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.
The opening of the outdoor skating rink on the Greece Town Campus should bring back memories of the “good old days” to many of us who have lived in the area for a half century or more. Back then there were many opportunities for outdoor ice skating, including public schools, community parking lots and natural ponds.
Residents of Greece were frequent visitors, until 1991, to the Maplewood Park pond. In fact, the building near the pond that is now City offices was specifically built with ice skating in mind. The Ontario Beach Park parking lot was another favorite spot for us as were the nearby ponds along the lake. A January 4, 1948 Democrat & Chronicle article talked about the thousands that crowded area skating rinks.
In the 1940s and 50s Barnard and Britton schools, and I am sure other schools, were also sites of public ice skating and they were true community endeavors. The DPW would roll down the snow and bring in an old voting booth as a shelter. The local volunteer fire department would flood the field. (No plastic liner or safety bumpers back then.) When the snow needed to be cleared off the ice, plenty of shovels were available for anyone who wanted to help clear the snow. In 1948 a group of volunteers from the Greece Youth Foundation cleared four acres of land on Britton Rd near Forgham Road for a rink with water supplied from Fleming Creek. It was on private property but was used by anyone who came by.
By the 1960s, the Town converted the lighted tennis courts at Carter Park into an ice rink in the winter and in 1975 built a shelter large enough to provide a place to change skates.
We all had ice skates back then, whether you were a good skater or not. New skates were always a great Christmas gift. If not a Christmas gift there was always Cooks Hardware who did a thriving business in used and new skates along with sharpening skates.
As indoor rinks opened and times changed, outdoor ice skating seemed to disappear around the early 1990s, albeit for a few artificially cooled rinks around the County. Maybe it was the changing climate or other activities to keep us occupied, but it seems kids don’t own skates anymore. If the weather cooperates and more outdoor skating becomes available, things may change or maybe we just never will go back to the “good old days”.
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
By the mid-1880s a steam railroad was planned to run from Charlotte to Grand View Beach. This plan never went beyond being chartered and was soon abandoned. The electric trolleys that began to appear on the streets of large cities seemed a more practical solution for this short line, which would eventually be just over seven miles.
Book page excerpt
Trolley schedule 1909
The Grand View Beach Railroad was organized in 1891 and ran from Charlotte to Grand View Beach, which was not far west of the end of Long Pond Road. By 1895 the line was extended to Manitou Beach with a long trestle over Braddock Bay. Washouts and deterioration of the trestle caused the line to go into receivership in 1907 and a new company was formed in 1908. Improvements were made along the line including a new Braddock Bay trestle.
Child’s ticket
After the World War of 1917-18, the popularity of the automobile caused revenue to plummet. The Manitou trolley had never been a huge money maker and by 1924 it was apparent that it would have to suspend operation at the end of the season. The passenger service was not resumed in 1925 and finally, the entire line and rolling stock were offered for sale in August 1925.
Elm Heart Hotel stop
Manitou Trolley- west end
If you live along Beach Avenue or Edgemere Drive, the former route of the trolley can be hard to trace. But, an odd rail spike or strange jog in the road oftentimes reveals itself as part of that old Manitou line.
Photos, data supplied by Alan Mueller, Greece Historian’s Office.
If you have any information on our photos, call Alan at 663-1706.
That is just what families and couples might do in the summer of 1912. Sunday was the ideal time for an outing as the aver age work week was 5 and one-half days. The Rochester area was lucky to have Lake Ontario and Irondequoit Bay close at hand where they might travel for the cool breezes. Remember, it was before the days of inexpensive room fans or air conditioning. Between 1900 and 1924, Mr. J.D. Scott (a very resourceful entrepreneur) came up with a scheme he called “The Pink Ticket Trip”. He offered tickets from a small tent he would put up at the downtown four corners (Main and State). For a special 50-cent ticket (that’s $11.15 today) you boarded the Lake Avenue Trolley to Charlotte and Ontario Beach Park to see the sites there and perhaps have a ride on the circle swing or the “The Breezer” (Roller Coaster). You might have a photo taken at the outdoor tintype photographer with your “sweetie”, as it was an inexpensive and nice souvenir.
Lake & Bay Belt All Resort Ticket
Japanese Garden Ontario Beach Pk.
Then it’s off to board the J.D. Scott for a short lake trip to the dock at Sea Breeze. At the end of the dock is a small restaurant called “The Hawaiian Gardens”. A dance floor with automatic music provided by a Wurlitzer Orchestra Piano entertained the early afternoon crowd, Later on, a five-piece live orchestra was on hand to keep the dancers feet tapping to lively two steps, waltzes, and the Turkey-Trot! Then over the railroad tracks of the “Hojack Line” to Sea Breeze Park with a small coaster and a carousel built and run by the Long family of Philadelphia. The cotton candy is quite good as well as the fresh roasted peanuts.
Sea Breeze Park
Sea Breeze Pier, Lake Ontario
Pt. Pleasant Gasoline Launch
Down a path which leads to Irondequoit Bay, there’s a Naphtha or Gasoline Launch, waiting to take passengers down to the end of the Bay. Stops could be made at any of the numerous hotels along the west bank, such as Pt. Pleasant, Birds and Worms, the Newport House, etc. The final stop on the Bay was Glen Haven Park with its large hotel, beautiful grounds, and an amusement park on the south end. If lunch had not been had earlier, but brought along (which was often the case), this was the place to spend some time. A large stage with vaudeville acts always attracted large crowds.
Glen Haven & Irondequoit Bay
Boarding a Sodus Bay & Rochester Trolley for a trip back to the station on East Main Street, the car went through a num ber of lrondequoit’s wooded glens and over several streams. Gathering umbrellas, coats, ties, large ladies hats, and lunch baskets for the last time, you rode the West Main trolley back to Main and State Street and to transfer points at Clinton or St Paul Street. The trip could be made in reverse and the length of time at each stopover was only governed by the ticket holder. The only caution being, the final boats on the bay and lake stopped running around dusk.
Wouldn’t it be fun to take a trip back in time to enjoy the one-day excursion??? Remember, all electronic devices must be left at J.D. Scotts tent fore boarding the trolley……..
Photos, data supplied by Alan Mueller, Greece Historian’s Office.
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