By Stan Roeser

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, and in a similar vein it’s a truism that you can’t always judge a news story by its headline.

That became apparent to me as I perused the front page of last week’s Independent Review.

“City Council receives $100,000 offer for the Opera House” was the headline which quickly caught my attention.

My reaction was that the headline signaled the solution to the Opera House dilemma which would please everyone — a wealthy individual with ties to Litchfield had come forward with an offer to buy and refurbish the building with money as no object.

Reading the story quickly deflated this pipedream.
Instead, the story outlined an offer by an amorphous group to put forward an amorphous amount of money and much empty rhetoric about restoring what I choose to call the Litchfield Community Building.

Here I should point out that Editor Brent Schacherer and I are not on the same page on this preservation. Neither, for that matter, are my wife and I. They want to save it. I’m for razing it.

My contention is that the Community Building and its predecessor the “Opera House” simply did not play a significant role in Litchfield’s past to merit any larger community expenditure and effort to preserve it.

I’ve come to this conclusion after delving into the building’s background far more extensively than most Litchfield citizens have, partly due to my connection with LHS and University of Minnesota grad Scott Brummond, who wrote a detailed history of the Opera House as part of his class work at the “U.”

I could see restoring the building if it were to fill some clear-cut need in the community as did the restoration of the old middle school into the very serviceable Family Service Center.

Prior to writing this column I studied carefully the report made by the Litchfield Opera House Re-use Study group. It was an exceptionally well-done report covering all aspects of possible restoration, with one exception.

Nowhere in that report did I come across a sensible suggestion for use of the building, if and when money can be found for restoration.

Nostalgia and sentimentality are heartwarming traits, but they don’t pay bills.

One comment, perhaps more realistic than others in the reuse study was to preserve the building as it is — just so it is there. I visualized the building standing shrouded in plastic like the Darwin Twine Ball.

And while I recognize that the Greater Litchfield Opera House Board includes well-meaning community-minded citizens I must tell you that the inclusion in the cost of razing the building as part of the $100,000 offer is, to use an arcane word, simply risible.

I read with some interest the accounts in the reuse study of other communities which have had some success in restoring structures similar to our Community Building.

In Red Wing, for instance, voters backed a $1.5 million bond issue to help refurbish the Sheldon Theatre and then went back to raise $2 million in contributions.

Pessimist that I am, I don’t think a similar scenario is even remotely possible in Litchfield.

In St. James, the report noted that $300,000 has been spent but added than an additional $2 million is needed.

My thought is that if there is potential for raising a substantial amount of money through contributions that money would benefit the community far more if directed toward a municipal outdoor pool than restoring the Community Building.

You can digest, I’ll grant you, all the preceding as the ruminations of an avowed pessimist.

In this vein, a report in the Opera House Re-use study carried the text of a speech given by then Litchfield Mayor Alfred Anderson on the occasion of changing the Opera House to the Community Building.

Speaking on Aug. 28, 1935, Anderson’s speech carried a line which jolted me a bit. “The greatest trouble with this old world today is that there are too many pessimists.”

Was he prescient, I wonder, in the knowledge that almost 75 years later there would be a pessimist writing columns for the local newspaper?

Stan Roeser is former editor and former co-owner of the Independent Review.