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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 10, 2010

TT: Frederick W. Huff, R.I.P.

January 10, 2010 by Terry Teachout

THE%20COLUMNS.jpgI suspect that just about everyone who grows up to be an egghead meets at some crucial point in his youth an older person who makes him feel as though it’s all right to take an interest in intellectual pursuits. For me, that person was Frederick W. Huff, the librarian of the high school in the small Missouri town where I grew up. He was, like most of the librarians I’ve known well, something of an eccentric, a violin-playing opera buff with a stately air and a deep, plummy voice who never met a polysyllable he didn’t like. Why he chose a place like Smalltown, U.S.A., in which to start a family and build a library was never clear to me, but it was my great good fortune that he did so.
Mr. Huff–I never called him “Fred” to his face, not even after I grew up–put together a richly varied collection of books and records that fed my curiosity for four blissful years. He also gave me my first summer job, and I never ceased to marvel at the just-so precision with which he regulated each and every aspect of his professional life. Above all, he took my dreams seriously, and long after I graduated from high school and started making my way in the world, I made a point of stopping by his office from time to time to tell him of my latest adventures and find out what was new in his life. He was, I knew, proud of my work as a writer, and I was prouder still to have lived up to his great expectations. Alas, the protracted illness that finally caught up with Mr. Huff this morning left him incapable of appreciating the success of The Letter. How he would have loved hearing the backstage gossip–and how I would have loved to tell him all about it!
The small towns of America are full of men and women like Fred Huff. Rarely do they make headlines, but their devotion changes countless lives for the better. He changed mine, and I will always revere his memory.

THE ROAD GOES ON FOREVER

January 10, 2010 by Terry Teachout

“Who has the best job in the world? When I was a boy, I had no doubt that it was Charles Kuralt, a balding, paunchy correspondent for CBS News who spent his days roaming around America in a battered white motor home, stopping along the way to file feature stories about plain-spoken, good-hearted men and women who carved merry-go-round horses by hand, made bricks out of mud, and led untroubled lives in towns even smaller than the one in which I grew up…”

AMERICA’S FAVORITE PLAYS

January 10, 2010 by Terry Teachout

“New playwrights deserve a chance, and it looks like most of our drama companies are giving it to at least some of them. But it also appears that far too many of those same companies may be steering clear of the classical revivals that are no less central to the continuing health of a theatrical culture…”

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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