June 2025 - History Corner

#189 in an ongoing series about the history of the Hillside Club

A New Donation to the Hillside Club archive

For the June 2024 Fireside Meeting, I had the great pleasure of interviewing former Hillside Club member Carol Tomlinson, who in the 1960s and 70s was an actor and singer in the Club’s Spring Extravaganza theater productions. Carol’s mother, Lois Tomlinson, was the Club’s pianist, and often the composer, for at least sixteen Extravaganzas, and her father, Tommy, was also a frequent actor and singer in the productions.

Carol told many stories of the days when fifty to sixty Hillsiders would work together for months in all the different areas required to produce a show: writing the script and lyrics, composing the music, making the costumes, constructing the sets, painting the backdrops, designing the stage lighting, a dozen or more rehearsals, publicity, selling tickets—and all for a show that was only performed twice: once for Club members, and once for the general public.

In addition to the very enjoyable Fireside Meeting, Carol also generously donated to the Club her family’s large archive of theatrical material, including playbills, scripts, sheet music, photographs, newspaper clippings, and audio recordings. The recordings are on 7” reel-to-reel tapes, which are now quite delicate. We have begun the process of digitizing the recordings so that they can once again be heard after sixty years.