Roger Gans died a couple of months ago. I heard about it from Gus, who had seen it on Facebook. Roger’s daughter Caitlyn had shared the news.
I have to go back a ways to set the scene for my meeting with Roger. I had been working as a stage technician at Flint Center on the DeAnza campus until June 1978 when I was laid off following the passage of Proposition 13. At that time, there was a casino building boom in Reno. A lot of my theatre friends had gotten jobs at the big ‘Hello Hollywood’ show at the MGM Grand there so I went up and applied for a job.
I didn’t get hired at the MGM but I got in at the Sahara Reno. The Del Webb Corporation was building a new hotel and casino in downtown Reno. There was a showroom, but also a smaller room and a convention space with some meeting rooms. Of course there were slots and tables for gamblers.
All of this needed sound systems and that was what I wanted to do. Mostly at the Sahara I was tending to broken microphones in the pits.
Anyway, the whole thing was over extended and not really ready for the business they thought they were going to have. I got laid off again in September. This was after moving lock stock and barrel to Reno.
Word on the street was that the Stagehands’ Local 16 in San Francisco needed sound people so I went down there and got work immediately. Not sound work, but work. Perrie Dodson was in the Union office and I had worked with Perrie when he had been bringing the Symphony down to Flint in previous years.
I took whatever they had for me – mostly carpenter jobs: midnight turnaround crew at the Opera House, SF Civic Light Opera shows at the Orpheum – but kept telling Perrie and Eddie that I was a sound man and wanted to work sound.
In December 1979, the Golden Gate Theatre was reopened as a Broadway road house (Chorus Line, in its first national tour! I worked the load in.) Jim Wright had been doing the sound for the SF Opera but he moved to the Golden Gate. I now knew there was an opening.
In March, the Opera went to the Palace of Fine Arts for their Spring Opera season. I got the call, but Tim Morgan, from the SFO electric crew, had been designated as the sound man. This was consistent with the way the Local 16 had staffed sound positions for many years. Tim was a neighbor of Eddie Powell in Tiburon. I was still a carpenter.
Tim was (and is) a great guy, but he knew nothing about sound. Roger Gans was already the sound designer for the Opera and got quite frustrated when Tim couldn’t put together what Roger wanted.
After Spring Opera ended, Roger made a fuss to John Priest, the Opera’s Technical Director. John went to Eddie and asked him to send him someone better. Enter me!
In July, Eddie sent me over to the Opera House to replace Jim Wright as the sound man. What he didn’t tell me was that Jim Wright had been a part time sound person, also filling roles in the electric department. I just dove into the sound world, ignoring the electrics. George Pantages, the head Electrician, let me go on and eventually replaced me on his crew. (I was technically under George at that time.) Jim had finagled a storage location in an unused room in the basement so I spent a lot of time down there organizing it.
One day, this guy shows up at this room and introduces himself to me. It’s Roger. I had actually met Roger before but I did not know him at all. He was associated with Dan Dugan but had also worked with Dick Garretson and the Beach Blanket Babylon people. Dick used to come down to Flint for the Nutcrackers we did at that time.
Those were the days when smoking was permitted inside buildings and Roger smoked a certain kind of cigarette called Sherman’s. They were pretty vile. Roger always went out in the hallway to smoke which I appreciated. Not much by today’s standards but nice for the time.
We were about the same age. I think Roger was a little older.
We both were passionate about sound, especially theatre sound. Roger worked for the Old Globe Theatre Company in San Diego. He had worked closely with composer Conrad Susa on many productions of Shakespeare there over the previous few years.
He had gotten in at the Opera a couple of years before and had chafed at the difficulty getting his designs executed with antiquated equipment and under qualified sound men.
*** To be Continued in Part II ***