The birth of the Paramus Scholarship Show

“Say Wes, I just came across a wonderful idea.”, I remarked to Wes Van Pelt, the Board of Education Secretary. We had bumped into each other at the Bergen Mall, then Paramus’ major shopping center. That was the beginning of what has become an annual scholarship fundraising event.

I had come across the idea of having churches and organizations contributing an act each and donating the monies to scholarship. Wes translated it into the PT Council which consisted of all the PTA and PTO’s in town. With his suggestion, I appeared before the Council with the germ of an idea. They liked it. Superintendent of Schools George Hodgins approved it and assigned Memorial School principal, Bill Dunn as his representative.

Wynema (Mrs. Richard) Duda was assigned by them as the liaison and I quickly petitioned Fred Manni. a neighbor and friend who had staged some productions for Ridge Ranch PTO. The three of us got together and laid the basic rules for putting together the first production. Fred was the overall director and I served as the unofficial head of the organization whose duty was to solve all the problems.

Word quickly spread and each member of the PT Council agreed to donate an 8 minute segment according to the rules set by Wynema, Fred and I. Russ Chapman joined us later on and made a lot of common sense contributions.

The criteria for participation as told by me to all the schools: “If they can breathe, they’re in!”. After all, we were all among neighbors and friends looking for a good time, not talented personnel. That’s not to say that individual talent didn’t appear. We found people that excelled in dance, in song, acting and in telling jokes.

Fred, Wynema and I would visit each school during rehearsal and Fred would often make suggestions. Fred was a whiz at knowing what would appeal to the audience and my job was to keep the peace. At that time, I used to travel a lot. I remember my wife, Ina, calling me at a hotel up in Buffalo, NY with a problem. I made several suggestions for her to relay and that seemed to solve the problem.

In one of our strategy meetings, Russ suggested that we drop off the committee one by one so that the same type of presentations would not prevail. He mentioned that he had come from a town where one person directed for 20 years and his technique was always visible and got boring. We agreed, but made one error. We did not tell Bill Dunn. Bill thought we had lost interest when actually, we went on to our schools and participated there.

That first year was a tremendous success, the exact amount collected eludes me, but it seems to be about $1700.00 for the 2 nights. That met the first graduating class of the Paramus High School. Of course it went on to become an annual event raising a lot of money. Many other organizations in town soon joined in to offer scholarship money.

How to fairly disburse the money was left up to the Administration and local bankers. Milt Stocker worked with Bill and George and set up a system where only a select few knew the actual need. They used numbers and letters to disguise the person’s financial needs. The original committee, Wynema, Fred, Russ and I, just made the money and turned it over to them.

It was a worthwhile effort