CLT celebrated its thirtieth birthday and its new home with high expectations. Congratulatory mail came from Ezra Stone, radio's Henry Aldrich, from Elmer Rice and Maxwell Anderson, from Maurice Evans, Fredric March, Florence Eldredge, Ethel Merman, Rosalind Russell, Brooks Atkinson, Arlene Francis, from Allentown's own Don Voorhees and Laurel Hurley, and from CLT's most distinguished show business alumnus, Clarence Egolf, whose name never became a household word, but who made a reputation in radio and TV as an NBC producer. Five years before, at the silver anniversary, Stone had been the principal guest. The keynote speech of that evening was titled, "The Future, Yipe!"

What the speaker meant was, "The business of prophecy, yipe!" The future, as it turned out, was not all roses, but it was far from uniformly grim. A little good, a little bad, a lot of routine and a few high spots - that's what the wise prophet probably said, and the odds, which were heavily in his favor, proved him right. The things that people remember about the theatre are the curiosities, the unexpected. They're the cream in the coffee, they're the salt in the stew. They're the little unidentified lumps in the greasepaint. A lot can happen in fifty years.

For instance, John Kohl remembered that A Christmas Carol had been played on a stage extended somewhat shakily by Fred McCready's father's garage doors, which Fred had nipped off with.

And that during the stint at the Fairgrounds, president Bessie Bortz walked around the building clanging a cowbell to round up stray patrons after intermission.

And since John wrote his history - well, how about 1973, when they rigged up a genuine working elevator for Company, only when they tried to use it, instead of the elevator going up the roof came down?

Or, if that one wasn't so funny, how about Bill Parks sleeping through the first act of Brigadoon on opening night in 1963, and director John Kichline filling in for him?

Still too near disaster? Then maybe Bernie Schimmel in Taming of the Shrew, in 1964, walking onstage with three enormous dogs on one leash - and after that walking wherever the dogs wanted to walk?

Or Ceil LeShay's classic performance as Tassel Tossin' Tessie Tura in Gypsy, in 1966?

Or the time in 1961 that someone noticed Dr. Hank Bridgers and Dr. Dick Schneer sitting backstage every night at Say, Darling, waiting for their cues to haul on those ropes, and CLT boasted that it employed the best educated curtain pullers in the world?

Or what must certainly be the greatest mixup of all, the 1969 Battle of Henry McClenahan's Beard, when Henry, who had always sported a moustache, began to grow a goatee for The Man Who Came to Dinner and was suspended from his position as a schoolteacher? The furor raged for days, with special school board meetings and indignant letters to the editor and, finally, a bit of an anticlimax when the decision was reversed and Henry kept right on teaching and growing hair at the same time.

Or when then theatre sent out fliers to its ticket holders, in 1962, for Bells Are Ringing, and the fliers had the wrong phone number on them, and the wrong bells were ringing somewhere in Allentown until the error was corrected and some innocent citizen didn't have to answer CLT's phone calls any more?

Once in a while something really sad happened, as when Betty Muir, who had been a CLT stalwart for years, finally earned her Actors Equity card in 1962 - and the first thing Equity did was deny her permission to play in CLT's Under the Yum-Yum Tree.

But the best are incidents were adversity turns to triumph. Remember Warren Burns, who played in two or three shows a season for a dozen years, and then decided, by George, that the theatre, not the Coca-Cola company, was where he wanted to spend the rest of his life. So he enrolled as a drama student at Cedar Crest, the college's first male student ever. And when he had accumulated enough undergraduate credits, off he went to Penn State for a graduate degree and a teaching career in theatre.

And Agnes Gackenbach, who starred in The Girls in 509 in 1961, when the opening was delayed two days by a blizzard. Then when we revived it in 1976 she took the same part and turned in one of the great performances in CLT history.

And, no doubt the most legendary moment in Lehigh Valley theatre, the 1958 production of Middle of the Night when a death in his family forced Joe Kowitz, the male lead, to leave the city on Sunday, and Tuesday night All "Jeff" Jefferis was playing the part onstage without a book. Bell Labs had rigged a hearing aid to a walkie-talkie, and Al repeated lines fed to him from backstage.

Daddy, Why Do You Go Where Those Plays Are?

So events pass before us, and people come and go, and it is only in retrospect that it seems extraordinary. CLT has every intention of remaining a permanent fixture in the Lehigh Valley. Perhaps some day the hundredth, the two hundredth anniversary program will be written. Meanwhile, it all is - or else it isn't. We know only a few absolute certainties.

One is that when the audience puts on its coats and goes out after the last performance of Promises, Promises - when the last audience ever puts on its coats and goes out after the last performance of the last amateur theatre on earth - there will remain in the auditorium a group of tired, irritable, happy people. They will be taking down the set, storing the furniture, putting the borrowed properties into the borrowers' cars (or rocket buggies or moosehide sledges or whatever) to be returned to the lenders in the morning, packing away the lights. And we know exactly what they will be saying to one another.

"What became of the brass knob on the bed?" they will be saying. "Didn't they use it in the second act in the fruit bowl?" "Don't ask me, I can't even find the fruit bowl, and the pineapple belongs to my little brother."

"There was a lady here tonight said that painting looks like hers." "Dunno. We borrowed it from somebody two years ago, and they never asked for it back."

"Doesn't anybody own this blue satin gown?"

When is this outfit gonna buy a real screwdriver?" (Note #8)

Hey! Gimme a hand with this - whew! - rope. Who took the counterweights off the teaser, anyway?" "Talk English, willya? What's missing?" "Are you done with that ladder?" "Do I look like I'm done with that ladder?"

How about in the first act when the phone rang two pages early?" "I told 'em away back at tech rehearsal that phone ring was wrong. What happened?" "Aw, somebody saw the wires weren't connected and decided to help out, so they - DON'T DROP IT!"

"My aunt has a better sideboard than that one she would have loaned us if we asked." "Well, this is no time to think of it. Does she have a Persian rug? We need a Persian rug for the next show." "Speaking of the next show, why can't we serve coffee and doughnuts instead of pretzels and soda?" "Don't start with coffee and doughnuts again." "I can't help it. I get heartburn."

Who's directing the next show?"

"Can I have about five of you to lift a piano onto a truck?"

"How many doors they using for the next show?"

"Are we gonna need the backdrop for the next show?"

"Platforms for next show?"

"Spotlights for next show?"

The next show, the next show. And then the last knife switch will be pulled and the last light will go out, and the end will have come. But nobody there, absolutely nobody there, will admit it.

That's theatre. CLT has given it to Allentown for fifty years. Here's to another fifty times fifty.

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