John Stefano
This interview with John Stefano was conducted by Cheryl Jacobs for the Columbus Jewish Historical Society’s Oral History Project on November 2, 2021 in Bexley, Ohio.
Interviewer: And here we go. Can you state your full name and spell it for me?
John: John, J-o-h-n, Peter, P-e-t-e-r, Stefano, S-t-e-f-a-n-o.
Interviewer: Very good. You passed.
John: But, my dad would [?], my mother, too.
Interviewer: Do you have a Hebrew name?
John: Yonatan.
Interviewer: Okay. Tell me about your early life. Where did you grow up and go to school, etcetera?
John: All that jazz.
Interviewer: Yes.
John: I was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, a very fancy suburb but my parents were living in, in an apartment. My dad was working for a company called Kellett Aircraft, which was one of the first helicopter manufacturing companies in the country. He had grown up on the North Shore of Long Island, in Sea Cliff. His parents were illiterate Italian immigrants who immigrated here in the first part of the 20th century, never learned to read or write. My dad was the oldest of six kids, born in 1912, the only one to ever go to college. He won a scholarship to Rensselaer Polytech but couldn’t afford it and so ended up going to Cooper Union in New York City, which I think you know…
John: …a school founded by Peter Cooper in the 1850’s, good Dutchman based on all of his real estate holdings, but anyway they offered free education to kids at the time, in 1939, and my dad graduated second in his class…
Interviewer: Oh, wow.
John: …[?] went to work for IBM. I’m giving you all this…
Interviewer: No, no, no, no, no. I get it. I appreciate it.
John: Went to work for IBM, one of only two people in his class of 1935 who got jobs. It was the middle of the Depression and then during the War he wanted to join the Navy. They wouldn’t let him. He had flat feet so he joined the War Department and was working in Rochester, New York, which was where my mother was from. She’d been born in New Jersey but her father had died when she was three and so her mother moved her to her father’s home town and she grew up there, went to high school and went to the University of Rochester, graduated in ’39, I think, and met my father early in the War. They married in ’44. I was born in ’46. After the War was over, he took, he had taught himself how to design helicopters. There was no school for that and he read the books, blah, blah, blah…
Interviewer: No internet either.
John: …and interestingly enough, all the early helicopter companies were in Pennsylvania andthe Sikorsky and Kellett, Piasecki, all these great Russians and then three years later, I was born in 1946, and three years later, Howard Hughes in Los Angeles, had his own aircraft company, decided he wanted to get into helicopters so he essentially brought my father and a whole bunch of others from Kellett and they all moved to California in 1949 and called themselves the New 49ers and he became the first Chief of Helicopter Engineering.
Interviewer: For Howard Hughes.
John: Yes.
Interviewer: Wow. Did he know Howard Hughes and was he as crazy as we all heard he was?
John: I actually have a, he didn’t spend a lot of time with him but there is, there is some film of Howard shaking my dad’s hands…
Interviewer: Oh, cool.
John: …hand at the unveiling of the new helicopter that my father designed
[extraneous conversation]
John: I understand. For a long time, my father was the only one who’d moved away from the family.
Interviewer: Really?
John: Yeah.
Interviewer: So, when your grandparents came, did they come through a certain port?
John: They came through Ellis Island.
Interviewer: They came through Ellis Island.
John: They married in Italy and my grandfather came over first and worked for Con Edison out on the Island.
Interviewer: Oh wow.
John: Want to know what he was doing? Shoveling coal to power the power plant.
[extraneous conversation]
Interviewer: So, you answered a lot of these questions in one which is great. I guess you’re used to this.
John: Well, so anyway…
Interviewer: I’m sure you’ve done voice-overs and people have told you
John: I have not.
Interviewer: Oh, well, you have a great voice.
John: … but I’ve thought about it.
[extraneous conversation]
John: So, where was I? I basically grew up in Los Angeles. We moved back east briefly for a while and I lived out on Long Island. Then I lived in Hagerstown, Maryland, following my dad’s various jobs but then he moved back to California in ‘62 and I graduated from high school and went to Pomona College in Claremont, California, good liberal arts school, started out majoring in physics…
Interviewer: Wow.
John: Switched to theater my sophomore year. Actually, that’s a, it’s kind of an interesting story. I had taken a leave of absence ‘cause I got mononucleosis. In those days they told you you had to go to bed for six months.
Interviewer: Right.
John: Crazy. Now they don’t pay any attention to it. So, I had gone back east and spent some time with my uncles, got a letter from my draft board, this was 1965.
Interviewer: Bye-bye.
John: Luckily, I had a letter from my allergist specialist that I suffered from allergies so, I was labeled 1-Y instead of 4-F but, at least I wasn’t 1-A, and very quickly went back to school and got cast in a play…
Interviewer: Oh, wow.
John: …a musical and I’d sung in choirs from the time I was four years old. As a matter of fact, my earliest stage memory, if you will, is either first or second grade getting up in class and singing I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas, a capella, so, yeah, and I started studying voice when I was in high school, blah, blah, blah, but anyway I got cast in a Gilbert and Sullivan play.
Interviewer: Oh, wow.
John: I had a baritone role. It was, the role was Jack Point and the musical was, oh, Yeoman of the Guard, very obscure Gilbert and Sullivan musical. Anyway, the director of the play who was the head of the theater department told me afterwards, “Hey, you should think about coming and doing some work for us.” So, I was not doing all that well in physics. I actually liked physics but differential equations which is a branch of calculus I could not figure it out. I could not wrap my mind around it. My father didn’t understand that because he,
Interviewer: That was his…right.
John: …that was, you know, his brain just worked that way and he understood it.
Interviewer: My brain never worked that way.
John: Yeah, so, anyway, I agonized all summer about giving up science, blah, blah, blah and walked in to Andy Doe’s office in September and said “I think I want to be a theater major.” He looked at me and he said, and I’m going to put this on the tape and you can edit it, he said, “What took you so fucking long!?”
Interviewer: Was your family supportive of your decision?
John: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was not the easiest conversation I ever had with my dad but I remember telling him that this was something I wanted to do and his response was, “As long as you get professional training.”
Interviewer: Oh, that was good advice.
John: That was good advice. You know, I mean, you know, if I’d said I’m going to run off to New York and be an actor, I don’t think he’d have been quite so supportive.
[extraneous conversation]
Interviewer: So, you have, in addition to your work history, you have a very interesting history. Whereas you chose Judaism…
John: I did.
Interviewer: …in your life, can you tell me a little bit about how that came about?
John: Yeah, yeah, I think I can. I will tell you that when I was twelve years old, I had a friend. I was living in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Interviewer: You wanted a bar mitzvah.
John: No, I didn’t want a bar mitzvah, but I went to a bar mitzvah. Had a friend who as Jewish. Didn’t know anything about it. He invited me to his bar mitzvah and I remember going to it, in Hagerstown, Maryland, not a hotbed of Judaism, in western Maryland, and I remember listening to the cantor and I remember thinking, “I could do that.” I don’t know where that thought came from. “I could do that,” right? (inaudible) Then actually, while we were still living in Hagerstown, my mother…Let me back up a little. Let me give you some religious history, okay? My father, being a good Italian, was raised Catholic. My father, being a rational, college educated man in the 1930’s, became an atheist.
Interviewer: Ah.
John: He didn’t want any part of that, and it didn’t help that an Irish priest called him out in church when he was home from college. I’m talking about those college boys who don’t go to mass. My father walked out. That’s the story that my Aunt Terri told me. My mother was raised Presbyterian or Methodist. I think it depended which church her mother liked better…
Interviewer: Sure.
John: …which preacher my mother liked better at the time, but she, too, was a college educated woman in the 1930’s….
Interviewer: Which was very unusual then.
John: …which was unusual and, I don’t think people are, people in the Midwest I don’t think are all that aware of it, but what a college education meant in the 1930’s is that you probably were not going to be traditionally religious in any way, shape or form. The traditional religions and their leaders at the time were very anti-science.
Interviewer: Uh-uhm.
John: They were anti-intellectual. They thought…
Interviewer: women belonged in the kitchen…
John: …women belonged in the kitchen and they belonged in church and raising children and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and while my mother was not a proto-feminist, it was a little early for that, and she was a devout Democrat.
Interviewer: Good for her.
John: Good for her, admired FDR, loved Adlai Stevenson, stumped for him in ’52 and ‘56. I mean, she was an educated person, right? And so…
Interviewer: Sure. She probably wouldn’t have liked Trump that’s for sure.
John: I don’t even want to think about him. I think my father would have hated him as well. I would like to believe at least that he would have hated him as well.
Interviewer: He was a smart man.
John: My father was a smart man. Trump is not only evil he’s just…
Interviewer: …stupid, right. Anyway…
John: He is stupid. Anyway, so they were both college-educated, so, you know, we weren’t taken to church…
Interviewer: Sure.
John: …but my mother, being a smart woman, thought I needed some kind of religious education so, she sent me to the Unitarian Church to do Sunday School and I spent two years doing comparative religion…
Interviewer: Wow.
John: …and we studied Buddhism and Sikhism and Jansenism and Catholicism and Presbyterianism and Judaism and I remember being attracted to it at the time. Then, my junior year in college, I met Sally at Pomona. She had, you know, her parents were not very religious. Again, they were both college-educated and they weren’t as atheistic leaning as my dad was but Sally’s mother had sent her to religious school for a related reason.
Interviewer: You laugh.
John: Okay. My mother sent me to religious school ‘cause she wanted me to learn about all religions.
Interviewer: Right.
John: Sally’s mother sent her to Sunday School at a Protestant Church of some kind so that she would know Bible stories when she read Milton in college.
Interviewer: Talk about unusual backgrounds. You win. I mean, that’s wonderful.
John: So, Sally started out as a music major at Pomona and switched and became a religion major.
Interviewer: Really.
John: Yeah, Pomona, like a lot of liberal arts colleges founded by a church but in the 1960’s was non-sectarian as almost all of them are now…
Interviewer: Uh-uhm.
John: …with rare exceptions. So, it wasn’t that she was learning Christian doctrine but she wrote her senior thesis on Martin Buber…
Interviewer: Wow.
John: …and became very attracted to Judaism and then I went and did an MFA degree at the University of California, Riverside. We were still living in Claremont. She was teaching elementary school and I started work on my PhD at UCLA and then we got a job, got a job at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, wonderful BFA and MFA programs, one of the premier professional training programs in acting and theater and at the time and I was just a junior faculty member, but Sally, eventually got a job working in, wait for it, the Dallas Hebrew Day School.
Interviewer: This just gets more interesting. I’m shocked that you guys haven’t written a book or something together.
John: That’s an idea.
Interviewer: I mean, I think it would be a huge success.
John: Anyway, she, became then the head of English studies. You know, the rabbi was the principal of the school…
Interviewer: Right. Right. Right.
John: …and the rabbi was in charge of all the religious training which happened in the afternoon but…
Interviewer: …the secular…
John: …Sally was head of the secular studies in the morning…
Interviewer: Good for her.
John: …and, and while we were, actually, I think within our first month at SMU, we met some people who have been life-long friends, our longest friends, actually, and Dave Karp, K-a-r-p, was on the music faculty, was head of piano, still is. He’s retired now but still teaches piano at SMU, and his wife was Renee, and Sally and Renee became best friends and you know, we attended the kids’ bar and bat mitzvahs and their weddings and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so, Sally became more and more attracted to Judaism. We moved to, I took, after seven years at SMU, I took a job at Emporia State University at Emporia, Kansas.
Interviewer: Kansas.
John: William Allen White may mean something to you, I, no, not connecting.
Interviewer: No, sorry.
John: The Emporia Gazette. Emporia is in the center right of the state. It’s about halfway between Wichita which is in the south and Kansas City which is in the east, and I was teaching at Emporia State University which used to be Kansas State Normal. It was the Teachers’ college. It was founded in the 1960’s [transcriber’s note – I think he meant 1860’s] and Sally became one of the two principals of the university’s elementary school which was part of its education program and she was one of the two lead teachers and she was with teacher training other teachers and she kept doing that the rest of her career wherever we went. And there was no Jewish community to speak of in Emporia, Kansas.
Interviewer: No.
John: There’s a very funny story about a guy who was a visiting professor, guy from the east coast who had come out to direct a show and I think was in Emporia for a semester or something and he walked in to the only department store down on Main Street. Emporia was a small town, you know, 20,000 at the time. I don’t think it’s even much bigger now, but anyway, he walked in to Harry Rohvogel’s Department Store and said, “Where is the Jewish community?” and Harry looked at Gil and said…
Interviewer: ‘You’re looking at it.’
John: …“You’re standing in it!”
Interviewer: Wow.
John: So, not much could happen there. Then we moved in 1989 I took Jonda’s Chair at Illinois State University which is in Bloomington, Illinois. Actually, it’s in Normal, Illinois. They’re twin cities, Normal and Bloomington, and there was a Jewish community in that town, and Sally talked to the rabbi about converting and he wouldn’t do it.
Interviewer: Hunh.
John: He was, I don’t know whether, she would correct me, I don’t know whether he was Reform or Conservative. If he was Reform…
Interviewer: …Reform, he probably would have done it.
John: …that’s…he had Conservative leanings and he just wouldn’t do it unless she went through three years and unless the entire family agreed because blah, blah, blah…
Interviewer: Right.
John: …but by this time, I mean, Sally essentially was a functioning Jew. I mean, we celebrated the holidays. We stopped celebrating Christmas and, you know, we’re not Orthodox. We never kept kosher, you know, but…
Interviewer: …right, but you lived a Jewish life…
John: We lived a Jewish life.
Interviewer: …and it was important to you.
John: …and it was important, and then in 1992, I came to Columbus as the Chair at Otterbein and we immediately, once we found our house which is in Worthington Hills, we found Beth Tikvah and found Gary Huber and Gary agreed to convert Sally in the evenings. I did not convert for another five years, I think.
Interviewer: Oh really?
John: Yeah, not at the time but then I did.
Interviewer: I used to work with Marsha Huber a million years ago.
John: Oh, yeah.
Interviewer: …at Bank One.
John: Yeah. Marsha and I sing together in Ben Gelber’s group all the time and she’s, I mean, they’re really good friends.
Interviewer: They’re very nice people.
John: They’re really nice people. So, you know, part of it was that, I mean, we really had a Jewish family by that time.
Interviewer: Do you have children?
John: Yeah, I have two boys. David is 41 and Andrew is 39. David converted when he was 14 or 15, I think, went through the process, and I think Sally having converted and David having converted…
Interviewer: It made you…
John: …it made me say, “Okay, it’s time,” and I think Sally was thinking it was time. And the other thing was that I’d been singing with the choir for five years by then and we had, we had a musical director at the time who was our cantorial soloist, [transcriber note – musical director was separate from cantorial soloist] a good guy but, you know, he was a good Presbyterian. That’s who we had, right? And, oh, the other thing is that, no, we also had a cantorial soloist, Maddy Rivera who was…
Interviewer: I remember her.
John: …Maddy, who was Jewish, wonderful voice, trained operatic soprano, and I think, I don’t remember the sequence of all the events but, I think part of it is that Maddy had said she didn’t want to do this anymore and I thought, thinking back to what I’d thought when I was 12, I could do this,
Interviewer: Sure.
John: …but I couldn’t do it if I wasn’t a Jew.
Interviewer: Although, Temple Israel…
John: Yeah. I know.
Interviewer: Yeah, I know Tom for a long time. Yeah. So, the fact that not only does Judaism play a part in your regular life, being a cantorial soloist is a very impressive thing to do and you have to learn a lot in order to be successful and do a good job, so how does that come in to play with the rest of your life?
John: With the rest of my life. It, it quickly became the place where I could, where my performer’s soul could express itself.
Interviewer: Did you ever get into local theater while you were here or you didn’t have time being the Chair?
John: Well, being the Chair, I was primarily a director. I did do, I did do two roles when I was at Otterbein. I did John Adams in 1776. Did that in 1997, but I was very relu…although other members of my faculty played roles on stage, I was very reluctant to do it. We brought the kids into this program with the promise that they would get to play these big roles on stage and I, they felt, and I did not disagree with them, and I felt it just wasn’t appropriate for me to take roles away from them, so…
Interviewer: Well, that was very nice.
John: I just didn’t do it, but, you know, the occasional…
Interviewer: Right.
John: …thing was probably okay. The year that I retired, the faculty had decided to do Fiddler on the Roof and this was a year out so, and I’ve always wanted to play Tevye but I wasn’t going to, I wasn’t going to say anything.
[extraneous conversation]
John: But anyway, I wasn’t going to say anything, but the managing director of the theater, wonderful girl whom I hired pretty much out of college, and I had taught some years before and I was at a, oh, I think a theater board meeting. We don’t really have a board. I mean, it’s an advisory group, a guild, and they were going around the table asking people, you know, what their favorite roles were, and what they would love to play and I had said Tevye and she remembered that and so, she spoke up at a meeting that I wasn’t present at. She told, she told at least one other faculty member, maybe two, because there was nobody, I mean, they wanted to do Fiddler…
Interviewer: Right.
John: …but they’re looking around. They don’t have a Tevye.
Interviewer: Well, you’ve got a bunch of young kids.
John: Yeah, you’ve got a bunch of young kids and you know, and sometimes you do have young kids who can play Tevye and there’s no question about it but at that particular moment there wasn’t anybody that had the maturity to be able to do it, and Elizabeth, I think, told Stella. She said, “Well, you know, John has always wanted to play that role,” and Stella went, “Really?” So, they approached me and asked if I would be willing to do it and here’s what I said. I said, “Only if the students agree.”
Interviewer: That was diplomatic.
John: Well, I also knew that if I did it and didn’t do that, that, you know, there was going to be …
Interviewer: Sure.
John: …all kinds of complaining and carping, so, we scheduled a meeting with all the acting and musical theater majors and I walked in and I said, “You know, I’m open to whatever decision the faculty makes. It’s the faculty’s decision, but they really are here to listen to what you have to say,” and then I walked out, and the faculty conducted the meeting and they came out afterwards and they said, “It was almost unanimous. There was one kid.”
Interviewer: One kid. There always is one kid.
John: There was one kid who thought he could play Tevye and they just looked at me and they told me his name and we all went, “No.”
Interviewer: “No.” My, you know, it’s like everybody says, you’ve got a bunch of Jews together, there’s always gonna’ be one that’s gonna’ not be happy with something.
John: Right, but, I mean, to your question of whether I did any local theater while I was Chair, I didn’t. Now I have since then and I’m doing something right now.
Interviewer: Oh, good. What are you doing now?
John: The Laramie Project…
Interviewer: Oh, wow.
John: …at Hilliard Arts Center.
Interviewer: That should be very nice.
John: Yeah, it opens on Friday night and I’m playing the tract that includes the artistic director of the theater company that went to Laramie and interviewed everybody and I’m playing the Unitarian minister.
Interviewer: There you go. I love that.
John: …and a couple of other people – the president of the University of Wyoming, Matthew’s academic advisor in the political science department, but I’m also playing Matthew’s father Dennis Sheppard and I’m getting to read the speech that he wrote and delivered…
Interviewer: Oh, wow.
John: …at the end of the trial where he grants the man who killed his son with “life” and doesn’t demand the death penalty.
Interviewer: So, if someone were to ask you what kind of legacy do you want to leave for the next generations with regard to your personal life, your work life, your family life, what would you say?
John: Oh, dear. Well, a couple things. One of the things that I’m proudest of is that when I was at Beth Tikvah in the 90s, we wanted to build a religious school. We also wanted a bigger sanctuary blah, blah, blah, and we had a bunch of neighbors who were “uh” and were very resistant to that idea. In fact, I think it was, yeah, it was 2001 and I was not on the Board at the time, but there was a committee that had gotten together with the local architect named Phil Markwood, and they had redesigned the building and you know, the sanctuary and religious school, preschool, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but I think, what turned out to be bad advice from some people that were on the Board at the time. They did not do the political work involving the neighbors and so, they were advised, you know, that, the Board was advised that you could just fly under the radar, and so they took the proposal to, what is it, the architectural commission, I don’t know what it’s called, in Worthington and it passed, but then the neighbors heard about it because it passed and all hell broke loose, and they pulled out the original documentation of the deed and promises, anyway, they went to City Council and City Council overturned that decision, after all of the work that had been done and it was just a kick in the teeth and that happened in 2000, 2001 I don’t remember. It was right around the time of 9/11, and so for a year, the congregation didn’t do anything at all, and then they put together a group of people who were talking about, ‘Okay, well…’ Well, here’s what happened. There was a vote and the congregation was asked, “Do you want to stay in Worthington or do you want to move?” and the vote was 99% ‘We want to get the hell out of Worthington.’ People took it personally. I honestly don’t think it was. I mean, I’m sure there was some anti-Semitism involved. I have no question about that, but it wasn’t primarily that. It was a neighbor response.
Interviewer: ‘You didn’t ask us.’
John: ‘You didn’t ask us,’ and it’s what happens when Sheetz says…
Interviewer: ‘I’m building this.’
John: ‘We’re building, we’re building right here on the corner. It’ll be great,’ and you’re going ‘not to my property values it won’t be.’ Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Interviewer: And eventually they not only, they got the JCC Preschool, they got the…
John: Long story. I’m going to go into it a little bit. So, anyway…
Interviewer: My husband was responsible from the Columbus Jewish Foundation finding the money for that.
John: Yes. Right. I remember that.
Interviewer: One of the things he’s proud of.
John: Yeah. So, the twists and turns of that is that there was a committee who put together proposals. We got Phil Markwood to give us the design. We bought property a couple of miles away, and, but it was all contingent on us selling the property at 6121 Olentangy River Road, and we couldn’t sell it. Who would want it?
Interviewer: Who would want it? Right.
John: Who would want it? We couldn’t sell it. We couldn’t raise the money and our, our congregation is one that was founded on the principal of no debt. Weren’t going to take loans, never going to take loans. So, I was intimately involved. I was on the Board. I was Building Chair. We had the design. We were ready to go, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. We could not make it work and it fell through, and at the board meeting where the board voted not to give the money back to the donors, because they’d had a legal opinion that, you know, the money was freely given. It wasn’t for that specific purpose, blah, blah, blah. I spoke up and I said, “So, what are we going to tell the congregation we’re going to do with that money?” and I said, “ I want five thousand dollars to go back to Phil and see if we can come up with a design on this site that’s more workable than the one that he had ten years ago,” and remarkably, they said, “Yes,” and so Phil and I got together.
[redacted]
Interviewer: Sure.
John: And so, we met with Phil and a month later we presented a proposal.
Interviewer: Wow. I’m sure that’s something to be very proud of.
John: Well, and then we eventually got it to vote and we’ll give credit to the machers in the congregation, the money guys, ‘cause they figured out how to do it. We did end up taking loans but it was self-funded in a way that I don’t understand ‘cause money is not my thing, and, and, you know, it took some time and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but eventually we were able to build a new sanctuary on the ground that had been the patio and the outdoors, and you’ve been there.
Interviewer: I’ve been there. I’ve been there, I was there when they cut the ribbon to open the facility, plus, I’ve been, look, if it wasn’t in Worthington, I would be interested in going there but I’m spoiled ‘cause I live here.
John: You live here.
Interviewer: That’s right.
John: So, that’s one of the things that I’m proudest of and then, that’s the latest, and then the group after me and I stepped off the board, got the preschool and more power to them. So, you asked me about my legacy. That’s one.
Interviewer: Do your children live here or do they live out of town?
John: David lives in Bexley.
Interviewer: Oh really?
John: He just bought a house six months ago over on Chelsea, but they belong to Beth Tikvah, and my younger son lives outside of Boston. He lives in Watertown and they belong to a temple there. So, Sally raised two Jewish kids.
Interviewer: There you go.
John: That’s her legacy and I had some small part in that.
Interviewer: I think you had more than a small part.
John: Well, it’s a much smaller part than Sally’s. So…
[extraneous conversation]
John: So, but anyway, so, two Jewish boys and three Jewish granddaughters…
Interviewer: Good for you.
John: …and then beyond that, I think, just, you know, the students that I’ve helped. The students that I helped recruit, managed to find a way to get them a way to Otterbein, a lot of African American students, other students…
Interviewer: That’s great.
John: …that I’m very proud of. I’m proud of all of them, and, you know, they’ve all gone and lived good lives even if they didn’t stay in theater. Most of them don’t stay in theater…
Interviewer: No.
John: … but they use every piece of their theater, education and training.
Interviewer: That’s great. Do you miss teaching?
John: I do. I get to do it a little bit now, uh, the Pandemic, yes, okay, so, it’s March 2020 and everything now has been shut down and Rick [transcriber’s note- Rabbi Rick Kellner] and Julie and I are going, “Okay, now what?”
Interviewer: What are we gonna’ do?
John: What are we gonna’ do? And, I quickly figured out if Julie made audio recordings of the accompaniment to the songs that we were going to sing on Friday night, I could put them on my computer, play them over a set of speakers and I could sing to that recording and send it out over zoom.
Interviewer: Wow. That was very industrious.
John: Other people were doing it, too but I think I was one of the first, and so, Rick would be in his home, a mile and half from mine. He lives in, just outside the Hills and so, he would be zooming his portion and I would be zooming my portion, and Julie would be at her piano and, although she wasn’t playing for me, occasionally, she would play a piece on her own and the three of us did services like that, essentially, for over a year…
Interviewer: That’s great.
John: …and there were a whole bunch of variations on that. The choir – Julie and I wanted to figure out a way to involve the choir and I can pull it up for you here in a bit, so I taught myself how to use Garage Band…
Interviewer: Oh, yeah.
John: …and taught them how to make recordings and so, they would send me a recording. Julie would make a master on piano and I would sing a master track or Marsha would sing a master track for the women and we would send them the master tracks and they would listen to the master track on their phone with a set of earphones with the recorder on and they would record themselves singing their part to that master track. They would send it to me and then I would mix it.
Interviewer: That’s better than, I’m, I was in the Harmony Project for many, many years and it just got too complicated. They couldn’t get it together.
John: Well, they’re only 14 or 16 of us.
Interviewer: Yeah, they’re five hundred of us.
John: Little tougher.
Interviewer: Yeah.
John: But anyway, so, yeah, for the High Holy Days, not this year, last year, we made eighteen recordings.
Interviewer: Really. Wow.
John: Yeah, the High Holiday literature. Took me hours.
Interviewer: I bet.
John: About a hundred of them.
Interviewer: So, do you consider Columbus your home?
John: Yeah. I’ve lived here longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my life.
Interviewer: Me too. It’s different. So, if someone were to ask you what do you have to say about yourself to tell other people, what would that be?
John: Oh, I don’t know. I’m, if you’re asking how other people see me, I’m not entirely sure.
Interviewer: How do you see yourself?
John: How do I see myself? As someone who gets up in the morning and when he goes out to get the paper, sings the Shehechianu, which is not the appropriate morning prayer…
Interviewer: No, but…
John: …but I do it anyway.
Interviewer: It’s better than nothing.
John: It’s better than nothing, and on Friday nights I ask God to make me a better husband and a better father and a better teacher and a better Jew and a better singer.
Interviewer: That is great. That is wonderful, really. I feel like I missed out not knowing you for the last 30 years…
John: Well, thank you.
Interviewer: …because I really think that you have a lot to offer this community and I would love to see you do more things. [recording skipped] Okay. Tell me about how that happened.
John: So, yeah, the other legacy, blah, blah, the Letters Home…So, I think, it was, I got either a phone call or an email from Toby Brief, and she had gotten my name from Diane, Diane’s last name, she was at the Jewish Center, you know who I’m talking about, husband was an art teacher at…Saks, Diane Saks S-a-k-s.
Interviewer: She worked at the Federation.
John: She worked at the Federation. Toby had these letters that had been written by a Jewish boy to the girl that he wanted to marry and he’d written them primarily from the camp that’s down in Chillicothe. She had this cache of letters and she wanted to turn them into a play about World War I, and she wanted somebody to give her some advice about how to do that. So, Diane gave her my name and Toby and I had lunch at the Chinese restaurant right there by the Jewish Center and so we stated talking and very slowly she reined me in like a fish on a long line. You know, I started out being an advisor and ended up being the primary writer and, with her, and the director of the production, and it took us, it took us well over a year. I don’t know, it took us well over a year to finally come up with a construction for these letters and other letters that made sense, and it was just a joy putting it together.
Interviewer: Didn’t you use relatives of some of the people to read, to do the letters?
John: Uh-huh. Yes. Hang on.
Interviewer: How’d that come about?
John: Uh, she’s on the Jewish Historical Society Board, uh, let me see who that is. Oh, I don’t have it here.
Interviewer: Well, I know Babette Gorman was very impressed that she was doing it and she said, “How come you didn’t do it?” I said, “Cause nobody asked me.”
John: Well, it was, I mean, primarily it was guys in the play. I mean, there were only, there were only three female characters that I think we came up with, but…
Interviewer: It’s a wonderful idea.
John: Yeah, it turned out. I mean, at first, I was thinking it was going to be power points and a kind-of documentary. Toby was vociferous. Now, Toby doesn’t get vociferous and she certainly doesn’t get angry, but she was very blunt about how, “No, that’s not what it’s going to be,” and eventually, here’s what happened, is that because I had it in my head, as you do when you’re thinking about a documentary, that there’s going to be a narrator. There’s going to be a narrator’s voice. It’s going to be Peter Coyote or somebody, right, saying, “Yes, and then in 1918, David met Anna and,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that just wasn’t working for either one of us, and then I tumbled to the idea that, ah, David and Anna can narrate their own stories, so…
Interviewer: Great idea.
John: …that became the opening, so…
Interviewer: Great idea.
John: …David comes up, “Hi. My name is David. I was born in…” the year, whenever it was, you know, “and moved to Columbus when I was ten years old and” mmm “and I lived in this house,” Slide. ‘Cause the house still exists “and here was…
Interviewer: And probably people still live there.
John: … “and here was my draft card.” And, so, it just, it flowed from there.
Interviewer: Any plans to do something similar?
John: Well, we’ve been talking about doing World War II. The Pandemic has slowed us down, so, you know, I don’t know how long it will be.
Interviewer: Well, I also think there are some people who you could interview for, you know, whose parents lived through World War II, type of thing.
John: Yeah. Toby, yes…World War I, we had precious little material and that was the problem. World War II we have too much material and that’s the problem.
Interviewer: There’s a guy that recently passed away that was one of the liberators from.. Jakeway, I think his name was.
John: Yeah, so, we’d have to be able to figure out how to do that but, we ended Letters Home. Toby had assiduously compiled a list of all the Jewish men who had fought someplace in World War I, who had been in service. A lot of men did not go overseas. David didn’t go overseas. David Pastor. A lot of guys died of the flu in 1918 at the camp, but we ended it with a movie, the slide of those names rolling by, set to music.
Interviewer: Very good.
John: It was just a good way to end. Did you see it?
Interviewer: Nope. I did not.
John: It has been filmed and it’s available…
Interviewer: Oh, yeah?
John: …on the CJHS website.
Interviewer: I’ll take a look.
Transcribed by Linda Kalette Schottenstein – February 2022
Notes:
John Stefano was Chair of Theater and Dance at Otterbein in Westerville, Ohio for 24 years Aug 1992- July 2016.
The Laramie Project is a play by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project in response to the real life 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, in Laramie, Wyoming. Kaufman and the other company members visited Laramie on six occasions and interviewed residents, members of the police force, and Matthew’s friends, in an attempt to understand what happened, and why and its impact on the community of Laramie, Wyoming. It is derived from interviews, journals and other sources complied by the members of the Tectonic Theater Project.
CJHS Letters Home was first performed at the Jewish Community Center in Columbus, Ohio, on May 30, 2018: