by Barbara Brabec
Adapted from THE DRUMMER DRIVES! EVERYBODY ELSE RIDES
TO BE A SUCCESSFUL FREELANCE MUSICIAN, certain entrepreneurial qualities are essential for survival, but it wasn’t until Harry’s options as a full-time performing musician ran out that he discovered entrepreneurial skills and talents he didn’t know he had.
In 1975, Busch Gardens opened The Old Country, a theme park in Williamsburg, Virginia. In 1976, they wanted to present an outstanding event in the park that would draw both media attention and many new visitors to the park. Having heard of Harry’s successful management of the annual crafts festival at Silver Dollar City, Missouri, they asked him to come up with a unique idea for a crafts festival they could present in their theme park.
He then conceived and implemented a plan to bring together forty highly-skilled traditional American and European artisans and craftsmen who would demonstrate and sell their wares to an estimated quarter of a million visitors. The first show in 1976 was so successful that he was hired to produce a second one the following year.
The work for each year’s show required two six-week trips abroad to search for interesting artisans who would demonstrate old-world skills. Harry found not only the unusual, but the rare. Many of the crafts he discovered had never been seen in America before, and a few techniques demonstrated at the Exposition were being practiced by only a few people in the world. Invited foreign craftspeople came from England, Scotland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. (Russia was added to the list of countries for the second year, but at the last minute the two craftsmen Harry had contracted for the show weren’t allowed to attend, for reasons that never became clear. But he didn’t mind because getting into Russia meant that we both got to see a traditional Russian circus performance few tourists were privileged to attend.)
I WAS FORTUNATE to be able to accompany Harry on the second of each of those trips, which were once-in-a-lifetime journeys filled with unforgettable people and places that would make a book by itself. Harry always fancied himself something of a detective, and in this job he had a chance to prove his ability in that area because he had to figure out the best way to move from one city and country to another, get around in each city he visited, deal with language barriers, and then track down the specific individuals, businesses, organizations, and agencies in each of these places that could lead him to the individual artisans he was seeking.
His expertise on the telephone was invaluable here, of course. More important, though, were his keen communication skills and ability to deal with strangers in a foreign land who needed to feel at ease with him as soon as they met him. His smiling face and sense of humor was never more valuable than it was here because he was dealing with every kind of personality imaginable, and humor was something everyone could understand, even when they needed someone to translate it for them.
Once all the artisans were brought together in the U.S. for the show, Harry and I spent six weeks in Williamsburg to implement all details of the two-week festival. Here, he was managing the needs of forty creative individuals, coordinating hundreds of details related to the display and selling of their goods, and negotiating with Busch management to get everything needed for the best show possible. How he accomplished all this still boggles my mind. I couldn’t have done this job even if I could have mustered the courage to travel alone all over Europe, England, and especially into Russia, and I don’t know another individual (let alone a symphony musician) who could have pulled it off, either. It was simply a once-in-a-lifetime job that required a once-in-a-lifetime kind of guy, and Harry took to this work as easily as he took to the snare drum.
Never before—and never since—has there been an event like this in North America, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.
Harry was justifiably proud of the job he’d done here, and we always saw this experience as a major highlight of our lives.
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Tags: European art and crafts
