Our attention is focused on Woodstock, Illinois, with the 80th anniversary celebration of the 1934 Todd Theatre Festival set for this weekend.
Welles’ spent much of childhood at the Todd School for Boys and his affection for the school, headmaster Roger Hill and Woodstock is well-documented.
Asked once where he considered home, Welles replied, “I suppose its Woodstock, Illinois, if it’s anywhere. I went to school there for four years, and if I think of home, it’s there. It may be a tedious cliché to say that school days are the happiest days of your life, but Roger Hill and his staff were so unique, and the school so imbued with real happiness, that one could hardly fail to enjoy oneself within its boundaries.”
Welles talked of returning to the school one day as a teacher and his 1946 thriller “The Stranger,” set in a quiet town, made sly references to the Todd School for Boys and Woodstock.
A sign is glimpsed mentioning Mrs. Collins (a housemother at Todd) and another refers to Clover Hall (a building on the Todd School campus).
Most notably, a sign warns of the dangers of mishandling the athletic equipment. Welles’ camera lingers on the sign and the audience can see the warning was signed Coach Roskie.
Roskie was a real-life coach at the Todd School and a fixture in the Woodstock community. He oversaw the dormitory where Welles lived as a student.
In his excellent book, Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts, Hill’s grandson, Todd Tarbox, recounts an exchange between Hill and Welles about Roskie a few years before Welles’ death.
ORSON: Is Coach Roskie still in Woodstock?
ROGER: Yes, Roskie is still there.
ORSON: There is no love lost between us.
ROGER: He was in charge of and lived in Grace Hall, the big dormitory that Noble Hill built, the Frank Lloyd Wright prairie style building. Do you remember it?
ORSON: Remember it? You’re talking to a man who not only went to Todd, but lived within those storied stones for most of my time there. There was a running fight between us at all times.
ROGER: I do remember how mean he was to you because your unbridled spirit ran him ragged. One night I tried to save you, but couldn’t.
ORSON: I was out on the town. AWOL… A member of the fairer sex more than once prompted my escapes.
Anthony C. Roskie grew up in Rockford, Illinois and attended Rockford High School.
After graduating from Lake Forest College outside of Chicago in 1929, he took a position as a coach and teacher at Todd School for Boys, eventually serving as its athletic director. Following his years at Todd and Woodstock Community High Schoo, Roskie became a founder of McHenry County College.
The father of two, Roskie was voted Woodstock Citizen of the Year in 1971. Eleven years later, a pavilion at Woodstock City Park was named in his honor. He died in 1995 at the age of 89.
Now, some 80 years after Welles attended Todd School and tangled with Roskie, Woodstock will pay tribute to one of the town’s most famous sons
Based on the recollections contained in Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts, Welles would have been touched, though it is doubtful he would have shown up for the honor.
ROGER: Do you remember the charming, if florid, prose you wrote for our Todd Theatre Festival mailing piece?
“Like a wax flower under glass, in the paisley and gingham county of McHenry is Woodstock, grand capital of mid-Victorianism in the Midwest. Towering over a Square full of Civil War monuments…is an honest-to-horsehair Opera House.”
Not everyone was pleased with your characterization of the town. Many of the city fathers were mad at you and me for what they considered our making fun of the town with your effusive-
ORSON: Well, there was nothing to make fun of. What I wrote was in affection and admiration.
ROGER: Of course it was. Now the town burghers quote your passage of praise in all their promotional pieces. Times have changed and the town now treasures it’s roots, which you extolled. But fifty years ago, Woodstock was the home of the Woodstock Typewriter Factory…and the city fathers wanted to be…a prosperous manufacturing center…They didn’t share your bucolic, sepia-colored image of the town. They didn’t want your charm at all. “Watch Woodstock grow!” was their ceaseless mantra.
ORSON: I hate to see the modern world coming between me and my memories. Paris, London, and New York are just not the same cities.
ROGER: I always keep thinking there’s one chance in a thousand that you will fly to your Midwest once more. Don’t you have any nostalgia in your bones?
ORSON: None at all. There are so many places in the world I have nostalgia for… and every one of them has been horribly changed. I don’t want to see that change. I don’t want to see Woodstock as a suburb of Chicago. What pleasure would that give me? Chicago might be different.
But much of the pre-Second World War character of New York and Chicago hardly exists anymore. Everybody builds these mirror boxes, and every second front is a front that didn’t exist in the ‘30’s… I’ve been to New York many times in the last few years, and I have no sense of coming back to a town where I used to live. There’s a little corner here and there, and that’s about it.
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