![]() Wiseman says he managed to pass on his passion for saving and restoring the opera house to the new foundation board. ![]() We got 15 people together and the city said it would give the opera house to the foundation for $1.” I had some friends who were experts in that area: a great lawyer friend of mine, a guy in construction and a woman who had just moved here. Why don’t you give it to a foundation? Well, I had to start that foundation. “I said to the council, ‘This thing is just sitting there. “We conjured up the city to take the vacant building for city hall and that left the opera house vacant. The latter was talking about building a new main office and giving its old building to the city. Then in the 1990s, he was serving on the town’s city council and on the board of a local bank. City hall was in it, and the upstairs was vacant,” Wiseman said.įirst he tried to garner private funds to restore the opera house’s upstairs, but that effort didn’t go really well. The only thing we had remaining in downtown Newberry was the opera house. “When all the (textile) mills closed in South Carolina, that left us with nothing but history. Wiseman called Smith in the late 1990s, but his efforts to renovate and preserve the Newberry Opera House date to the 1970s, he said. Wiseman’s goal? To convince Smith that she was needed in Newberry and that she belonged there. Wiseman said, ‘I have mint juleps and 65 degrees in South Carolina.” The promise of that oh-so- Southern adult beverage staple and the Palmetto State’s warmer climes led Smith to agree to – at least – come and visit. “It was really, really cold where I was,” Smith recalls. Then in 1998 during a particularly cold Vermont winter, Wiseman, a Newberry native and resident, called again. Smith to Newberry and the Newberry Opera House early in 1997 from a cherished fund raising position with the theater at Vermont’s prestigious Middlebury College, she turned him down. When retired dentist James Wiseman first sought to lure Deborah S. Creative community spirit revives an opera house and a small Palmetto State community
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