This week we look at the Greece Performing Arts Society.
Before GPAS formed in 1969
Paddy Hill Players annual banquet at the Rochester Yacht Club, 1943, from the Office of the Town Historian
Between 1930 and 1950, people in the town of Greece had many opportunities to join in performing arts centered activities. Amateur theatrics were popular; not only was there the Paddy Hill Players troupe, but a number of churches, including St. John the Evangelist Church and Bethany Presbyterian Church staged annual plays.
By 1960 whereas students could join drama club or the school chorus or band, the opportunities for adults were fewer.
Hoover Drive School Band, 1959, from the Office of the Town Historian
1969 – the Greece Performing Arts Society was formed
So, in 1969, the Greece Performing Arts Society was formed for just that purpose—as an outlet for adults who didn’t want to give up performing just because they were no longer in school. GPAS became the “umbrella organization to pull together and coordinate all the various community performing organizations.”
Initially there were four groups, the Community Orchestra, the Symphony Orchestra, the Choral Society, and a Summer theatre group. That first performance year, 1970-71, 165 people were in the various groups; they performed 20 concerts with an estimated total audience of 5,400 people.
Greece Choral Society, circa 1971, courtesy of Patricia Conklin
Greece Chorus and Orchestra practicing at Carnegie Hall, courtesy of Patricia Conklin
GPAS was born from the adult continuing ed experience of Robert Holtz who founded the community orchestra. Dr. David Felter founded the Symphony Orchestra.
Greece Chorus, with Ralph Zecchino and his wife Sandra, accompanist, standing before the choral society, courtesy of Patricia Conklin
Ralph Zecchino founded the choral society and was its director for 44 years from 1970-2014.
Rehearsing for Nunsense, Greece Post, August 24,1992
Over the years, the theatre group usually presented two musicals a summer with a mystery or comedy play or two until 2013. Now GPAS co-sponsors a student summer production.
In 1992 Greece Performing Arts Society put on Nunsense which was an off-Broadway Production that ran for 35 weeks in 1985 and it is a musical comedy with a book, music, and lyrics by Dan Goggin, who is an American writer, composer, and lyricist. The musical Nunsense is a hilarious spoof about the misadventures of five nuns trying to manage a fundraiser. Sadly, the rest of the sisterhood died from botulism after eating vichyssoise prepared by Sister Julia Child of God. It was based on Dan’s early life experiences, including schooling by the Marywood Dominican Sisters. The musical of Nunsense did have six sequels but Greece Performing Arts Society only put on the original Nunsense the musical.
The society had a regular schedule of annual events, such as
2017 Schedule of concerts
Some of Different Concerts GPAS puts on
2009 – The Christmas concert Program
Christmas Concert
Winter Blahs program
Winter Blah Concert
Front of 2018 Spring concert program
The spring concert
Concert at Ontario Beach Park, 1999, courtesy of Patricia Conklin
Concerts at the Shore
Supervisor’s concert, 2000s courtesy of Patricia Conklin
And the Supervisor’s Concert.
Concert at Our Mother of Sorrows Church, circa 1979, courtesy of Patricia Conklin
And they were there for special occasions such as: The 150th anniversary of the founding of Our Mother of Sorrows Church
Front of 9/11 program, 2001
And a solemn ceremony for healing after September 11, 2001.
Front RPO Pops program, 2019
They regularly perform at the Eastman theatre.
Chorus on the steps of cathedral, 1994, courtesy of Patricia Conklin
A highlight in the history of the Choral Society was performing in France for the 50th anniversary of the D-day invasion at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Broadside for D-Day concert, July 1994
Garden tour courtesy of Patricia Conklin
Many Greece residents looked forward every summer between 1997 and 2016 to the GPAS annual garden tour fundraiser.
Today, GPAS is composed of three groups, the community orchestra, choral society, and concert band. As they have for more than 50 years, the Greece Performing Arts Society continues to offer musical enrichment to the Greece community.
Learn More about Greece Performing Arts Society and it history starting with The Prelude written by Bill Coons at www.greeceperformingarts.org/i-the-prelude. If you have any General Questions about GPAS then email them at info@greeceperfomingarts.org. Interested in becoming a member of GPAS then check out their membership page https://www.greeceperformingarts.org/membership. You can subscribe to their monthly newsletter to stay up to date on upcoming concerts, events and more. The Greece Concert Band, Choral Society, and Community Orchestra are pleased to be rehearsing at 75 Stutson Street.
Kay Pollok’s interview with Bud Steeb when Kay was Vice President, of the Historical Society of Greece September 25, 1972.
This interview with Bud tells the story of the Fetzner Knipper Fire Wagon:
Kay: Bud, how and where did you acquire this fire wagon?
Bud: I first became aware of the existence of this antique piece of fire equipment at a garage sale in Rochester in April, 1970. The owner, Mr. Henry Griffin of Paddy Hill Drive, Greece, took me to the nearby residence of his father-in-law where it was stored in the garage along with a hose reel which was used to carry additional hose. This is a picture of the equipment taken when it was owned by Mr. Griffin. Both vehicles were lettered for the Greece Ridge Fire Department Greece Ridge had them on display in the old firehouse and had lettered them for their company. When the old firehouse was torn down to make way for the new one, this equipment was returned to Mr. Ray Fetzner who was the real owner. This is a picture of the equipment as it was stored in the basement of Ray Fetzner’s garage. Actually, the units were never owned or used by Greece Ridge, as it was always privately owned. Mr. Griffin said that he understood this was the first wheeled fire equipment in the Town of Greece and that he wanted to dispose of it to a museum or a collector, and that he had owned it for a very short while I was afraid that it might be purchased by someone out of the Rochester/Greece area and immediately began to negotiate for its purchase. Mr. Griffin and I reached an agreement and it was acquired by me on April 21, 1970.
Kay: How did you learn the history since the man had only owned it a short time?
Bud: At the time of purchase Mr. Griffin disclosed that he had purchased it from Ray Fetzner, prior to the time Fetzner’s garage on Ridge Road was razed to make room for the expansion of the Greece Towne Mall. I knew Mr. Fetzner slightly and through various talks with him, I was able to put together a history of the fire wagon, which at this time was not complete and is subject to future additions. Ray Fetzner’s story is as follows: During the 1870s and into the 1900s Ray’s father and uncle operated the JMF Fetzner Carriage Manufatury which included blacksmithing and painting. This is a picture of the Fetzner business as it existed in the 1870s.
This business was conducted in two wooden buildings connected by a third structure also of wood construction. A photo of this business exists in the Greece Historical Society archives through the courtesy of Mr. Fetzner Adjacent to the Fetzner family business and a short distance to the west was Peter Knipper’s Hotel, which was later operated by his son-in-law, William Buckert, and known as Buckert’s Hotel. Sometime in the 1890s a fire damaged a Fetzner property since there were no organized fire companies in Greece, the Fetzner and Knipper families decided, for their mutual protection, they had better seek a better way to combat any future fires than by the old and only method known then, the bucket brigade. The result was the purchase of a then modern and sophisticated for the time, piece of firefighting apparatus which is our subject of discussion.
Where it was purchased and exactly when and by whose foresightedness, it’s not known today. But in retrospect, it certainly must have been a wonderful addition to the Ridge Road scene in those happy and uncomplicated Victorian days. Ray Fetzner, who admits to being in his mid-seventies, states that it was housed in a small shed between the Fetzner and Knipper establishments as far back as he can remember. This picture shows the firehouse we referred to and believe it or not, that is Ray Fetzner holding the hose This was apparently a demonstration of the fire-fighting equipment. Mr. Peter Knipper, who was the first chief, stands under the street light and Ray Fetzner’s father stands in the doorway of the firehouse Ray, as a young man, helped to pull the equipment to fight fires. A picture of the firehouse and the Fetzner garage which Ray operated for so many years, is also on file in the Greece Historical Society archives. Again, through Mr. Fetzner’s kindness.
Kay: Bud, who were the builders of this equipment?
Bud: Well, whether the fire wagon was imported to the United States complete as it now exists, or whether only the pressure tanks were imported, is not known. On each of the two tanks, which are solid brass of riveted and brazed, construction, are two identification tags which are soldered on. One square embossed brass tag has the following description: “Fire extinguisher, F Carlier’s patent, U.S. Monnet and Company, Paris, France, 40 Rue Notre Dame, Pat. March 30, 1869”. The other tag is oval in shape and is embossed “Bate and Pinkham, pat. March 30, 1869”. They apparently were the importers.
The hose reel is obviously a carriage shop fabrication and very nicely done. Ray Fetzner is not sure who made it, but in all probability, it was made in the Fetzner Carriage Shop. This is a purely personal opinion based on my examination of several commercial and manufactured hose reels.
Kay: How was this equipment operated, and how was it moved to a fire?
Bud: Essentially, this equipment comes under the classification of a soda acid, pressure-operated, hand-drawn extinguisher. This picture shows the equipment hand-drawn in the 1972 Barnard Firemen’s parade. It operates on the same principle as an extinguisher still used, which hangs on a wall on a hook and is activated by tipping upside down. The tanks on the fire wagon, which are mounted vertically, employ a crusher to release a sulphuric acid which mixes with the soda water solution in the tank, thereby generating tremendous pressure. While I do not know exactly how the equipment was handled, I assume that the tanks were charged with a soda water solution, and a two-quart bottle of acid was placed in the crusher which was incorporated in the pressure-type cap The crusher was a brass cage built on the bottom of the cap so that when the cap was screwed on tight against the heavy gasket by means of a 26-inch spanner, the bottle was inside the tank ready to be broken by the crusher which was screw-operated from the outside of the cap. A seat placed between the tanks was occupied by a fireman with his feet placed on stirrups at the bottom level of the tanks, who on the way to the fire operated the crusher handle so that on arrival at the fire, the front tank was pressurized When the front tank was exhausted, the rear tank was used while the front tank was recharged This was accomplished by a system of valves and piping known as a Siamese manifold.
Kay: Bud, what are the physical characteristics of a fire wagon?
Bud: Well, the length is seven-foot-three, the draw-bar length is six-foot-six, with a quick detachable rig on it. The overall length of the wagon is 13 feet nine inches. The width is five foot eight, the height is five foot five. The estimated weight is 1,500 pounds. The tanks are 18 inches in diameter by 35 inches high of brass plate, tapered at the top like a thermos bottle. The front wheels are 38 inches in diameter. The rear wheels are 43 inches in diameter with brass hub caps and iron tires. The front toolbox has compartments for eight bottles of acid. The rear toolbox holds 50 feet of high-pressure hose and nozzles, a fire axe, a pinch bar, a spanner wrench for tank caps, wagon jacks, wrenches, etc. Other equipment consists of two kerosene fire department lanterns on brackets, two 100-pound pressure gauges (one on each tank) test petcocks, Siamese manifold with necessary valves, four coated fabric fire buckets, a leather embossed belt “alert hose #1” and a white chief’s helmet with a hand-painted tablet showing side arm hand pumper with initials PK which stands for Peter Knipper who was the first chief of this fire company. The hose reel is four foot six inches long with a draw-bar four foot four inches long, giving an overall length of eight foot ten inches. It is 48 inches wide and the wheels are 49 inches in diameter. It carries an eight-inch wooden drum with eight 18-inch winding handles on each side of the drum.
Kay: This equipment is now the property of Mr. Bud Steeb, who feels these historical items should not leave this area, but should always be associated with the Greece Historical Society. Thank you, Bud, for a job very well done.
(Bud Steeb sold this fire wagon to the Greece Historical Society for $1,500 in 1979.)
Unit of Service: Company A, 347th Infantry Regiment, 87th Infantry Division, 3rd Army
Location of Service:
Highest Rank: Staff Sergeant
Dates of Service: 1943-1946
Entrance into Service: Enlisted
Military Status: Veteran
Service History Note: The veteran served as a front-line gunner in Patton’s Third Army and was one of a small number of survivors from his original company.
John Foy grew up in Charlotte, the fifth of six sons born to Mr. and Mrs. Charles E. Foy and one of ten children. He attended Holy Cross School and graduated from Charlotte High School in June 1943. He was preceded into the service by three of his brothers. He enlisted in the army’s ASTP program at the age of seventeen in August 1943 and he chose to go to Cornell University, “because it was closest to home. I’d never been away from home before. We were supposed to go there for two years and after two years get a degree in engineering and then get a commission in the Army Engineers.”
Charlotte High photo by John Cranch
“But the Army in its wisdom decided after six months to close the whole program down. They decided they needed infantrymen instead of engineers. That’s something that always bothered me. All these guys—there were some 300,000 of them all across the country–and these college guys with extremely high IQs and almost all of them got sent as infantrymen right into the front lines. I had hundreds of them drop alongside of me. I often wonder what our country would be like today if we didn’t lose all those scientists, engineers, doctors, even politicians. Who knows what our country could have been. But they all got killed. I went over with about 200 hundred men in my infantry company; I was a machine gunner in an infantry line company. Of the two hundred that left only about a dozen of us came back. The rest of them are buried over in France and Germany.”
Queen Elizabeth
After his basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, Jack was assigned to Company A, 347th Infantry Regiment, 87th infantry division. He went over to England on the Queen Elizabeth, “the biggest boat in service. I slept in the swimming pool, the first class swimming pool, of course; we were stacked eight high.”
“Near the end of November 1944, the army was up in the area of Metz, Nancy, France. That’s where we joined up with Patton’s Third Army. It was a very rude awakening; there were some naughty men shooting at us. It was an area the Germans had just been pushed from a few days before we got there and they knew where troops were likely to congregate and they were dropping artillery on us. We lost a lot of men even before they had a chance to fire their weapons.”
John “Jack” Foy, infantryman
Battle of the Bulge Monument at Ontario Beach Park
“It rained every day we were there. The mud got deeper and deeper. We were there until a couple of days before Christmas 1944. We got alerted that we were going to move. That was the start of the Battle of the Bulge, which was in Belgium about a hundred miles north of us. We didn’t know anything about it really. All the infantry knows about the war is what goes on a hundred feet from his foxhole. Everything else was just a big blur he didn’t know anything about.”
“In the Bulge, it was 10 degrees below zero and sometimes even colder than that. It was down below zero for two weeks. We were out in the cold and we had normal fall clothing on—we didn’t have winter clothes. You had to keep moving all the time or you’d freeze. We lost a tremendous amount of men from frozen feet and frozen hands. It was awful. It was the worst weather they’d had in Belgium in over a hundred years.”
White Christmas Written by Irving Berlin Performed by Bing Crosby Produced by Decca Labels Year: 1942
“They pulled us out; our company was the last one to leave and I was the last one of my company out. The engineers had primed a bridge with explosives and I got there and just pulled the lever down and Boom! The bridge goes up. Right next to the plunger I saw a regular army radio lying there. Usually those were locked on to a certain frequency for talk between guys in the same company. I picked it up and this one was tuned to the BBC in London. This was Christmas Eve, maybe six o’clock at night. It was completely dark there. Bing Crosby was singing White Christmas from London. Somebody had changed the frequency. It was a beautiful song right in the middle of such horror and misery.”
“I had a Jeep at that time, as a machine gunner, to carry my gun and ammunition. We headed north going through Reims. By that time it was about one o’clock in the morning. At the huge cathedral in Reims, midnight mass was just letting out and the people were streaming out of church and we were roaring down the street in front of them with the engines wide open on the way to the Bulge. It just seemed so strange that here they were celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace and we were on our way to kill. And that’s what we did.”
“We were on the west side of Bastogne. The Germans were trying to close the road off. It was our job to stop them. We ran right into the German Panzer Light air division which was one of their top divisions. We were still greenhorns more or less, but we stopped them. We pushed them back. We were there fighting them in pretty much the same location for about two weeks. We’d push them back and they’d push us back. Go back and forth. We were there from Christmas day until the middle of January. ”
“They pulled us out and sent us to Luxemburg. It was another country, but it was only about a hundred miles away. It was supposed to be a quiet section where we could kind of rest, recuperate, and build up again but it didn’t turn out that way. The Sauer River was between us and the Germans. Every night we’d go across the river in rubber boats and stir up trouble.”
The regiment was sent back into Belgium to Saint Vith to try to break through the Siegfried Line. The Germans had built a series of thirty-square feet forts. “They covered each other so you couldn’t sneak up on one without the guy next door seeing you. The idea was we’d have to put everything in to breaking into one of them and work our way down the line. It worked fairly well. I had a blow torch I picked up some place. It worked with gasoline. I used to carry it with me on a rope on my belt to heat coffee or a can of beans. I thought, ‘this ought to work on these pillboxes.’ We snuck up real close to one of them. I pumped the blow torch up with as much pressure as I could and we squirted a stream of gasoline through an air vent. It’d only hold a pint a gas and when I figured the pint was just about gone, I told the guy I was with, ‘Okay, light it.’ He sticks the match underneath the stream and it travels right up into the pillbox. I thought there would be a big explosion, but there wasn’t. There was a dull thud. But then heavy black smoke came pouring out and the Germans came pouring out, too. We took quite a few pillboxes using that.”
The U.S. Army finally broke through the Siegfried Line and in early March they were in the Rhineland. “It was picture postcard country with a castle on top of the hill and a moat. Sometimes we’d attack a castle of all things. It was like we were the knights of old charging across the drawbridge to an old castle. We captured four or five castles like that.”
“We came to a little town, Rhens-on-the-Rhine; it was built by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago. That was where we crossed the Rhine River and it was pure horror. The darn Germans had 20mm anti-aircraft guns right on the bank of the river. They knew we were coming sooner or later. I was supposed to be in the second assault wave. The first company went across with just paddles in these small boats and the idea was to get to the other side without being discovered. Some German shot up a flare when they were about halfway across and they opened fire and had quite a battle going.”
Maus Castle
“They had an engineering company that was with us. We had more boats than we had engineers to run them. A call went out: ‘Anybody know how to run these damn boats?’ Well, I had fooled with boats down here on the [Genesee] River since I was five years old. So I was pretty good handling boats. They had these big engines, 32HP Johnson engines, on the back of these small barges. So I just ran down and jumped in one of boats there, pulled the cord, started the engine up; ‘Okay, jump in!’ It would hold only about twelve to sixteen guys. They jumped in and across the river we’d go. I ended up running the darn boat for half the night. I got sunk once or twice, I’m not sure; well at least once I got sunk. The shell hit the boat and blew the bow off it and it went down. But I was able to climb back in. I was more valuable running the boats than I was fighting on the shores, so I went back, got on another boat that wasn’t being used.”
“Things started opening up a little bit. The weather was getting better so our Air Force could get in and strafe the German army. We were moving kind of fast and we’d come up to all these little villages. The German army had almost disappeared. In front of these towns they’d leave a bunch of old men, who were usually soldiers from the First World War, and young kids, which were fourteen or fifteen years old. The Hitler youth. As soon as we came around the corner, the old guys would give up right away. But the young kids, all they knew was this Hitler garbage, stuff they had been fed since they were babies. And they wanted to fight. And they did fight. Quite frankly, they were good fighters because they were in well entrenched positions and their firing was just as deadly as an experienced soldier. At first you felt funny; you felt like you were shooting your kid brother, but after a couple of our guys got shot by them, we stopped showing mercy and we took them out, which we had to do.”
“In April, we discovered our first concentration camp, one called Ohrdruf. I find it hard to describe. You could smell it coming down the road. ‘What the hell is that?’ We got up to a fence and there were all these people wearing—striped pajamas, I guess, is the best way to describe it—and they were just skin and bones. It really awakened us to the Germans. Right away we called back to our regimental headquarters and the Colonel, the regimental commander, came up and he saw it and he called back and before the day is done, General Patton himself was there and he saw it. The next day Eisenhower was there and I think Churchill from England came to see. He couldn’t believe it. I saw General Patton walk behind a shed and just puke his guts out, it just made him so sick. There’s a tough old geezer, but he did. We started moving again and twenty miles down the road we ran into Buchenwald Concentration Camp.”
John’s unit moved into Czechoslovakia at the beginning of May 1945. “We were collecting thousands and thousands of Germans every day. They came in to surrender; of course they wanted to surrender to us rather than the Russians. They knew what the Russians would do to them because they had done the same thing to the Russians when they took over their country. We went out on a patrol—there were 20 of us, I think, in the patrol. We went into a little town that was filled with Germans and we just drove a Jeep and a couple of trucks right on down to this big building that was the headquarters, evidently. We went in and there was a German general, a lieutenant general, the equivalent rank of General Patton. He surrendered to us. Here there are 20 of us and he surrendered about 50,000 people to us.”
John’s company was still in Czechoslovakia when the war ended on May 8. After a few weeks the company was assigned to go to Japan. They returned to the United States on the Navy ship, the West Point. His battalion had received a Presidential Unit Citation for their crossing of the Rhine River: “Our general was pretty proud of us. So he kicked all the officers out of the state rooms on the top deck of the ship and gave us the state rooms which were pretty nice coming back. We came back to New York and we were one of the first fighting divisions to come back. They had a big celebration in New York. They had big fireboats in the harbor when we came in. We all got 30 days leave to go home and recuperate for a little while and we’d have to report back at the end of thirty days to get ready to go to Japan. We weren’t too happy about that.”
“While we were home, that’s when they dropped the atom bombs. If they didn’t drop those bombs we would have easily lost a million men in the landings in Japan. I hate to think what would have happened. I know I wouldn’t be here. Because after the war they came out with the plans that they had already drawn up for the invasion, and our division was due to land halfway between Tokyo and Yokohama, right in Tokyo Bay. They expected 50% casualties in the landing party. That was just the landing party. I never would have made it.”
“My company went over to Germany with about 200 hundred men. When we came back there were 12 or 15 of the original company still left. They weren’t all killed—about 80 of the 200 were killed and the rest were badly wounded. I got hit three times, but not seriously; it was just grazing to my arm, my side and my leg. I got back to the aid station and the doctor sprinkled some sulfa powder on it, bandaged it up, and said ‘get your butt back up there.’”
“All the guys I had been close with had gotten killed and strangely enough you didn’t want to get to know the replacements. Say Joe Dokes next to you got killed and they sent up another guy, Pete Brown, to take his place. You didn’t really want to get to know Pete Brown because you knew chances are within three or four days he was going to be dead. When you’re in the line for a while, you knew how to stay alive, how to keep going, how to take advantage of the least bit of cover, and what to do when you heard the sounds of the shells coming. You knew what to do. These young kids didn’t know and they’d get killed. There was a sort of core of us of maybe 20 men in the company that had been there from the start; at the end there was only maybe a dozen left. But we kind of hung together and we were the ones that stayed alive.”
“People would ask me, ‘how did it feel when a guy you had served with for a year or so when he got killed right alongside of you?’ Your first feeling would be that you’re sorry Joe got killed; very selfishly you second feeling was ‘boy, am I glad it wasn’t me.’ You became very callused to death. I actually piled dead German soldiers up around my foxhole. I didn’t have any sandbags or anything and the ground was like a rock to try to dig, it was frozen solid. So we piled dead German soldiers up around us for protection. Sounds like a horrible thing to do, but we did. I look back now and wonder ‘How the hell could I have ever done such a thing? You did a lot of things you never thought you could. Conditions were so different then. You did what you had to do. I hate to think of it. I killed men. It’s hard to think of sometimes, but that’s the way it was. If we didn’t kill them, they would kill us.”
After a stint in the Navy during the Korean War, John returned to Charlotte where he had his own plumbing contract business. He and his wife raised four children. Today is lives right on the Greece-Charlotte border.
Other photos that are connected with John aka “Jack” Foy
John “Jack” D FoyReims Cathedral Light Show 2011-12Cambridge American Cemetery2012 German Castle Trip Rhine boat tour Maus Castle2012 German Castle Trip Rhine boat tour Maus CastleWestwallJack Foy With General Pattons GranddaugterBurg Lahneck
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