Published: July 19, 2008 11:37 pm            

As a member of the old Sycamore Showcase group, Larry Beymer ushered entertainment icons around Terre Haute

TERRE HAUTE — Who could’ve imagined the scene before Larry Beymer’s eyes?

Bill Cosby, the edgiest young comedian in America, leaning against a tank of aviation fuel, smoking one of his trademark cigars at Hulman Field Airport right here in little old Terre Haute, Indiana.

Never mind Cosby’s hot stardom. Beymer feared real fire.

“There was Bill Cosby with a big cigar lit, leaning against a tank of aviation fuel,” Beymer recalled of that October day in 1968. “I said, ‘Mr. Cosby?’ And he said, ‘Yeeessss.’ And I said, ‘Would you mind stepping away from that aviation fuel?’ And he did.

“I saved Bill Cosby’s life,” he added.

The Coz would never have tempted his fate in Terre Haute, if not for a daring venture by Beymer and a handful of fellow staffers at Indiana State University.

In 1967, they persuaded then-ISU President Alan Rankin to allow them to bring in national-caliber artists to entertain the students and community in, of all places, the very athletic ISU Arena, seven years before the more elaborate Hulman Center opened.

Rankin’s approval came with one daunting condition — it had to be completely independent and self-supporting, with no university or student funding. It would seem like a recipe for failure, considering the members of this new Sycamore Showcase series committee had absolutely no experience in show business. They were administrators, accountants and professors.

“We didn’t know anything,” said Beymer, a professor of counseling psychology at ISU for 37 years. “We had to learn.”

They did. Quickly. And in its 10-year run, their Sycamore Showcase series lured a “cavalcade of stars” to Terre Haute to the Arena and then for a while into Hulman Center. Once that facility opened, they gradually gave way to a professional, full-time promoter, Kim Tidd. But as the Showcase committee’s decade of moonlighting as talent finders ended, they’d learned a lot and seen a lot.

Take the ISU homecoming 1970, for example.

The Showcase landed Latin musicians Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66. As the Oct. 13 concert date approached, the band’s management informed the committee the group wouldn’t perform in the round, as the Arena was arranged, without a rotating stage. So Showcase member Ken Uhlhorn — by day, the director of the ISU Science Center, drove to Pennsylvania to get the only available rotating stage.

On homecoming night, members of Brasil ’66 played the first of their scheduled two shows, then left to eat and party a bit, Beymer explained. They returned, energized, and during their second show, Mendes invited the crowd to dance on the stage. The additional bodies on that rotating surface “exceeded its weight limit by about 200 percent,” Beymer remembered. “Ken Uhlhorn was sweating blood, because if they’d have broken that, we’d have lost our butt.”

Instead, the concert succeeded, like nearly all of their Showcase events. They started small, with jazz trumpter Al Hirt on Oct. 13, 1967, and used that “seed money” to build up a list of performers filled with household names, comic legends and Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Famers … Cosby and the Staple Singers on homecoming 1968, Henry Mancini and Jose Feliciano less than a month later, The Fifth Dimension, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Carson on homecoming 1969, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, The Temptations, Neil Diamond and Albert Brooks on homecoming 1971, Tina Turner, Sly and the Family Stone, Chicago, The Carpenters on homecoming 1972, Yes, Johnny Cash along with June Carter and Carl Perkins, REO Speedwagon, Bob Hope on homecoming 1973, and the Edgar Winter Group, all before Hulman Center.

“The purpose for this whole damn series was to give the students something different on the weekends that they can’t get at Purdue or IU,” Beymer said, sifting through a stack of letters, photos and ticket stubs from that era. “But the stars have to line up just right.”

Open arms at ISU

The stars aligned perfectly on Oct. 13, 1973. Latin pop singer Vikki Carr, the scheduled homecoming headliner, canceled. Hope’s career was stung by criticism of his initially hawkish stand on Vietnam, and wound up connecting with the Showcase committee. Once he’d been signed, Beymer had to tell comedian John Byner, originally booked as Carr’s warmup act, that he couldn’t perform. (As a rule, Hope insisted on not sharing the bill with any other comics.) Byner “wasn’t pleased,” Beymer said.

Beymer’s Showcase role was to attend to the performers’ needs before and after the shows. He escorted an exhausted and withdrawn Steve Martin before his infamous “Nowhere, USA” moment in Terre Haute, marveled at the professionalism of shy but polite Johnny Carson, found Henry Mancini “very personable,” endured Barry Manilow’s insistence upon three tunings of his piano, and saw Tina Turner on “tall heels, and she could really kick up a storm.”

His experience with Hope was particularly memorable.

Beymer, now 76, watched the UCLA-Notre Dame football game with Hope at the Sheraton Inn on the afternoon of the concert. Hope also required a dish of prunes in his hotel room refrigerator. To give his shows a local flavor, Hope got details about ISU and the town, and then telephoned his joke writer back in California. A half-hour later, Beymer listened as Hope reviewed the writer’s offerings, one by one, over the phone.

“He says, ‘Uh, huh. That’ll work. Uh-huh. Some real knee-slappers,” Beymer said. “And then people here say, ‘Boy, he really knows us.’ He was a real pro.”

Hope indeed was a hit here. Just months earlier, the war issue got him booed at a Notre Dame show.

“I think he came [to ISU] at a time when he needed us as much as we needed him,” Beymer said.

Hope wasn’t the only Showcase act embroiled in controversy. Jose Feliciano’s performance on Nov. 3, 1968, came less than a month after he unwittingly outraged conservative Americans by singing a slow, heartfelt rendition of the national anthem before Game 5 of the World Series in Detroit. NBC’s switchboard lit up for days, with callers infuriated by the blind Puerto Rican singer’s unique version of “The Star Spangled Banner,” accompanied only by his guitar. In a retrospective clip now on YouTube.com, Feliciano recalled, “After that happened, everything that I was doing stopped. Radio stations stopped playing my records.”

Yet his Terre Haute show went on. “And he played [that national anthem version] here, too,” Beymer said, grinning.

Still, singer-songwriter Neil Diamond delivered the most thrilling Showcase performance, in Beymer’s opinion. Diamond and his band unveiled a 25-song show that became his epic 1972 album “Hot August Night” during two shows in the Arena. “That was spooky,” Beymer said. “I get chills just remembering it.”

Beymer also watched Carson, his band leader Doc Severinsen and a dance team do a two-show gig here. Afterward, the shy but gracious Carson told Beymer, “This is the most satisfying night I’ve ever had. I have never had two shows go perfectly like this.”

A few surprises

Sometimes, Beymer and the Showcase crew got their eyes opened. Forty-five minutes before one Arena show, some female performers — who Beymer prefers to keep anonymous — demanded a quart of cognac. A Showcaser drove to buy some, brought it back. “When they went on stage, there were three empty glasses and an empty bottle in the trash,” Beymer said. Their show, nonetheless, was a crowd-pleaser, “because [professional performers] have got egos as big as their outsides,” Beymer added. “They still want to be good.”

Strange moments continued after Hulman Center opened, and the Showcase team continued to assist shows occasionally. They found an ISU alumni who owned a Rolls Royce, and convinced him to become the official limo driver for the artists. When KISS came to town, Beymer recalled, the alum picked Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley and Co. up after the show to take them back to their hotel. Along the route, an older motorist in another car up ahead stopped suddenly, and the Rolls hit it from behind.

The KISS guys were still in their sinister makeup and costumes.

“All four of those guys bailed out of this car to see what happened,” Beymer said, “and the old man driving the [other] car about had a heart attack.”

The concert series committee eventually was pressured to add more student reps and university officials, and undergo university oversight, Beymer said. That, coupled with the presence of a professional promotion staff at Hulman Center, brought the Sycamore Showcase to an end. They finished in the black, with $22,000 left in the Showcase account, Beymer said.

The original Showcase team included Beamer, Uhlhorn, mastermind and vice president for student affairs John Truitt, his assistant James Boyle, controller William Neihart, and ISU Union Board program director Linda Eldred, although the committee grew and added other members, Beymer said. The unforgettable moments they initiated included that Fifth Dimension show in ’68. Beymer’s wife, Norma, gave birth to a daughter — one of their four children — six hours after watching that show.

“I’ve always told her, on the day you were born, The Fifth Dimension was here singing ‘Up, Up and Away (In My Beautiful Balloon),’” Beymer said.

The Showcase gave ISU and Terre Haute a niche among other colleges and places, he said.

“We were blessed to have an administration with a vision and courage that said, ‘This might work, so we’ll try it,’” Beymer said.



Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.