By BOB MARTIN
Eagle Times Staff
CLAREMONT, N.H. — Local actors and a “newspaper guy at heart” will be bringing to life a rivalry between a pair of newspapers in the 1950s, the Daily Eagle and the Valley News, and how their reporters went about getting the scoop.
Sometimes it takes multiple entities to work together to bring something special to the community, and on Thursday night this will be the case as presenter Stephen Taylor and actors from the Off Broad Street Players will be putting on a production at the West Claremont Center for Music and Arts for the public to enjoy for free.
“The Great Newspaper War of the Upper Valley” will he hosted by Taylor, who is a farmer, long-time public official and also a journalist now hailing from Meriden.
“I am a newspaper guy at heart,” he said. “There are two sides of every story. Everybody has an interesting story and there are a zillion that don’t get told. If you have the drive to get the story, that’s what I admire in good reporting.”
He will be sharing what are sure to be interesting accounts of the 1950s rivalry between the veteran newspaper, the Daily Eagle, and then-newcomer Valley News, according to event organizer Sharon Wood.
There will be a series of brief skits involved in the presentation, which will coincide with the newspaper coverage of major events that Taylor feels sparked the “war” between the two newspapers. Wood explained that one of the sponsors, the Claremont Historical Society, is also preparing an exhibit of newspapers from that time period, and the script being performed involves research from those archives.
“The Claremont Historical Society wrote the grant for the New Hampshire Humanities, and the Humanities grant will pay for our speaker, Steve Taylor,” Wood explained. “This is basically his program that he is offering.”
Wood explained that she has known Taylor for years and he wears all kinds of different hats, but one aspect that Wood was sure of is that he is an excellent speaker. She said in the spring, the Humanities Council was celebrating its 50th birthday in Hanover, and that he was the keynote speaker at the event. After he spoke, Wood asked if he’d like to come to Claremont and if he would be open to the idea that they add theatrics to his presentation, to which he accepted.
“He talks about newspaper history in the ‘50s, and I sat there fascinated and waiting for him to read a snippet from the articles he was referring to,” Wood said. “And he wasn’t. He didn’t read them, and he filled them with his own ad-lib and it was terrific. But I thought if we get our actors together, they can read some of these articles.”
One topic discussed is a political scandal of the late 1950s where former New Hampshire Gov. Sherman Adams was the chief of staff of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and resigned after it was found that he was accepting expensive gifts for political favors.
Another main topic of the performance will be the “great Grantham fire of ’53,” Wood explained. She said an interesting aspect is that the writers in that time period essentially had a whole script to go by in their material, between the firefighters, reporters or anyone on phone calls.
“They printed verbatim the conversation going on, so here they will be acting it out,” Wood explained. “We’ll have people portraying firefighters. We’ve also got a scene with three people sitting in their homes discussing the fire.”
Melissa Richmond, who is the executive director of the West Claremont Center for Music and the Arts, said that this is the first community collaboration hosted in the center since it opened on June 1. The performers from Off Broad Street Players have used the center to practice several times in the weeks leading up, and there are displays of newspaper articles posted throughout the room. They also will be utilizing some of the cozy furniture at the venue, giving it a living room kind of feel.
“This is a really exciting thing because it is a part of the vision of this place as a creative center,” Richmond said. “To have creative groups beyond just us as a presenting organization, to have the space be enlivened with the creativity of especially arts and humanities, and the community in general.”
The program is funded in part by a grant from New Hampshire Humanities, and is jointly sponsored by the Claremont NH Historical Society, Off Broad Street Players, the Friends of the Fiske Free Library and West Claremont Center for Music and the Arts.
“A collaborative program like this is bringing together these three groups,” she said. “Being a sponsored Humanities program, I think that’s a beautiful example of the vision for community building through Humanities and Arts.”
She added, “To have beautiful community spaces we really have to use them and fund them together. It’s nice to work with a group that understands that and are happy to be a part of making the center a viable space for the community.”
The event takes place on Thursday, Nov. 14 at 7 p.m. at the West Claremont Center for Music and Arts. It is free to the public, although donations are always accepted. For more information call the library at 603-543-2017.
