Word: chautauquas
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Millions of U.S. small-towners remember the institution called Chautauqua, usually with affection. For over half a century it gave to the culture-curious and the culture-hungry a tent show of live entertainment that ranged from the Kaffir Boys' Choir to a course on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, from the measured comments of Viscount Bryce to the soaring platitudes of William Jennings Bryan. Carol Kennicott, the stifled and discontented heroine of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, went to Chautauqua in Gopher Prairie and "was impressed by the audience: the sallow women in skirts and blouses, eager...
Authors Victoria and Robert Case (brother & sister) are far from agreeing with Carol Kennicott that Chautauqua was "nothing but wind and chaff and heavy laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm." We Called It Culture recalls how cheap and tedious Chautauqua could be at its worst. It also insists that at its best it brought to provincial society a leaven of excitement, entertainment and intellectual stimulus...
Right Thinking for $6. The movement (it soon became that) was started in 1874 at Lake Chautauqua, N.Y. by John Vincent, a young New Jersey minister, and a businessman friend from Akron named Lewis Miller. By 1900, what had begun as an open air "Sunday School Teachers' Assembly" for 40 young people (two weeks of clean living and right thinking for $6) had expanded into an association that ran a school of theology, a correspondence-school university and a publishing house. To the "Mother Chautauqua" pavilion by the lake came U.S. Presidents, reformers, topnotch writers, singers, and actors...
...eared, sardonic lowan of 42, Harvard cum laude Author Duncan spent ten years on Gus the Great and was nearly broke much of the time. An itinerant writer, teacher and Chautauqua actor, he is the author of three previous novels, all poor sellers. He retired to a trailer to finish Gus the Great, wandering through the West and Southwest. When the money ran low, Duncan hacked out short stories on a 1924 Corona; his wife, Actea, took a secretarial job. The Duncans' first purchase with their new riches: a shiny new Chrysler convertible...
Died. Mina Miller Edison, 82, widow (second wife) of Thomas A. Edison; of a heart ailment; in Manhattan. She was a noted supporter of the G.O.P. (but not during Democratic son Charles Edison's successful campaign for governor of New Jersey), of the Chautauqua Institution (cofounder: her father, Lewis Miller), and of the temperance movement...