The story below is a preview from our November/December 2017 issue. For the full story Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
The Historic Masonic Theatre reopened its doors in 2016, restored to its original beauty and possibility. It’s been full steam ahead ever since. How it happened is a story worth telling…and remembering.
Chuck Almarez
All stories have beginnings and endings; joy and sadness; places and players we care about.
But the very best stories have heroes we don’t forget. Heroes’ stakes are high; the battles are well-fought. And when all is said and done, a hero’s hard-won victories spin endlessly into future times and lives.
So here’s a story that has it all. It’s the story of a time and place, of vision and passion—and therefore of risk. It is, most of all, a hero’s story.
John Hillert was hiking in the Blue Ridge with his wife, Gayle. It was 2005, and the Wisconsin native was about to retire from a 28-year career in human resources. Gayle remembers the decision to come East to live like this: “John looked out over the mountains and valleys and said, ‘You know, I think I could live here.’”
They called a realtor in Lexington who discouraged them from looking at houses in Clifton Forge, labeling it “a depressed town.”
Which, in 2005, was an accurate label for the former C&O Railway hub. The Locomotive Shops, which in the early 1950s had employed more than 2,000 people, had shut down; workers had been transferred to Huntington, West Virginia and Cumberland, Maryland. The cash-strapped city reverted to town status in 2001, and many of the businesses on Ridgeway and Main streets were closed.
Being people who aren’t afraid to take on the unknown, the Hillerts bought the house and moved to Clifton Forge from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, the state that John had called home for most of his life, and where he and Gayle had lived for decades.
That’s 900 miles. That’s leaving home. That’s crossing the threshold into an unknown land where the unknown waits.
The unknown that was waiting for John Hillert was a dark and musty building on Clifton Forge’s Main Street.
Like the town around it, the Masonic Theatre had fallen on hard times when Hillert saw it in 2007, attending a STARS performance sponsored by Appalfolks of America. By then, it had stood empty for four years.
“It was where people who didn’t have anywhere else to go hung out,” one longtime resident put it. “It wasn’t a piece of Clifton Forge that looked promising.”
I don’t know what John Hillert saw that night; I’d been gone from Clifton Forge since the early 1990s. But I can tell you that when I took my children to see the reissue of “Snow White” in 1987, the theatre’s bats were as much an attraction as the movie.
I do know from photos and news stories that the Masonic Lodge and Opera House, as it was called when it opened in 1906, was a stunner. Designed by the prestigious Lynchburg architectural firm of Frye and Chesterman, the 545-seat Neoclassical theatre had three spacious floors and a warehouse basement beneath street level. The elegant theatre auditorium had box seats rising on either side of the stage and perfect acoustics. Upstairs, the chandeliered, brass-railed balcony housed African-American theatre patrons prior to 1965, when segregation officially ended. The third-floor Masonic Meeting Hall afforded stunning views of Clifton Forge and the mountains that cradle it. Despite defaulting on the $42,000 loan in 1910, the Masons continued to meet there until 1921.
In its elegant heyday, the Masonic Theatre hosted vaudeville acts, operas and operettas, magicians and musicals, plays and politicians—William Jennings Bryan took the Masonic stage in 1908 during his ill-fated presidential run. Silent films were added, followed by talkies in 1929.
In the day, you could buy your ticket and see just about anything at the Masonic. Lash LaRue. Hopalong Cassidy. Roy Rogers and Trigger. The Lone Ranger and Silver. Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Cowboy Bob Steele. Shirley Temple, John Wayne, and Elvis movies. Musical icons like the Count Basie Orchestra and the Drifters.
Fast forward to 1987. The Historic Masonic—by then the longest continuously operating theatre in Virginia—closed its doors. Despite reopening in 1991 as a production theatre for the service group Appalfolks of America, the Masonic Theatre was returned to the town of Clifton Forge in 2003. And the west end of Main Street went dark.
The night John Hillert saw the Masonic Theatre in 2007, he emailed his wife Gayle, working in Switzerland for Bernina USA. “The Theatre needs to be restored. It needs to be taken care of.”
I can’t help but wonder what it was that caught Hillert’s eye that night in that dark, neglected place—what set him to dreaming of a new day for the crumbling Masonic Theatre? What made him think that spending ten years of his retired life was the right thing to do, in a town he was fond of from the start, but in which he had no deep roots?
Those are questions without answers. Young dreams rarely make sense to anyone other than the dreamer.
Maybe the best answer is the one Gayle Hillert provides. “What John saw was a glimpse of what had been—and what could be. From the start, he saw the potential of the theatre as a gathering place for the Alleghany Highlands. He’s always been able to see possibilities.”
John and Gayle met in graduate school at Auburn University, where they were in a guidance counseling class together. “At our first class meeting, he pulled out two books: ‘The Giving Tree’ and ‘The Velveteen Rabbit.’ I knew then he was a special man. Any man who would bring those two books as resources had to be good.”
Highlands’ attorney Meade Snyder remembers the day John Hillert caught him on the street early in 2009, asking for his help in exploring Masonic restoration.
“I passed by that theatre two or three times every day…I guess I’d gotten used to seeing it sitting empty,” Snyder says. “But John had a vision. Not all visions are worth pursuing—this one surely was.”
The nonprofit Historic Masonic Theatre Foundation was formed in June, 2009. Architects drew up plans, and contractors made bids. The resulting fundraising picture was daunting: between $5 and $6 million would be needed to restore the Theatre with historical accuracy and integrity.
So Hillert and his foundation members hit the streets. “They basically took money from whoever would give it,” Gayle says.
John was adamant that construction would not begin until all the money was in place. It took six years to raise the needed millions. Six years of writing grants, appealing to individuals and businesses, and applying for tax credits. That’s a lot of dragons to slay. That’s a long time to maintain a dream.
With $5 million in hand, the foundation officially announced the closing of the Masonic Theatre for renovation in March of 2015, the Grand Reopening gala set for July 1-3, 2016.
Most days, John Hillert was on site as Thor Construction from Roanoke and local sub-contractors went to work restoring the Historic Masonic to its former glory. During the 15 months of construction, you’d be more likely to find John pushing a broom or running errands than supervising from a distance. His famous smile welcomed curious visitors and defused the inevitable setbacks in what ended up being a $6.7 million construction project.
Of course there were disappointments. Delays. Necessary pauses and repositioning. But Hillert never wavered. That’s how it is for someone who dreams big. There’s no going back in the face of difficulties and setbacks. “You just suck it up, and do it,” John said. “I’m getting it wrong as often as I’m getting it right. But I’m going to keep trying.”
Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece had nothing on John Hillert. The Historic Masonic Theatre opened on schedule, and John was there to see it, standing characteristically to the side as music and movies played late into the night and the Alleghany Highlands celebrated.
Theatre Executive Director Jeff Stern had his doubts about taking on the opening of the Masonic in the Alleghany Highlands.
“From a demographic standpoint, this theatre project wasn’t one that seemed particularly optimistic,” Stern said. “Arts managers look at what they need to do to keep the place alive. To successfully run a theatre in the black, you need to go far enough to capture seven to eight times the population of the town or city your theatre is in. I’d opened another theatre, and my experience was one of going in a twenty-mile radius. Here? They were looking at a seventy-mile radius!”
It was listening to John Hillert on YouTube at the groundbreaking for the Theatre restoration that made Stern want to know more. “John wanted to talk about why they were taking on this huge project. It was all about the vision. How the theatre would help the place he called home, by bringing the community together. He saw the theatre as more than an economic benefit to the Alleghany Highlands—he talked about the human benefit. John and I were united in that.”
“I knew it was a leap of faith, taking on the operation of the Historic Masonic. But the building was spectacular, and meeting John in person reinforced what I sensed about him. With John as the proven visionary, I could focus on the bookings and operations, do what I do best. It wouldn’t be easy—no one put lipstick on the project, or tried to paper over any difficulties—but I knew I had a leader by my side.”
The difficulty that Jeff Stern couldn’t have foreseen when he accepted the directorship of the Historic Masonic Theatre was that John Hillert, the unwavering energy behind the Masonic resurrection, wasn’t going to be standing next to him for very long.
Two weeks after the Historic Masonic reopened, John Hillert was diagnosed with stage four nonsmokers lung cancer. For 10 months, with characteristic courage and will, he underwent surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and immunotherapy, working from his hospital bed and wheelchair to chart a way forward for the theatre.
That’s what a hero does: persevere in the face of setbacks, holding firm to the vision that set him on his journey, to win the prize and share it with others. A hero looks forward, not back. And when the hero’s journey is complete, we are all the beneficiaries of his accomplishment.
John died on May 18th, 2017, 11 days after his daughter’s garden wedding and Theatre reception, wearing his Historic Masonic Theatre t-shirt. His celebration of life was held a year to the day after the Theatre reopened, as he would have wanted it—in the John E. Hillert Auditorium.
A story about a grand theatre and a hero can’t be in better company than Shakespeare. The famous “Seven Stages of Man” speech from “As You Like It” puts us right there on the stage, surrounded by all those who came before us, with room for those who will come after us:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts, …
Although he would be the last to claim the title, John Hillert played the hero in bringing back the Historic Masonic Theatre. He dreamed the dream, then rolled up his sleeves and made it happen, allowing countless others to play their parts right next to him.
May the Historic Masonic Theatre lights burn bright in the Alleghany Highlands and beyond, as we move into the future that John Hillert helped envision for us all.
... for more from our November/December 2017 issue, Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!