Gazette 2021

The State of the Opera House

the wheels are turning for the installation of an air conditioning system that should be functional Lots of progress has been made in the last few years. by the hot season of 2022.

The roof’s been stabilized, a new restroom has been added upstairs, the downstairs restrooms have been The air conditioning is being funded by an LSA updated so they no longer flood in the middle of grant. LSA stands for Local Shared Account, concerts, the concession stand has been remodeled, and is funded by a tax on casinos. All grants The entire building has been re-carpeted, there are must be used for arts or cultural projects. The new stage curtains, and a new custom designed Historical Society Board is planning to apply for another grant next year, and considering either sound system. a redo of the Opera House ceiling , or a remodel A contractor has been hired to redo the bar area, and of the concrete entrance to the building.

Photos and editor: Cleo Fogal Printer/publisher: Milan Printing, 1012 North Street, Jim Thorpe, PA

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JTAMS President Dan Hugos says he gets lots of positive feedback from performers. He says they like the roomy stage, the quality lighting and backdrops the OH provides, and the general feel of the place.

JTAMS goal is to provide quality shows that people consider a good value for their money, whether they’re familiar with the band or not.

Harry Packer was the spark plug that got the opera house built in 1881. If flourished as a live performance venue and then a cinema until the 1950s, was then a warehouse for a handbag factory, and then abandoned until the Historical Society took it over in the 70s, which then took on JTAMS as a production partner in 2003.

Hugos says he’s happy with the venue’s progress, and hopes to continue to move it forward.

Ghosts!

Ghosts. The first European settlers arrived in Old Mauch Chunk around 1800. The Leni Lenape Indians roamed the area before that.

People have been living and dying in greater Jim Thorpe for more than 200 years.

Some people may still be hanging around!

of

those

Allie Harpster researched the history of the building, and from there she wrote a Ghost Walk story line.

Tours have been running since 1999., and are the Rotary Club’s major fundraiser.

PJ Smith is one of the tour’s most experienced guides. Smith says that the geology of Old Mauch Chunk, as a cut between 2 steep mountains with water at the base and lots of stone, wood and metal, makes it an energy trough, and a good environment for spirit life. She estimates that 75 percent of the buildings on Broadway and Race Street have a ghost story connected to them.

The walks start at the Inn of Jim Thorpe, where 2 lovers who weren’t allowed to marry because of class differences carried on a long affair. They would each check in and be assigned 2nd floor adjoining rooms with a connecting door.

Then one night a new desk clerk made a mistake and gave them rooms that didn’t connect.

The woman waited all night for her lover.

When he didn’t show up she hung herself. Inside the old jail. Motion blur could be from long exposure in 100 low light. But who or what is in the lower right?

Pat Reilly, the president of the Jim Thorpe Rotary, was visiting Gettysburg in the late 1990s when saw people taking ghost walks there. He thought this was something that could be easily duplicated as a Rotary fundraiser in Old Mauch Chunk.

Club members liked the idea, so a medium was summoned to check for ghostly presence in various buildings on Broadway.

Fast forward years and another new desk clerk is walking on the hotel’s second floor, near the room where the lover died.

She sees a woman dressed in a flowing gown, standing at the end of the hallway , and asks her if she needs help. The woman doesn’t answer, but turns and floats towards the desk clerk, who sees the woman doesn’t have a face. The desk clerk runs screaming from the hotel, and hasn’t been inside the building since.

When the medium sensed a presence a woman named

Just up the street, at the Absinthe House, a girl working alone, cleaning up for a new restaurant

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opening, felt she was being watched. She looked at the staircase and a man in a Union Army General’s uniform, complete with sword, was watching her.

The building was originally owned by a Union Army General named William Albright, who was known for dressing in his uniform and sword.

morning.

At the other end of Broadway, in the Notch 8 Bar and Restaurant, a previous owner was losing patience with her staff.

She wanted her crew to leave the restaurant neat and tidy at closing, and despite her orders she was coming in to a mess every

One day a woman came in and asked to speak to the owner privately. The owner thought the staff had made another mistake and was ready to be criticized. But the woman was a medium. She said she had spoken to a ghost couple who enjoyed hanging out in the restaurant overnight, but they wanted more red in the decorations.

They were the ones making a mess. They promised that if the owner put more red in the centerpieces that they would stop messing things up. She did and the problem stopped.

The Parsonage House, a guest house that has recently changed hands, had a ghost cat. The couple who owned the place had a dog, but not a cat. Guests would come to breakfast and talk about what a nice time they’d had playing with the cat.

A young boy died in the house in the 1800s.

They say their dog frequently acted like he was playing with a child that only the dog could see.

The last stop on the tour is St Mark’s and St John’s Episcopal Church. Asa Packer’s daughter Mary Packer Cummings loved the church and put a lot of money into it. The church is a two story structure.

As Mary got older she decided the church needed an elevator to take its older members to the second story sanctuary where services were held. She

first elevator ride, in her casket.

pledged the money to build the elevator with the condition that she got the first ride in it. The elevator was installed in 1912.

Mary died shortly after and got that

The elevator is still operational, if an operator rides inside to press the buttons. But sometimes it moves without an operator.

Once when the Bach and Handel Chorale were practicing in the church several choir members noticed a small woman dressed in formal black clothes peeking out from behind pillars in the rear of the sanctuary.

They surmise that Mary Packer Cummings had ridden her elevator to the sanctuary, then stopped in to listen to their practice.

Those are just a sample of the stories told on the Rotary Ghost Walks. They’ve scheduled a total of 54 walks for 2021, stretching from September into December. Tickets are $12 for adults, $6 for children. Money goes to fund scholarships, leadership training for high school students, and a summer recreational camp for elementary students.

You can book a tour at walkthiswaytours.com, or by calling 570-401-8807.

Parnormal Sightings Most people are content to consider the existence of ghosts strictly as a Halloween phenomenon, but there is a local group, Paranormal Sightings of Pa, that goes deeper than that.

They recently did a ghost hunt at the Mauch Chunk Museum, which was built as a Methodist Church In 1843.

They brought K2 meters, which are used by electricians to measure electromagnetic radiation.

When the radiation is high, the meter’s lights go on.

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Ghost hunters believe they can communicate with the spirits by asking yes or no questions. If the answer is yes, the spirit moves closer to the meter, causing the lights to flash.

Their other tool was a Kinect, which is an adaptation of a video game camera, which has the ability to sense Paranormal Sightings investigator operates people or spirits’ electronic Kinect camera energy and translate it into stick figures. Stand in front of the camera and it will turn your body into a stick figure diagram, step away from the camera, and it will register the electronic energy of any ghosts and turn them into stick figures.

They started their hunt with a prayer to St Michael, an Arch Angel, asking for protection from any evil spirits that might turn up in the hunt. One of the hunters told a story of a hunt she’d been on in another state, where a bad spirit climbed on her back, causing her enormous pain.

She asked St Michael for help and the spirit left her alone.

Museum owner John Drury said there were often reports of spirits behind the stage curtains, so the hunt Investigators say this started there. The Kinect stick figure represents registered a presence a spirit named Charlie almost immediately.

The hunters had been there before, and had identified the spirit as a man named Charlie. Charlie showed up on both the Kinect and the K2 for several minutes, but efforts to get him to answer questions on the K2 or to make specific moves on the Kinect didn’t work. The hunters tried to get Charlie to identify a photo on my cell phone. I felt a chill and the hair on my arms stood up for a minute, so maybe he was looking at it, but he didn’t respond to questions about the picture.

Downstairs in the museum the Kinect didn’t register a presence, but the K2 meters did. The spirit didn’t answer questions, but a flashlight which was sitting by itself on the counter did turn itself off and on repeatedly.

And then it was down to the basement! A basement in a 150 year old building is an inherently spooky place, but the ghost hunters believe that a spirit named Sarah who had been raped and murdered by a traveling preacher and possibly buried there, lived in the basement. The Kinect wasn’t showing anything, and then its batteries died, but we did get the spirit to respond to a couple of questions on the K2. We learned that Sarah had a friend who lived with her in the basement, that she was born in Coaldale, her Dad was a coal miner, and she was English.

The spirits in the Mauch Chunk Museum don’t bother anyone, but sometimes there are spirits in houses that cause problems. One of the investigators told the story of a pre schooler who wouldn’t behave and kept telling his parents that “bad Johnny” told him to act up. Paranormal Sightings was called into investigate. They concluded that the house was haunted by the spirit of a young boy named Johnny.

They weren’t able to get Johnny out of the house, and advised the family to move. The family moved, and the boy’s behavior improved.

Paranormal Sightings is available to help people with haunting problems. You can learn more about them on their website, paranormalsightingspa.com.

Jim Thorpe Businesses and Covid Year 2 In June of this year the Center for Disease Control said that the best way to get around continued Covid problems was to stay outside as much as possible.

The public has recognized that Jim Thorpe is a great place to be outside! Whether its walking the colorful streets and checking out shops, riding the train through the gorge, or renting a bicycle to ride on the trail, there is a lot of great outdoor activity to be had in Jim Thorpe. .

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The biggest problem now is staffing the businesses that feed and water the tourists when they’re done playing outside. Greater Jim Thorpe lost 4 restaurants to staffing and other issues this summer.

The remaining restaurants did their best to pick up the slack, but long waits and uneven service were common in the height of the summer tourist season.

Santa Claus is coming back to town!

The Carbon County Economic Development Commission is sponsoring a tree lighting ceremony On December 4th.

Michael Rivkin, the president of the Jim Thorpe Tourism Agency, is also a member of the Pennsylvania Lodging and Restaurant Association, which considers staffing a statewide problem, and did a study to analyze it.

Their study found that the number one issue in staffing service jobs is competition from big box stores, which have a huge need for help, and offer regular hours, benefits, and high hourly wages.

The number two issue is availability and price of child care. There have been Covid related closings of child care facilities. The ones that are open have increased their fees.

Santa will arrive in a firetruck, and may be accompanied by Mrs Claus.

The third problem is the increase in government unemployment benefits, which ended in September, just as the tourist season was winding down.

We are walking a tightrope over a deep canyon, and we are about halfway across.

Solutions? Most businesses in town have upped their hourly wages to some extent. Democrats in state government would like to raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour, but that would mean everyone would have to raise their prices to cover the wage increase.

Rivkin mentioned that in European restaurants, especially Italy, the staff are salaried instead of hourly, and service charges are included with your bill.

COVID Report

That’s how Dr Luther Rhodes, an infectious disease specialist with the Lehigh Valley Health Network., describes our current Covid situation. Dr Rhodes practices telemedicine and says he sees 2 or 3 new Covid cases every day.

Rhodes says 80 percent of new cases are unvaccinated, and the 20 percent that are vaccinated have milder symptoms, unless they’re patients with underlying health issues, when there is no such thing as a mild case of Covid.

Covid cases were on a downswing in June, and then the combination of 4th of July Parties and the Delta variant brought case numbers right back up again.

Rhodes says as long as the Corona virus is making people sick there is potential for it to mutate into another variant which might be resistant to vaccines.

We are lucky as Americans because we have free and easy access to vaccines. The statistics about how well the vaccines work and the fact that the

Pfizer vaccine has been approved by the FDA is helping people to get over their vaccine hesitancy. Rhodes says vaccines are our most effective weapon against Covid, and he’d like to see everyone get vaccinated.

Medical science has come a long way since Covid first reared its ugly head. The Merck pharmaceutical company has developed a drug to treat Covid and Doctors generally have a better handle on how to manage the disease. There are fewer deaths. It’s now possible to purchase Covid test kits over the counter in pharmacies, so people have a better chance of knowing when they’re sick.

The average number of new cases in the US is at around 90 thousand a day at the time of this writing.

Rhodes says we need to think about the Corona virus like an ember in a campfire that’s prone to flare ups.

He says we should continue to be cautious about Covid exposure until our national numbers are down to the hundreds or less.

Garrison Kellior Garrison Kellior started his National Public Radio syndicated show, “The Prairie Home Companion” , in 1974, the year I graduated high school I was never as dedicated a fan as one of my friends, who recorded every one of Kellior’s early shows on a reel to reel tape recorder, and hosted pot luck dinner parties where people brought the foods Kellior talked about, Minnesota staples like hot dish, glorified rice, and jello. But I’ve listened to him off and on for his entire career.

I was raised in Minnesota, and my hometown bore a strong resemblance to “Lake Woebegone”, the setting for Kellior’s stories. But I appreciate him for more than that. The man pays close attention to the details of the world around him, and is a talented craftsman at trimming those details into a a story that’s fun to listen to.

Combine great content with a velvety baritone voice, and you get a radio show that you can follow for decades.

When a talent like Kellior steps out from behind his national microphone and onto a small stage like the Opera House it makes for a magical evening.

I wondered before the show started how a 79 year old man would handle the physical challenge of being on stage alone for 2 hours, but Kellior was ready for the challenge.

He started his show with a song hoping that God would be there when he died, because life on this earth would have been easier as an atheist, and from there proceeded with thoughts on aging, concluding we should do all we can to enjoy our golden years, and just to be careful not to trip and injure ourselves.

Historically Kellior’s shows have included music. He accomplished that here by telling people we would do a standing intermission. The house lights went on, everyone stood up, people had a chance to go to the bathroom or buy a drink, and he led the rest of the crowd in a half dozen songs.

The second half of the show featured a fictional story of the Flannery boys, siamese twins from Kelliors home town who eventually separate and develop opposite personalities, and the story of when Kellior suffered an attack of partial paralysis, went to the hospital, and learned about Buddhism from his Nepalese anesthesiologist.

JTAMS President Dan Hugos saw Kellior onstage in St Paul 40 years ago, and said having him grace the stage at the Opera House was a dream come true.

One of my duties as an Opera House volunteer is checking the seats for litter when a show is over. We were starting that job when Kellior reappeared from backstage. I got a chance to shake his hand and have a few words with him.

The goofy look on my face in the selfie I took a couple of minutes later shows how excited I was to talk to him. I felt like I was in the presence of greatness.

Upcoming Shows at the Opera House NOVEMBER Comedian Steve Byrne Last waltz Celebration John Waite The Linda Ronstadt experience THUR 18 ELP experience Carl Palmer FRI 19 Splintered Sunlight Grateful Dead Show SAT 20 Start Making Sense Talking Heads show WED 24 Harvest Jam FRI-SAT 26-27 Eaglemania FRI 5 SAT 6 FRI 12 SAT 13

SAT 18 FRI 31

MCCF concert with Free Range and Tin Bird NYE Dance Party with Hunkajunk

JANUARY FRI 7 Comedian Tome Cotter SAT 8th Craig Thatcher Band FRI 21 Superunknown (Chris Cornell exp) SAT 22 Us and Floyd Pink Floyd show FRI 28 Creedence Revived CCR

DECEMBER FRI-SAT 3-4 Twelve TwentyFour TSO Christmas Concert FRI 10 Mary Fahl Holiday Show SAT 11 Craig Thatcher Rockin Christmas

Mauch Chunk Historical Society MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION

Name(s): _______________________/_________________________

Membership Information

We now have our very own website, mauch-chunk-historical-society.square.site where you can join us online.

Anyone joining at the Bronze level or higher will be considered a VIP member, and get a card that entitles them to discounts at 17 area businesses!

Our 2021 New Years Resolution was to computerize our membership list. We started all new memberships at March 31, and plan to do a better job with communications and renewals.

Membership | MAUCH CHUNK OPERA HOUSE (mcohjt.com)

LEVEL

BENEFITS

PRICE

Individual Discount on one ticket per show Joint

$50

Discount on two tickets per show

$75

Address: _________________________________________________ Street Address/City/State/Zip Code

Membership Level(circle one) Individual

Joint

Bronze

Silver

Gold

Platinum

$50

$75

$120

$250

$500

$1000

Interested in volunteering at shows? Yes �

No �

CONTACT INFORMATION Email Address: _______________________________ Phone Number: _______________________________

Bronze

Discount on two tickets per show + VIP membership

$120

PAYMENT INFORMATION

Silver

Discount on two tickets per show + VIP membership + Sweet Notes Concessions Discount

$250

Name on Card: _______________________________________

Gold

Discount on two tickets per show + VIP membership + Sweet Notes Concessions Discount + Gazette dedication

$500

Platinum Discount on two tickets per show + VIP membership + Sweet Notes Concessions Discount + Gazette dedication + Personal Seat Plaque

$1000

More membership perks are coming soon and will be announced on our Facebook Page: Mauch Chunk Historical Society.

Credit Card #: ______________________ Expiration Date: ___/___

Billing Address: ___________________________________ Please make checks payable to: Mauch Chunk Historical Society Please mail application to: PO Box 273, Jim Thorpe, Pa. 18229

Board Members Bobby Yevak - President Steve Hlavka - Vice President Cleo Fogal - Secretary Trish Spillman - Treasurer

Helen Van Pelt Christy McGorry-DeGiosio Larry Daiell Vince DeGiosio

Dan Hugos Ciro LoPinto Terry Opelia