This article was originally published in The University Press, Lamar University’s student newspaper, on April 19, 2018.
Story by Eleanor Skelton
UP contributor
Marilyn Manson-Hayes didn’t expect her daughter’s volunteer work at the Tyrrell Historical Library to become a theatrical production.
When her daughter Laina started typing Rotarygrams newsletters she noticed several essays and prompted her mother to read them.
“Reading the essays brought inspiration to have the words heard,” she said. “The project is due to the sharp literary instincts of my daughter.”
Manson-Hayes said she hopes people will come to the show, set for 5 p.m., Monday, in the University Theatre, since it’s both entertaining and historical, unlike an academic seminar.
Beaumont’s Rotary Club was founded in 1913, she said, and in 1923, the club switched their newsletter format to Rotarygrams, a tri-fold pamphlet, which were stored in bound volumes at the Rotary Club office. Some of the archives were damaged and lost to time until the club decided to digitize them, Manson-Hayes said.
“I just noticed how the Rotarygrams changed when Rabbi Sam and Chester started writing them,” she said.
She thought she found a collaboration between the writers, as if they were helping each other.
Rabbi Samuel Rosinger, 1900 Russian immigrant and rabbi of Temple Emanuel at the time, and Chester Easley, a Texas-born Baptist and owner of Seaport Coal Company, both wrote for the newsletter over a period of about seven years.
“The writings of Rosinger and Easley are personal, poignant, sometimes funny and delightful, and echo what was being spoken about in the 1930s,” Manson-Hayes said in a release. “Come to hear (them) calling to make the world, especially Beaumont, a better place.”
The Great Depression, prohibition, women’s rights and education during the period are all discussed in these essays.
“Some are just hilarious,” Manson-Hayes said. “The performance of those essays will be like hearing their voices alive again.”
Three of Rosinger’s grandchildren are coming to Beaumont for the production.
“They’ve never heard these words before that their grandfather wrote,” Manson-Hayes said.
“Laina noticed that Rabbi Sam was writing some of these and she would think some of them were funny, like when he was going to buy a new car and he was suddenly popular with people he’d never met before.”
The rabbi also wrote against cutting teachers’ pay because he valued education.
“He wrote, ‘If you don’t have good education, then you’ll all just become a bunch of Bolsheviks,’” Manson-Hayes said.
“There was a women in business club in 1935,” she said. “It’s like everybody forgets that stuff happened here and that things were progressive and good. The streets didn’t used to be empty.”
Manson-Hayes, an Arkansas native who’s lived in Beaumont for the last 10 years, said she’s never lived anywhere long enough to learn the history of a place, but the Rotarygram essays were part of a shift for her.
“I’m a thespian, not a historian but I recognized if I was an actor, I would want to say these words,” she said, adding that there is power in saying words out loud.
“These newsletters went out to about 200 households,” she said. “I just felt these words needed to be heard again.”
Allison Nathan-Getz, president of Temple Emanuel, Floyd McFaddin, past president of Beaumont Rotary Club, and Mary Scheer, chair of Lamar’s history department, all supported her project to bring these voices back to life on stage, Manson-Hayes said.
“Dr. Mary Scheer has given so much support and I appreciate the faith she and the board of the History and Culture Center placed in me,” she said.
Manson-Hayes said the production will include original 1930s music like “There’s No Depression in Love,” “Crazy People” by the New Orleans based Boswell Sisters and “The Suicide Blues” by Houston singer Sippie Wallace.
Lamar’s Center for History and Culture awarded a grant for the production.
Eleanor Skelton 