Embedded Files
Melanie's Mission
Melanie's Mission
My project explores early membership of Weathervane Playhouse, looking at membership costs and mapping out members' addresses to see where they lived in and around Akron.
My initial questions were: who were the people that performed in and attended Weathervane performances? Was it an activity only enjoyed by Akron's "upper crust," or did the average Akronite partake as well? Was it only Akronites that were involved with Weathervane, or did others from the greater Akron community join as well?
Early Weathervane Membership
Early Weathervane Membership
Weathervane Community Playhouse was founded on the basis that the Playhouse should not deal with the constraints of a social club, such as the Women's City Club. The Women's City Club's little theater required all participants to be members of the Women's City Club. Therefore, membership for Weathervane was open to the public (Hall, 9).
To better understand some of the early Weathervane Playhouse members, I looked at three membership lists that can be found in the Weathervane Community Playhouse Records at the University of Akron's Archives and Special Collections, and mapped out the members' addresses listed.
Hall, L. F. (1971). A history of the Weathervane Community Playhouse 1935-1970. (Unpublished master’s thesis). Kent State University.
1935 Charter Members
Yellow = address still exists today
Blue= address is too vague, no longer exists, or a different structure
1937-1938 Active Members
Red = address still exists today
Purple = address is too vague, no longer exists, or a different structure
1946-1947 Sustaining Members
Orange = address still exists today
Brown = address is too vague, no longer exists, or a different structure
Charter Member
Charter Member
62 founding members
All but eight lived in Akron
About 35% of Charter Members lived in the Highland Square and West Hill neighborhoods, within one mile of the Marshall Avenue theater.
Active Member
Active Member
54 members on 1937-1938 list
$2.00/year
Equivalent to $43.71 today ("CPI Inflation Calculator")
Allowed you to vote in the organization, attend membership meetings, and participate in productions.
Active Members were the most spread out across Akron. About 35% of Active Members lived in the Highland Square and North Hill neighborhoods; however, other pockets of some members are found in Goodyear Heights, Downtown Akron, and Cuyahoga Falls.
Sustaining Member
Sustaining Member
70 members on 1946-1947 list
Minimum $15.00/year, preferred $25.00/year
$25.00 in 1946 is equivalent to $414.61 today ("CPI Inflation Calculator")
Voting privileges, mention in the playbills, and 20 tickets
About 77% of Sustaining Members lived in the Highland Square, West Akron, Northwest Akron, and Fairlawn Heights neighborhoods
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. CPI Inflation Calculator, https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm.
Blog Posts
Blog Posts
Conclusion
Weathervane Community Playhouse was community-oriented in that you didn't have to be a member of a social club to join. However, you did have to "pay to play" in order to participate in a production. Weathervane membership was a bit costly, especially in the early years as the country was still recovering from the Great Depression, so those particularly interested in theater were most likely to join.
Looking at the Charter Members list, many of the names are unfamiliar, which leads me to believe that many of the Charter Members were everyday people who had a passion for theater. In fact, the four founders (Grace Hower Crawford, Laurine Schwan, Helen Troesch, and Muriel MacLachlan) enlisted the help of Paul Strough, Willard Seiberling, Wilbur Pearce, and Burton Garlinghouse, members of the inactive Civic Drama Association, to start (Hall, 10). Their names are all listed on the Charter Members list.
By the mid 1940s, some of Akron's biggest names, such as Firestone, Knight, and Polsky to name a few, were supporting the theater as Sustaining Members.
Further Research
Further Research
There are many avenues of research that could be taken with Weathervane membership. My project has only looked at membership for the first 10-15 years of Weathervane's history, but there is an additional 70+ years of membership that could be studied, looking at trends of where people lived and if they were repeat members. I would also like to further research the individuals from the three membership lists I looked at.
Toward the end of my second visit to the archives, I found myself looking at meeting minutes. Digitizing and creating metadata for the meeting minutes would be a valuable project for learning more about the organization.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse