Blast From the Past

The Herald-Dispatch has a regular feature on its online site where they post old photos from their archives and invite readers to send in any information they might have to share.

I bring it up because there were a couple of photos posted today that should be of interest to local theatre followers. First was this one:


When I saw it, I thought, it has to be a stage production of the children's classic Puss in Boots (now more famous as a character in the Shrek movies).

The second photo was this one:


It clears up any mystery, thanks to information provided by Tony Broh.

He identifies the photos as being of the Junior League Children's Theater. He writes:

The photograph of the Junior League play is a production of Puss in Boots.

The woman on the left in the photo with the King is Hite Wilson Compton, who taught Speech and French at Huntington High School from the late 1920s through the 1970s. She also directed most of the senior plays, a tradition where the senior class produced a play that was performed at the end of the year a week or so before commencement.

She directed me in my senior play You Can't Take It With You. Hite Compton later married my father and became my stepmother, Hite Compton Broh. She died in 1981 and left her family papers with me. They are important because she was a direct descendant of John Laidley, the first president of Marshall, as well as Robert Holderby, who owned the land on which Marshall is located (Holderby's Landing gets its name from him).

Several of the family papers in Hite's family papers date back to the early 19th Century with signatures and notes of her famous ancestors.

What a wonderful find! I have to admit I didn't know anything about the Junior League Children's Theater, although certainly schools have been staging shows for a very long time.

It's also nice to see Mrs. Broh getting some recognition for her work!