It's Friday, Jan. 27, 2023, the day of the week when I reprise a quotation meant to be uplifting or educational. Today's words of wisdom come from Avery Hopwood, an incandescent early 20th century American playwright who died before his time.
I became curious about Hopwood eight years ago in a roundabout way, as a winter storm named Juno slammed into the Eastern Seaboard. Despite being described by overwrought meteorologists, politicians, and easily excitable cable news correspondents as a "historic blizzard," it provided little more than a dusting here in Washington and only a few inches of snow covered New York City. But by the time it reached New England it was one nasty nor'easter.
In 1978, and again in 2003, Boston got 27 inches of snow, so records there are hard to break -- but Juno did it, at least in Worcester, which recorded 34.5 inches.
Insofar as the predicted storm proved something of a dud in ports of call further south, the weather forecasters sounded somewhat defensive. "With each situation there is some uncertainty," said New Jersey-based National Weather Service meteorologist Walter Drag. "We are not happy that we ‘over-hyped,' if you will, what is the reality," Drag added. "But we thought it was in the best interest based on the information we had up to this morning to protect life and property."
That's government-speak for "better safe than sorry," and it's a good point. Even then, there are no guarantees, as the city of Washington, D.C., learned on this day in 1922. The snow that began falling that Friday night would turn lethal.
Nobody thought to name winter storms in 1922, as neither The Weather Channel nor its medium had yet been invented. But motion pictures were becoming a huge draw, and American ingenuity was put to the task of building large movie theaters in all the major cities to accommodate the crowds flocking to see movies, even before the advent of "talkies." Fittingly, many of these ornate structures were patterned after the opera houses they were supplanting.
In 1915, Harry Crandall, owner of a small string of theaters in Washington, D.C., commissioned a local architect to design a grand cinema at the corner of 18th Street and Columbia Road in what's now called the Adams Morgan neighborhood.
Architect Reginald W. Geare created a stylish, three-story movie house that could seat 1,700 patrons. Its Georgian Revival facade incorporated the curvature of Columbia Road into its design. Constructed of limestone on red brick, it contained touches of Colonial Revival and Neo-Classical styles. The interior was graceful and elegantly furnished. It was named the Knickerbocker Theatre.
The roof was flat, but in order to ensure stability, Geare's design called for steel supporting beams to extend eight inches into the walls on both sides of the theater. For reasons never fully explained, the contractor did not follow this design: The beams only went two inches into the walls. It was an ominous oversight.
Crandall's Knickerbocker opened its doors on October 12, 1917. The feature film was a historical drama starring Alice Brady in the title role of "Betsy Ross." Miss Brady even made an appearance that night at Harry Crandall's new edifice.
For more than four years, Washingtonians flocked to the place. A large crowd was there on January 28, 1922, a Saturday night, for a hit comedy, "Get Rich Quick Wallingford." To Crandall's patrons, the theater seemed a safe and entertaining respite from a winter storm that had appeared with little notice the day before. It had been snowing for nearly 24 hours in Washington, courtesy of a weather system that had formed just off the South Carolina coast. The blizzard moved northward slowly, trapped over the Washington area by a stationary high-pressure system in New York that both stalled the storm and kept temperatures lower than normal.
By mid-afternoon Saturday two feet of snow had accumulated in the nation's capital, and it didn't stop that evening during the showing of the movie. At intermission, while the theater orchestra was playing and the lights were being dimmed, an estimated 28 inches of snow had accumulated on the roof.
Suddenly, with the only warning being a loud hissing -- the sound of the roof ripping in half -- thousands of tons of concrete, steel, and snow came crashing down on the moviegoers. What followed was bedlam and tragedy. In the darkness with the snow still falling, desperate rescue attempts were mounted.
In the end, 98 Knickerbocker patrons died and more than a hundred were injured, some quite seriously. The aftermath was filled with blame and recrimination, as would be expected, and it could be said that the real death toll was an even 100: Reginald Geare never recovered his reputation and committed suicide five years later; Harry Crandall died the same way after going broke in the 1930s.
But that story line is a little too tidy. Less than a year after the disaster, Crandall hired a new architect, rebuilt the Knickerbocker and renamed it the Ambassador Theatre. It was even more ornate than its predecessor and slightly larger, seating some 1,800.
The Ambassador is long since gone, with an ugly brick bank now standing in its place, but on September 20, 1923, it opened in high style with the premier of a Warner Bros. farce, "The Gold Diggers." The script was based on a play of the same name written by Avery Hopwood. Largely forgotten now, Hopwood was America's leading playwright before Eugene O'Neill burst on the scene. Born in Cleveland and educated at the University of Michigan, Hopwood spent a few months as a reporter on the Cleveland Leader before talking his editors into becoming the newspaper's New York correspondent. Once in the Big Apple, Hopwood made a name for himself writing for the stage.
By 1920, newspapering was in his rearview mirror and Hopwood had four hit plays running simultaneously on Broadway. At the time, the best of these was considered "Fair and Warmer," although the most commercially successful (not to mention most enduring) was a whodunit he co-authored called "The Bat" -- the inspiration for the "Batman" franchise.
Avery Hopwood died in his mid-40s while swimming in the French Riviera as the Twenties were still roaring. He left most of his estate to his mother, but bequeathed $150,000 to his alma mater for a scholarship. The Avery and Jule Hopwood Prize went to students in his old department who produced or performed the best creative work in dramatic writing, fiction, or poetry. Per the playwright's expressed wishes, the rules proclaimed: "Students have the widest possible latitude, and the new, the unusual and the radical are especially encouraged."
Campus conformity has taken a much different turn in the 21st century than that of Avery Hopwood's time, but regardless of who's doing the censoring and the canceling, the spirit of his sentiment remains essential to the creative process. And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
