For One Local Couple, Edmond Town Hall

Is The Seat Of Many Memories

By Kaaren Valenta

When Charles D. Ferris, III, was a senior at Newtown High School in 1956, he wanted to be in the talent show at Edmond Town Hall so he joined a folk band, the Hayshakers, led by Joe Ozanne, who played the harmonica and guitar and also taught French and American history at the school.

“Charlie” Ferris also played a guitar in the talent show. Shirley Cole, Class of 1959, played the accordion.

“It was at the town hall that I got the first look at the girl who would later become my wife,” Mr Ferris said. “She was outstanding — very pretty.”

The annual talent show was the first opportunity that many students had to perform in front of a large audience on what seemed, at the time, to be an enormous stage.

“I played a very poor version of ‘Lady of Spain’ on the accordion,” Shirley Cole Ferris recalled. “I was scared to death — my whole body was shaking. To this day I hate to be in front of groups. But my father used to say that it was these kind of things that build your character.”

Charlie and Shirley Ferris have many fond memories of activities held over the years at Edmond Town Hall so when the Newtown Lions Club announced this year that its tercentennial project would be replacing the downstairs seats in the Edmond Town Hall Theatre, the couple decided to pay for two seats.

“We both graduated from high school at the town hall,” Mr Ferris said. “My wife recalls when she was a junior being a ‘fern girl’ as part of the graduation services for the Class of 1958. Fern girls lined up along the center aisle, holding up palms to form an arch for the graduating class to march under on their way to the stage. Junior boys served as ushers at graduation.”

“I thought it was really cool,” Mrs Ferris recalled, laughing. “You were selected to be a fern girl or an usher by [teacher] Kate Dolan based on three criteria: your grades, the amount of civic duty you performed, and whether she liked you or she didn’t. If you were selected, you felt pretty important.”

Charlie Ferris remembers the days when he played basketball at the town hall gym.

“Coach Harold DeGroat used to bus students to the town hall from Hawley because the gym at Hawley was smaller than the gyms of most of the schools where we completed,” Mr Ferris said. “He’d take four or five students in his 1944 station wagon with wood-paneled sides, then go back for more. After a few trips he’d have everyone for the basketball game.

“We would practice there and also played games there until the middle of 1953 when the new high school [now the middle school on Queen Street] was ready,” he said.

“I also remember my dad, Charles D. Ferris, Jr, talking about how he and his brother William worked with draft horses, doing excavation work for the foundation of the town hall when it was being built.”

Charlie Ferris was president of the NHS chapter of Future Farmers of America, a member of the high school’s fire crew, and an essay winner many times over, according to the 1956 yearbook. In one essay, reprinted in that yearbook, he bemoaned the loss of farmland to development, noting that “farmers in my area may have to pay as much as $1,000 an acre to compete with the building contractors” when purchasing additional land for their farming operations.

“Forty acres across the road from our farm sold for $40,000 that year,” he recalled in a recent interview. “It might as well have been a million dollars. There wasn’t any way that we could have afforded it.”

Shirley Cole was in band and chorus, worked on the newspaper and yearbook staffs, and was a member of the drama club and the prom committee during her high school years. She went on to become a journalist and to serve as Connecticut’s commissioner of agriculture for eight years.

Over the years the Ferrises, who own the Ferris Acres dairy farm and an ice cream shop known as The Creamery on Route 302, had many occasions to go to the town hall.

“We went to movies in the theater and dances and wedding receptions in the Alexandria Room,” Shirley Ferris said. “The Alexandria Room was used a lot when we were younger because the kitchen could still be used.”

“We’ve got a lot of happy memories,” Mr Ferris agreed. “The Lions project has given us an opportunity to revisit some good times and to share in the revitalization of a beautiful building.”

Mrs Ferris said she believes the project will reach its goal of $150,000 in the town’s tercentennial year.

“I think there are enough people in this town that have memories from long ago, or more recently, of the building and the theater that this project will be successful,” she said.

Gordon Williams, coordinator of the project for the Lions, said the gift from Charles and Shirley Ferris has increased the number of seats purchased to 295.

“Additional money, however, has been collected because many people have not wished to buy a seat at $300 but have wanted to contribute,” Mr Williams said. “These smaller donations are very necessary as when all 411 seats are sold, there will still be a need of more than $25,000 to reach the $150,000 figure that is the estimate for what the seats will cost, counting installation and floor repair.”

Anyone who wants to contribute may send tax-deductible checks made out to the Edmond Town Hall Board of Managers. The checks should be mailed to the Newtown Lions Club, Attention: Gordon Williams, PO Box 218, Newtown 06470. Call Mr Williams at 426-6443 for more information.