When Tom Cormier looked at decades of detritus piled a foot high in the basement of the Oneonta Theater, he figured the 1890s cellar had a dirt floor.
With the help of the non-profit Friends of the Oneonta Theater (FOTOT), the backing-breaking cleanup ensued – basement to dumpster, basement to dumpster; “we kept MOSA busy all summer” – and Cormier got a pleasant surprise: The floor was cement.
Most of the surprises were bad ones at the historic property he had purchased in June 2009, which was at least generating an income stream from three storefronts and a half-dozen apartments.
Still, “I was actually sick to my stomach when I left the closing,” he said. “I knew this wasn’t going to be easy.”
Luckily, “I’m a get-it-done, hardworking, blue-collar guy,” and on Saturday, July 31, the show went on – an opening gala featuring Too Many Divas, the Fokine Ballet, the Sweet Adelines, music and dance by local troupe after local group. Then, local groups like Guava Smash played rock and roll into the wee hours.
“Opening night: That was great,” said Cormier the other day, sitting on a stool in CITIZEN/From A1
the smartly redone lobby, “seeing people smiling after all that hard work.”
Perhaps Tom Cormier and his impresario partner, Jon Weiss, hadn’t heard there was a recession on, the worst in 80 years.
Perhaps they hadn’t heard that the Upper Catskills Community Council on the Arts was in extremis, that the Foothills Performing Arts & Civic Center lacked funds to finish its theater, and that Glimmerglass Opera up Route 28 had seen its state funds cut by $120,000.
But these entities depend on grants and government funding. Hope springs eternal in the breast of entrepreneurs. Cormier and Weiss had an idea, they were excited by it, and they were going for it.
And week in, week out, into December, the partners staged band after play after movies (movies weren’t a success, it turned out) and are still standing.
And Oneontan Jerry Jeff “Mr. Bojangles” Walker’s Aug. 5 performance sold out every seat in the place, and drew fans from Washington D.C. to Ohio, showing the theater’s potential.
For what he’s accomplished so far in a challenging economy, and what he has planned for the months ahead, Hometown Oneonta has named Thomas R. Cormier as its 2010 Citizen of the Year.
“There’s no guarantee we’ll survive,” said Cormier frankly; he’s closed the venue until spring to save on heat. “I hope we do.”
But when you hear about next year’s lineup, there’s reason for hope.
John Sebastian, famed lead singer for the mammoth “Lovin’ Spoonful,” will launch the season April 1. Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Famer Roger McGuinn, former lead singer and lead guitarist for “The Byrds,” is booked. John Mayall, pal to Eric Clapton, hitmaker (“All Your Love,” “Hideway”) will follow up later in the summer.
Before the Oneonta opened, agents were reluctant to book name acts, said Jon Weiss. But now, “The theater has earned the reputation as a good-sounding, well-run place. That’s something we couldn’t prove before we opened.”
Whatever is accomplished couldn’t have happened if Tom Cormier hadn’t taken a chance, investing proceeds from his Installation Technologies Inc. in an idea. (The company installs satellite dishes in Upstate New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.)
That Cormier had the money wouldn’t always have been the case.
Tom was born in Concord, Mass., by far the youngest of two sisters and three brothers, and moved several times in New England and New York State while growing up.
After graduation from Jamesville-Dewitt High School, outside Syracuse, in the early ‘80s, he spent a few years in the Army National Guard, then attended Hallmark Institute of Photography in Turner Falls, Mass.
After a stint taking aerial photographs, he found himself in Florida, the owner of Deerfield Beach Photo, which he expanded and soon renamed Industrial Photo Magic.
This was the early ‘90s. Sensormatic, the surveillance equipment manufacturer (now part of Tyco International), was located down the road. A big conference was coming up and the planners discovered they didn’t have enough media kits.
That was in the days before you would go to your PC and knock out a few more copies, and Cormier received a call from a frantic Sensormatic executive who needed 45 kits by 9 a.m. the next morning.
“I stayed up all night and hand-delivered them at 9,” Cormier recalled. “She was so impressed that, immediately, I had all her work.”
Word got around and soon IBM, W.R. Grace and other heavy hitters in the neighborhood were Cormier’s customers. He pioneered digital retouching of photos, bought a high-end scanner, but saw where the business was going: His $200,000 scanner would soon be available for $25,000.
So he sold his business to a bigger photo lab from Miami, and moved – with future wife Karen Fagan, who he’d met in Florida – to a farm his parents had bought in Orwell, Vt.
“I’d gone up the previous fall for the foliage,” he explained. “I fell in love with the Champlain Valley.”
Pretty soon, the photo entrepreneur was a farming entrepreneur, tending a herd of 350 sheep. He got a lesson in global interconnectedness when the Asian Stock Market crashed in 1996 and Southeast Asia dried up as a market for Australian and New Zealand mutton. He’d been getting $2.10 a pound live weight for his sheep; suddenly, as sheep from Down Under flooded the U.S. market, that price dropped to 10 cents.
“Needless to say, I lost – terrible, terrible,” he said, shaking his head.
Tom and Karen had married, son David (now 14 and an eighth grader at Edmeston Central) had arrived, and Joshua (now 12) was on the way (Jacob, now 8, followed later), so the still-young man found himself farming in the morning, working for UPS in the afternoon, and working the third shift as a security guard at Castleton State College.
“That’s when I got into satellite.” In the late ‘90s, Primestar – it sold both satellite dishes and cable – was hiring in Keene, N.H., and Tom drove down. He got an installation job, but soon found himself promoted to project manager on a “massive project” in Boston.
But Tom was traveling, and didn’t want that for his kids. In 2000, he took a job with Ken Stabler’s Communication Specialists in Fly Creek and bought a home in Burlington Flats. And in 2006, he went out on his own, founding Installation Technologies in a back bedroom; soon, he had 8-10 staffers fulltime, and was subcontracting with 40 installers.
If Burlington Flats meant stability, so did real estate, Tom figured, and so to Oneonta.
“It has the highway right here. It’s not a scary city. It’s a city that has room for growth,” he said. He was intrigued by 47 Chestnut, with its storefronts and apartments, although “it happened to have this huge abandoned theater as well.”
At first, he welcomed FOTOT’s collaboration, renting it the theater space for $50 a month. But over the winter, he recognized, regretfully, “they didn’t have the resources to be able to do heavy-duty fundraising. That was going to take a long, long time.
“If I wanted to see it turn around quickly, I had to step in and make it happen.”
He’s received a quick lesson in theater finance. To keep the 600-seat venue heated at 40 degrees this time of year costs $4,500 a month. Opening the place up and throwing on the 50,000-watt stage lights costs $500.
During part of the interview, Cormier had been leading a tour though the building, up to the second-balcony, sealed off since the 1980s, which he hopes to open up again. Wooden pews line the third-floor balcony – the peanut gallery.
In the projection room at ceiling level is an original camera, equipped to accommodate the huge rolls of film that would come through in the days of “Casablanca” and “Shane.”
Throughout, you sense pride and commitment.
“I stepped into it,” he said. “There was only one way to go, and that was forward.”
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