I recently saw online that The Evergreen Playhouse is getting ready to replace the seats in its theater. There aren’t many of us left who remember the history of those old seats that have served the theater well over the years. If you think they look shabby today, you should have seen them when they were first acquired from a Hoquiam movie theater back in the Sixties.
As I said, those seats were old. Really old. The frames were made of cast metal and the seats of tough leather, with most having rips and tears, giving evidence they’d likely been installed before the word “talkie” had been invented! But, they were cheap.
Why would anybody buy a truckload of seats and not have a place to use them? Actually, there was a place, for a short time, anyway. In the early days of the original Yard Birds, one of their first buildings was a war surplus Quonset hut. But they’d expanded to the point where it was no longer needed. The playhouse voted to buy it and the City of Centralia offered a location for it in Borst Park, near the present middle school.
Don’t laugh. St. Martin’s College was already presenting plays and musical performances in just such a dwelling. Frances and I attended at least one performance there. Acoustics in it were a bit strange, with echos bouncing back from the curved metal roof, but it was better than an open air facility. Anyway, the Quonset hut was purchased but the dismantling and transportation to the new site did so much damage it was unable to be used. Those recently acquired seats wound up being stored in a barn owned by Howard and Nelda Steowe on the Big Hanaford Road.
I’ve mentioned some of the history of those seats in a previous column or two and how they eventually fit into The Evergreen Playhouse but here is a bit more detail...perhaps more than you want to wade through so, if you’ll hold up your hand, you may be excused.
Depending on whose recollections we’re tapping into, some of the seats may have been removed for use when the playhouse was operating for a while, in a second floor room above Reda Hardware store. The Centralia College drama department also used it. While attending classes at the college I was in a play there, directed by Philip Wickstrom. When the building was torn down to make a parking lot, the seats went back to the barn and both drama departments started using a room in the college, now the meeting room for the college board of directors.
Eventually, in 1972, when Ann Caldwell was president of the playhouse and I had just joined the group, she convinced us to purchase the building which now sits on Center Street in Centralia. There was some apprehension among the group as to whether or not we could afford it. After all, $16,000 was a lot of money back then, but it included a large number of church pews that were soon auctioned off in the first of many annual CAFTA auctions. We were committed. The building was only barely adequate...rain or shine, the actors had to walk outside, through the alley to go from the dressing room to “backstage”. Need eventually overcame financial fears and we, having burned the first mortgage, obtained another loan to extend the building to the edge of the lot on the East side.
Since the stage was now going to be located on that east side of the building, instead of the south side, and the audience would surround it on three sides, the new seating arrangement meant that risers would have to be built, and that was done with huge amounts of volunteer talent and sacrifice. A gentleman, whose name slips away from the mind, sold us the carpeting at cost and donated all the labor to install it. After that, it was time to rescue those old movie seats from the Stoewe barn.
To be continued in next week’s column.
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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.
