A speech in Chapel by Dean Emeritus Helen M. Smith on April 1948, honoring Flora Stone Mather.
We have met today to honor Mrs. Flora Stone Mather who was born in Cleveland April 1852. Mrs. Bishop, Mrs. Mather’s daughter, tells us that, “one of her (mother’s) cherished childhood recollections was Abraham Lincoln’s visit to Cleveland on the way to his inauguration in Washington. She proffered him a little bunch of flowers and received a kiss from him in return.” It is not of Mrs. Mather’s childhood, however, that I wish to speak but rather of her varied interest and especially her interest in this college.
Emerson said “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” If he could see this college today, I think he would day this institution is pretty nearly the lengthened shadow of one woman, Flora Stone Mather.
The buildings on this campus speak eloquently of here. She gave Guilford House as a tribute to her former teacher Miss Linda Guildford. Although Mrs. Mather shunned publicity, she was prevailed upon to speak on its presentation at the College, principally, I believe, that she might acknowledge her debt and the debt of the community to the inspiration of Miss Guilford who taught her girls to seek the things of “supremest worth.”
Mrs. Mather gave Haydn Hall, but delegated the presentation of it to the College to Mrs. Worcester Warne then president of the Advisory Council who said Mrs. Mather chose not to speak for herself.
Flora Mather House was the gift of the alumnae and their friends in loving recognition of what Mrs. Mather had done for their Alma Mater. If you will read the bronze tablet at the entrance of that dormitory, you will see what the givers thought of Mrs. Mather.
The Mather Memorial Building was the gift of her husband and children as a fitting and lasting memorial to her. Truly this campus speaks eloquently of her.
But the beauty of Mrs. Mather giving was that she gave so unsparing of herself. She was a frail woman all her life, yet with the urgent demands of a large house and growing children, church and community affairs, she found time to make frequent visits to Guilford House, often staying for lunch with the sixteen girls who lived there getting acquainted with them and their needs and the needs to make living there more comfortable and homelike. She brought flowers and books for the sparse library and books to individual girls which she thought they might enjoy reading.
She did not forget the interest of the town girls. She gave Haydn Hall especially so that the town girls might have a place for relaxation and comfort when they had to spend long hours on the campus and had no place but the basement of Clark Hall for other than academic activities.
She brought to the Chapel noted lecturers and musicians, whom the students might otherwise have seen and heard. On one occasion she brought, from Boston, Villa White who had a glorious soprano voice and gave an all-Grieg program. For one of the students in that audience, interest in Grieg’s music began on that day.
She was a very wise, understanding and fair woman.
In the early days it wasn’t considered quite proper for young ladies to go to a down-town hotel without an escort. Because there were no facilities for serving large number on the campus, the students decided to go to a hotel for a banquet. The Advisory Council perhaps wisely objected. One student was delegated to talk about it with Mrs. Mather. With her usual generosity she offered to pay the whole expense for a caterer to serve the banquet on the campus. But when it was pointed out to her that that would defeat the very purpose of getting the students to do something for themselves, she said, “I see your point, go a head with your banquet at the hotel.”
Mrs. Mather never put herself in the foreground. She worked through other people and never sought credit for her deeds.
You have seen that although she gave Guilford House and Haydn Hall, she put Miss Guilford in the foreground on one occasion and had another person for Haydn Hall.
President Thwing said she was one of the most self-less women ever known to him. And yet Mrs. Mather was the guiding spirit in the many organizations she sponsored. Dr. Haydn turned to her to make the Advisory Council of interest to the prominent women who belonged to it. Church organizations testified to her wisdom in straightening out differences and difficulties without offending anyone.
Her work with the Home for Aged Women, The Children’s Aid Society, the Day Nursery Association, the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Associations, the Welfare Federation, Goodrich House, struggling schools, churches, and colleges the country over, much have meant a great tax on her strength and composure. Dr. Meldrum, her pastor said to her: “Mrs. Mather it is easier to ask you for a contribution that to thank you for it” and she replied, “That is as it should be. It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Self-effacement was so characteristic of her. As early as 1898 the President, the Advisory Council, the students and the alumnae were interested in an appropriate name for the College. Although a number of names were suggested and rejected, all agreed upon one name, “but the woman who bore it was too modest to permit its use.” As Professor Bourne said: “Happily three decades later it could be made the name of the College – Flora Stone Mather.
Mrs. Mather died in 1909. A half–hour service of utmost simplicity was conducted a the Old Stone Church, where she had so long worshipped. Then the funeral procession moved slowly to Lake View Cemetery. At Adelbert College and the College for Women hundreds of students of the University stood at attention to pay their last tribute to the one who had done so much for them.
It is an amazing thing that one so frail could have lived such a triumphant life, accomplished so much, meant so much to so many people, to this city and to so many the country over.
No fonder hope could be entertained than that this College should express itself, in its students and graduates the wisdom, graciousness, and understanding that characterized Mrs. Mather.
The Mather Memorial Building was the gift of her husband and children as a fitting and lasting memorial to her.
She gave Guilford House as a tribute to her former teacher Miss Linda Guildford.
Flora Mather House was the gift of the alumnae and their friends in loving recognition of what Mrs. Mather had done for their Alma Mater.
Originally a combination of dormitory and classroom building, Haydn Hall was given to the college by Flora Stone Mather.
The building was named in honor of Hiram Collins Haydn, fifth president of Western Reserve University.
Amasa Stone Chapel. This dignified Gothic chapel was designed by Henry Vaughn, a Boston architect who made a career of recreating English gothic chapels in America.
The Chapel was given by Clara Stone Hay, wife of U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, and Flora Stone Mather as a memorial to their father, Amasa Stone.
Through both live concerts and behind the microphone at WJW Radio in Cleveland, deejay Alan Freed did more to spread the gospel of rock and roll during its infancy than any other non-performer.
By adopting a persona “the Moondog”, playing rhythm & blues records, and popularizing the term rock and roll and the music that it defined, Freed became a crucial player in the push to move African-American music into the mainstream. Taking it a step further, Freed and local promoters put on what is widely accepted as the first rock concert— the Moondog Coronation Ball at the old Cleveland Arena on Euclid Avenue.
The inaugural event attracted more than 20,000 people back in March of 1952, double the capacity of the arena. Fans began rioting, knocking down ticket takers and ushers. Eventually the concert was shut down by the police and fire departments..
The riot became national news, and Freed’s popularity escalated. Freed eventually moved to New York and began booking concerts at the Brooklyn Theater breaking new ground in featuring both black and white artists.
Sixty years ago the world’s first rock concert was staged in Cleveland by two men whose passion for music bridged the racial divide in a segregated US.
Jimmy Sutphin was playing poker and drinking beer in a hotel room with some hockey team pals when they heard the commotion outside.
Peering out of the fifth-floor window, they saw thousands of people besieging the indoor arena across the road.
The 20-year-old student and his friends abandoned their card game and piled downstairs to investigate.
It was Friday evening, 21 March 1952, in Cleveland, Ohio, and they were about to witness history being made.
The crowd was angrily demanding entry to a performance featuring a radical new music movement that was about to sweep the nation.
Pandemonium
The world’s first ever rock concert – the Moondog Coronation Ball – was about to end in turmoil after it had barely begun.
Image captionAudience members were apparently surprised to discover Alan Freed was white
The years seem to peel away from Mr Sutphin, now a 79-year-old grandfather, as he stands outside the former site of the Cleveland Arena, remembering.
“The crowd were screaming, ‘let us in’, and banging on the doors,” he recalls. “It was chaos.
“Turns out the place was sold out and they had closed the doors on them. And these people had tickets and were not happy.
“The doors had a glass centre panel and they ended up breaking them so they could get into the building.”
When police captain Bill Zimmerman arrived with dozens of officers, he was confronted by pandemonium.
Gatecrashers had stormed the 9,950-seat venue and it was dangerously overcrowded.
‘Race records’
The musicians, who are thought to have only performed several songs, were ordered to stop playing as police waded into the mob. A man was stabbed in the melee.
The next morning, Mr Sutphin remembers entering the Cleveland Arena, which his father built, to find it strewn with whisky bottles.
John Soeder, music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper – which carried a front-page story on the tumultuous event the next day – says the Moondog Coronation Ball was the “Big Bang of rock’n’roll”.
But it might not have been possible without two visionaries who raided the airwaves with this pulsating, insurrectionary new sound, and in doing so brought black and white kids together to dance in post-war America.
One of them was the concert’s MC, Alan Freed. The other was Leo Mintz, owner of a music store on the fringes of Cleveland’s black community.
Mintz had noticed an increasing number of white teenagers sifting through his extensive collection of rhythm and blues tracks by African-American artists.
But the singles were often a turn-off for such buyers because the industry marketed them as “race records”.
And it wasn’t just west-side white folk who viewed these juke-joint tunes as undesirable.
Terry Stewart, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland (which has a permanent exhibit dedicated to Alan Freed), says: “These songs were filled with double entendres, lyrics like, ‘she just loved my 10-inch record of the blues’.
“Many of the churchgoing black families were just as upset as the white families with this music being played for their children.”
However, when Mintz listened to this raucous sound – with its thumping back beat, locomotive rhythm, and infectious 12-bar blues melodies – he heard the future.
Old blues euphemism
Mintz convinced Freed – a friend and onetime radio broadcaster from orchestral dances in Akron, Ohio – that the obscure tracks deserved some airtime.
His son, Stuart Mintz, says his father told Freed the “kids are rocking and rolling in the aisles to these records, but they won’t buy them”.
Mintz helped Freed, then a humble sportscaster, secure a new show on the city’s WJW radio in 1951, devoted to playing this underground music.
Freed would coin the term rock’n’roll – an old blues euphemism for sex – to describe the tracks.
Using the on-air alias King of the Moondoggers, he would ring a cowbell, drink beer and howl in tribute as he played the records, while pounding out the beat with his fist on a phone book.
The flamboyant Freed’s late-night show caused a sensation with black and white listeners alike.
Mintz and Freed’s logical next step was to stage a live concert featuring the edgy new acts.
Headlining the Moondog Coronation Ball that night 60 years ago was Paul Williams and his Hucklebuckers, supported by Tiny Grimes and his Rockin’ Highlanders, the Dominoes, Varetta Dillard and Danny Cobb. Tickets were $1.50.
One of the few photos from the event shows the men in flannel suits, saddle shoes and fedora hats, while the immaculately coiffed women wear dresses with pinched-in waists and high heels.
It is all a far cry from the ripped jeans, merchandise T-shirts and untamed hairstyles sported by rock fans of later years.
Disastrous printing error
Mr Stewart says that when Freed appeared on stage that night there was uproar.
The predominantly black audience apparently could not believe the exuberant radio personality whose show they had been tuning in to for nine months was white.
The delighted crowd “went nuts”, says Mr Stewart.
He adds: “The fact that this many people would show up for an all-black rhythm and blues event, based solely on advertising on a late-night radio show, and tear the doors off an arena to get inside, made promoters and record labels say, ‘wait a minute, something’s happening here.'”
Less well known is the reason why the Moondog Coronation Ball ended in disaster: a minor printing error.
The mistake was caused by someone forgetting to add the date to tickets issued for a follow-up ball, which Mintz had set about organising immediately after the initial one sold out.
As a result, an estimated 20,000 people showed up on the same night for the first concert – at a venue which could hold half that number.
Rock devil knocking
Mintz was on holiday that Friday in Florida when he was informed by an afternoon phone call of the ticket foul-up.
Image captionAlan Freed’s TV show was cancelled after Frankie Lymon (centre) danced with a white girl on stage
Stuart Mintz says: “My dad was told, ‘there’s an emergency, you’d better come home right now’, and he took a plane.
“By the time he arrived [at the Cleveland Arena] there was already a full-blown riot.
“The fire department opened up hoses on the crowd. He just tapped the cab driver on the shoulder and said, ‘find me a bar.'”
The concert that was billed on a promotional poster as “the most terrible ball of them all” had certainly lived up to the pre-show hype.
Freed narrowly escaped criminal charges, although the event’s notoriety helped propel him to stardom.
Younger generations raised on rap videos might well be perplexed at the idea that rock’n’roll could have once made the authorities squirm with unease.
But this was a dozen years before the Civil Rights Act. J Edgar Hoover’s FBI would place Freed under surveillance because the records he played were deemed such a threat.
As broadcast historian Mike Olszewski says: “Back then, it seemed, the United States was always looking for new enemies.
“It was the beginning of the Red Scare. In 1948, you had Roswell and the UFO scare.
“People were always looking for a devil and rock’n’roll was a devil that came right into their homes.”
A new era
Freed’s downfall would be just as sudden as his meteoric rise to fame.
Image captionThe Moondog Coronation Ball laid the foundations for every rock gig, from Woodstock to Glastonbury
In 1957, the trailblazing DJ’s nationally televised rock’n’roll show on the ABC network was cancelled after a black performer danced with a white girl on stage, outraging Southern affiliates.
Freed’s career was finished by the payola scandal, a then-widespread practice of disc jockeys accepting gifts from promoters to play their records.
Convicted of commercial bribery in 1962, he died of complications from alcoholism three years later, aged 43.
Though Freed had been silenced, the rock’n’roll genie was well and truly out of the bottle. The Moondog Coronation Ball laid the foundations for every rock gig that followed, from Woodstock to Glastonbury.
The Cleveland Arena was demolished in 1977 and an American Red Cross office block stands today at the spot where a new era of live entertainment was born.
Recalling how he came to be a bystander to the dawning of a new era on Euclid Avenue six decades ago, Mr Sutphin says: “Who would have thought it would be such a memorable event?”
We have met today to honor Mrs. Flora Stone Mather who was born in Cleveland April 1852. Mrs. Bishop, Mrs. Mather’s daughter, tells us that, “one of her (mother’s) cherished childhood recollections was Abraham Lincoln’s visit to Cleveland on the way to his inauguration in Washington. She proffered him a little bunch of flowers and received a kiss from him in return.” It is not of Mrs. Mather’s childhood, however, that I wish to speak but rather of her varied interest and especially her interest in this college.
