their neighborhood, but it was impossible to see where they could legally park their rig AND unload at least SOME of it.

The blocks in Minneapolis are mostly rectangular in shape, and eventually a parking space only three SHORT blocks to the West of their rental house opened up. Little Andy, then only 4, had a full backpack with a bedroll attached and was protected from the elements as well as possible. As if he cared. He couldn’t WAIT to get chest deep into that snow, squealing with glee every inch of the way. Wayne’s wife carried as much as she could of whatever she believed she needed to get through the night. It was getting dark by this time, and Wayne had no doubt he would be making at least one, if not more, trips on foot between the truck and the house. But this first one was a challenge:  a “full” sized mattress balanced on his head and carried the three blocks and up fifteen steps from the street level to the front-door level of their house. The next morning, Wayne’s little family got bundled up and walked two blocks to a hardware store to make their first family purchase in Minnesota:  a small and totally inadequate little snowblower! Welcome to Minneapolis!

Wayne was grateful that someone at U of MN Theatre had the foresight to NOT schedule Wayne as director for a production during his first semester on the faculty. And although Wayne had no say in which show he would direct during year one, he was grateful for what he called a “softball assignment”:  You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.

This show can be called a “softball” because its characters are well-known and well-loved by people all over the world. Moreover, for Minnesota audiences, the creator of these characters, Charles Schulz, was born and raised across the Mississippi River in Saint Paul and gave life to them from an imagination based in reality! The CHALLENGE was this:  Wayne would be directing TWO separate casts in TWO separate productions, one right after the other!

The first, or Mainstage, production would be staged in the smallest of Rarig’s venues, its 200-seat Kilburn arena setting, and would not be cut back in any way. The Mainstage show would open in late January of 1983 for a two-week run. The second production would be a truncated (by Wayne), 45-minute “Young Peoples University Theatre” (YPUT) offering, presented in Rarig’s largest venue, its 460-seat Stoll thrust theatre. The YPUT show brought elementary school students to Rarig Center during their regular school day by the tightly scheduled busload. Those performances were not open to the general public.

This first directing assignment at the University of Minnesota shed some light on another aspect of “the way things were”. Wayne cast the Mainstage show just as he always had:  the best talent got the part. That’s what he’d always done. But he had undergraduates tell him (away from rehearsals):  “Thank you so much for giving me this Mainstage opportunity. Typically only graduate students get roles in these shows…undergrads rarely get a chance to perform in Mainstage shows.” Brick number three.

You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown received positive writeups from on and off-campus media. Staff Writer Mike Steele in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune (then the Minneapolis daily newspaper) wrote:  “The University of Minnesota Theatre, under the direction of its newest faculty member, Wayne Hamilton, has taken the piece on and done a routinely nice job of it. Hamilton, like Schulz, shows some respect for kids and seldom falls into the trap of making them overly precious. Kids, let it be said, never think of other kids as ‘cute’ or ‘darling.’ Adults often do and that condescending attitude drowns a show like ‘Charlie Brown’ in a sea of smirks. Hamilton manages to meld the cast into a nice ensemble overall and the group as a whole is likeable, which wins half the battle.”

In the campus newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, Lisa A. Brock wrote:  “…Director Wayne Hamilton has put together an admirable production. What the show lacks in content he makes up for in tempo, color and razzle-dazzle showmanship. Each vignette slides swiftly into the next, never letting the audience’s attention lag. Moreover, Hamilton has a clear conception of Charles Schulz’s ironic, understated humor, and presents each scene with a careful shading of mood and tone. A basic, direct approach has made this production of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown a success. With Hamilton emphasizing the sharp, clean lines of Schulz’s humor without ever condescending to the material, this juvenile musical is given a very professional treatment.”

In addition to teaching undergraduate classes, teaching at the University of Minnesota also meant teaching graduate classes. That was understood from the beginning. Along with that came the responsibility of ADVISING both undergraduates and graduates. On top of that, graduate students had graduate PROJECTS, which faculty were expected to supervise and suggest improvements. Furthermore, as a NEW faculty member, Wayne was “made aware” that it would work in his favor to take on directing projects IN THE COMMUNITY!

To that end, while he was employed at the University of Minnesota, he directed additional plays and musicals for community theatres and other academic entities in the Twin Cities area, including:

The Sound of Music, by Rodgers and Hammerstein, for the Masquers Theatre Company in Forest Lake, Minnesota. This production auditioned in mid-May of 1983, and received extensive support from the entire community. The Chisago County Press in Lindstrom, Minnesota published an extensive article about Wayne in an article that put his entire theatre resume, complete with photograph, in their May 12 issue, designed to pump up excitement about the popular musical. The county high school in Forest Lake was the site of the production, and the show had an eight-performance run in late June and early July (June 22-25, 29 & 30, July 1 & 2). After the first week of performances, the same local newspaper ran a two-column article on June 30 with a half dozen pictures about how wonderful the show was, encouraging readers to “get their tickets” so they wouldn’t miss the remaining shows!

Chapter Two, by Neil Simon, at the new Phipps Center in Hudson, Wisconsin. Hudson was a small town on the banks of the St. Croix River with large, pretty houses and a busy, commercial “main street” with lots of bars and restaurants. Many of the large houses were built by executives of the 3M Corporation, who decided that residence in a quiet little town just ten miles from the headquarters campus of their large corporate campus might give them some privacy. Now, in 1983, city fathers had allocated the funds, assisted by a gift from the local and wealthy Phipps family, to build a modern “Phipps Center for the Arts”.

The new building housed a local children’s theatre, a community theatre, a dance school and an art school and gallery, It was in its final months of construction in the early summer of 1983 under the tutelage of the man who chaired the search committee that brought Wayne to the University of Minnesota:  Lee Adey. Lee, who was working with the Phipps during his sabbatical to establish appropriate systems and equipment for the new facility, invited Wayne to visit “the Phipps” and introduced him to the Phipps board of directors. They all spoke of community theatre there, and Wayne was invited to direct their next production, to be presented July 22-24 and July 29-31 of 1983.

And the pattern was repeated. The Hudson Star-Observer published an article that recounted Wayne’s directing experience, announced the audition dates for Chapter Two and cited his excitement about his upcoming work with the citizens of Hudson and surrounding communities. After the first weekend of performances, the Star-Observer’s theatre critic, Linda Bleskachek’s headline was “Chapter 2 Incredibly Good”. Her comments about Wayne read as follows:  “Wayne Hamilton is to be congratulated for a fine directing job. He has brought four complex personalities to life. With so few characters, it is a challenging job to find balance and believability. Wayne gives us two supporting players who have distinct comic personalities yet do not dominate the major characters. He gives us two major characters who dominate the action in spite of their quieter personalities. The balance is there and it is skillful. Special praise should be given for the handling of a play which has distinctly different moods in each act.”

Candida, by George Bernard Shaw, at Lakeshore Players in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. This was the opening show of the Lakeshore Players’ 1983-84 season, running September 9-11, 15-18 and 22-25 of 1983. The company had been founded in 1953 in an old wooden church they purchased and quickly converted to theatrical purposes. The six-character cast included, ironically, Wayne’s fellow directing faculty member at the U of M, Lee Adey, back from his sabbatical, which was a positive “get re-acquainted” experience! Candida was fun for Wayne, who had an opportunity to coach his entire cast in one or another British dialect. Marlys Oliver, editor of the White Bear Press local paper, wrote six terse paragraphs after viewing one of the performances of the first weekend. Overall, she called the show “a fine production”; she went on to say “In less skillful hands, this play could have been a disaster. Director Wayne Hamilton pulled the right strings in this case.” The caption of the picture below was more informative. It read, in part:  “This Bernard Shaw ‘Pleasant Play’ is a witty look at traditional marriage vows, and at men in their relationship with an emancipated woman. A pleasant comedy from the pen of one of the theater’s great playwrights…”

Craig Johnson as Marchbanks and Janice Hoffmeister as Candida

Fifth of July, by Lanford Wilson, at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Wayne was invited by Hamline’s Theatre department to conduct a workshop titled “What the director looks for when casting a play”. The workshop resulted in an invitation to direct the Wilson play, which Wayne happily accepted. It was not a musical. Rather, a group of friends who came of age in the sixties have a reunion in an old Missouri farmhouse, where their reminiscences reveal shattered hopes, buried resentments, lost dreams, and the unhealed trauma of the Vietnam War.

The second year of Wayne’s two-year contract with the University of Minnesota (the 83-84 academic year) gave Wayne a hint about where his future lay. The teaching part would be the same, working with both undergraduate and graduate classes and advising. This year also gave Wayne some additional input about what HE would like to direct, and he was not surprised when the added stipulation came:  “…as long as it’s a musical.” From day one, Wayne saw the hints that an aging, dance-oriented, very popular faculty member who was “Mr. Music Man” for the department was looking hard at retirement and Wayne was going to be the person to step into his Capezios.

Also from day one, Wayne had been impressed with the extensive technical capabilities of the department and its tech faculty members, all of whom were about his age. Perhaps it was because of their age similarity that they were a little social at first, inviting him to THEIR outings, mostly weekend pizza parties at favorite clubs or at each others’ homes. But along with those invitations were constant probing questions that Wayne felt uncomfortable responding to:  “Where do you want to be in five years?” “Do you plan to apply for a chance to direct at the Guthrie?” “How do you feel about tenure?” His avoidance of answering such question seemed to annoy his colleagues, but that was OK with Wayne. Couldn’t we talk about sports or hobbies or our kids? Apparently not.

It was OK because Wayne was growing more unhappy almost daily. He was still making about the same money as he had made at the Mount, and the expenses of living in Minneapolis were far higher than living in rural Maryland.

However, Wayne was not willing to quit yet. He took a risk that he questioned later, more than once. in his second year at Minnesota, he decided to ask if he could direct a musical he had directed just a few years ago:  Something’s Afoot. That was the most challenging technical project Wayne had ever undertaken, and he wanted to see how the advanced tech capabilities of THIS department would handle it. He did not do so to make the department look bad; rather, he hoped, even expected, that the department would conquer the challenge and have fun solving the tech problems the show would present.

MORE STORIES COMING SOON:

CREATING MUSIC, PERFORMING LIVE AND MAKING MONEY

MUSICAL THEATRE FAVORITES

Another of Wayne’s favorite projects was an experiment in the history of musical theatre. In 2010, he worked with friend and Cold Fusion (look it up) programmer Jim Moore to create a web site called First on Stage. The complete name of the project is “First on Stage:  A Collection of Historical Firsts in American Musical Theatre”. Wayne worked for several years as an actor and director in many musical theatre productions, and is a huge fan of the art form.

The beauty of this site is that it is database driven. When you arrive at the site, there is a blank search window at the top of the page. Visitors can enter actor names, theatre names, show names, composer names, show titles, song titles, anything related to musical theatre. If there is data about your “item of interest” on the site, you’ll be shown whatever is there.

As Wayne explains in the introduction of that site:

“Years ago, while teaching college courses in the History of American Musical Theatre, my research exposed numerous instances of innovation in the art form (“this was the first time…”) as theatrical technologies, along with musical styles and forms, evolved. I began to “collect” such phrases, which later included people, theatrical venues and other occasional oddities, into the collection and organized the data chronologically.

At this site, we focus on historical firsts. Innovation creates history, and this is a collection of innovative events, decisions and inventions. Among other things, the collection includes initial appearances of popular shows, songs and performers. Here, you’ll find descriptions of theatrical firsts in America from 1665 to 2000. Each “historical first” appears in bold type.

Generally, the New York opening is considered the finished form of any work (even if subsequent changes occur during the New York run). For the sake of maintaining some historical perspective, this site covers events through the 1999-2000 season.”

Here’s where you can read all about it:

http://firstonstage.com

Below is a list of every theatrical production Wayne has either acted in, composed for or directed during his career, not necessarily in alphabetical or chronological order:

Oklahoma! (3 productions) The Beggar’s Opera Chapter Two She Loves Me Ten Nights In A Bar-Room The Threepenny Opera Down In The Valley Naughty Marietta 1776 (2 productions) The Cowboy and The Widow My Fair Lady How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (2 productions) Carmen The Sound of Music Bye Bye Birdie Earnest in Love Disney Villains Musical Revue Celebration

Fiorello! Sunday Excursion The Vagabond King Man of La Mancha Il Tabarro Carousel You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown (2 productions) Something’s Afoot (2 productions) Once Upon A Mattress Little Mary Sunshine Guys & Dolls (2 productions) The New Moon Where’s Charley? Side By Side By Sondheim The Pearlfishers The Cowboy and the Widow The Fantasticks Cabaret

MAKING FRIENDS WITH THE PAST

From 2011 through 2017, Wayne served on the Board of Directors of St. Paul’s famous History Theatre. That organization worked with amateur and professional playwrights, actors and actresses to tell true stories about people and events in the upper Midwest, especially Minnesota and most especially in St. Paul. Wayne volunteered to serve as “host” to the Company’s founders, Lynn Lohr and Lance Belville, when the wife-husband team “came home” for the group’s 40th Anniversary celebration in 2017.

Lynn Lohr and Lance Belville
(photo by Daniel Axler of Indianapolis, IN)

To commemorate the event, Wayne constructed a web site about the early years of the organization, using resources from the Minnesota Historical Society, History Theatre’s archives and the University of Minnesota’s Performing Arts Library Collection. The link below will take you to the only web site celebrating those years that was sanctioned by Lynn and Lance.

historytheatre-first40.com

After their visit, Wayne’s friendship with the couple grew. Upon returning to California, Lance was inspired to write a play about a distant relative of his:  William Tecumseh Sherman (Lance’s middle name was Sherman; he was the General’s great-great nephew), the Union General in the Civil War who is famous for his “march to the sea” and the burning of Atlanta. He called the play Atlanta Burning, Sherman’s Shadows, which premiered at the Twin Cities’ annual Fringe Festival in 2018.

General William Tecumseh Sherman
1820-1891

There were two speaking parts in the play, the General and his Aide, but Lance added a third character, a Corporal, who 1) played guitar and sang a few of Sherman’s favorite songs as the audience was seated, and 2) carried messages on and off stage during the play’s dialog. However, the Corporal was not given a single line in the entire play. Guess who played the Corporal? Correct! Wayne Hamilton.

Lynn Lohr, Lance Belville and Wayne stayed in touch over the next few years. Wayne eventually sent the couple copies of each of his recordings, and when they returned to Saint Paul to visit old friends, Wayne was usually on the list of “newer” friends who were on their list to spend time with. One day, Lance called and told Wayne he was interested in using one of his songs in a play he was working on. Wayne wrote “I Wish I’d Met My Second Wife First” as a comic piece. But Lance asked him to re-write the second verse a little differently for use in a new play he was writing called Cowboy and Widow.

This was a play about a twenty-something cowboy who had an act with his trained American Bison. When money ran short, the Cowboy married an attractive and rich older woman and eventually inherited part of her fortune. Wayne had the privilege of working not only with Lance, but also with composer and gifted performer Eric Peltoniemi, who once led Red House Records here in Saint Paul.

Eric Peltoniemi

Eric and Wayne each contributed songs to Lance’s Cowboy and Widow, and both Eric and Wayne receive a royalty check whenever the play is performed (it has proved popular in California community theatres in recent years).

A SURPRISE ASSIST FROM ASCAP

One day in 2005, Wayne is working at his day gig when his cell phone rang. When he answered, the person on the other end of the line introduced herself as a “project lead” at TBWA Amsterdam. Having served in some American advertising agencies, Wayne knew that TBWA was one of the top five ad agencies in the world. Turns out TBWA wanted permission to use the title cut from Wayne’s initial 1999 release, Lucky That Way, in a TV commercial they were developing for the six State-owned Holland Casinos!

How could this stroke of luck happen from thousands of miles away? Back when radio was king, Wayne was associated with a worldwide list of radio deejays who aired acoustic folk music and kept in touch with one another on this fairly new entity called the INTERNET. As a result, he mailed dozens of copies of his first release to members of this list all over the world, and especially to Western Europe. His music was very popular on stations in Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, where many citizens spoke English. One of the TBWA’s employees had bought a copy of Wayne’s CD, played it for the creative team, and Wayne got the offer!

And it was exciting! Five grand for a year’s use of one tune! After a brief conversation, Wayne told them he would call back the next day after he’d had an opportunity to consult with his PRO (Performing Rights Organization). In Wayne’s case, this was the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, or ASCAP.

But Wayne had zero experience with synch contracts and needed some advice, so the next morning, he called ASCAP’s home office in Nashville. He explained his situation to the person who answered the phone. After listening politely, she told Wayne, “Just a moment. I’ll see if Ralph Murphy is available to speak with you. Please hold.”

Wayne couldn’t believe his ears. He was on the verge of a conversation with one of his songwriting heroes, the man who wrote Murphy’s Laws of Songwriting, a book that had a spot in his studio less than two feet from where he typically did his writing. Murphy was at that time VP of Membership at ASCAP. Suddenly a voice came on the line:  “Good morning. This is Ralph. Am I speaking to Wayne?”

For the next 40 minutes he talked with Wayne. He insisted Wayne tell him his story before he got around to talking about the synch contract. Ralph offered what sounded like good advice while Wayne furiously wrote down what Ralph said. Before they rang off, Ralph wished Wayne good luck and said, “Now don’t forget to call me back after you sign the papers. I wanna know how it all worked out, OK?”

Wayne called Ralph back a few days later and reported that the deal was successfully concluded with TBWA and that he was happy to have had the opportunity. They both laughed when he told Ralph that his only regret was that he didn’t have a similar deal in the works every month.

Below is a link to the commercial as it appeared on Dutch TV stations. The last line, spoken in Dutch, is:  “Holland Casinos advises its visitors NOT to rely on lucky numbers!”

Watch on YouTube

To Be Continued…