The Orlando Sentinel du lieu suivant : Orlando, Florida • 29

The Orlando Sentinel Sunday, February 19, 1984 Biography written for E.B. White fans, C-3 Me John Tiedtke shares good fortune with community 3T By Stephen Wigler SENTINEL MUSIC CRITIC lis i i i -rim i ii "And he just pours it out." Why is Tiedtke, who is not a musician, so devoted to music? "I enjoy listening to it," Tiedtke says. "And if you like something, you just get involved and help it." Hugh McKean, 75, now director of the Morse Gallery in Winter Park and president of Rollins from 1951 to 1969, remembers visits in the 1920s to the Tiedtke home in Toledo, Ohio. "The first time I visited them, I waked up slowly to the most wonderful experience. The father was playing their Skinner organ.

It was 7 a.m. and it was the Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. It was the most wonderful way to wake up. John was raised on music." When they were young, Tiedtke's father, Ernest, and his uncle, Charles, sold vegetables on a Toledo street corner. Before they died, they were the owners of Tiedtke's, then perhaps the largest department store between New York and Chicago.

In 1911, the Tiedtke brothers built an eight-bedroom winter home for their two families in Orlando on the southeast corner of Colonial Drive and Magnolia Street, then dirt roads. In 1931, fresh out of Dartmouth College, Tiedtke came to Winter Park, where the Tiedtkes had built another home, to convert the families' interest in Florida municipal bonds into stocks. It was the height of the Depression and Florida's economy was particularly hard hit. But he made a discovery. "Municipal bonds were selling for as little as 5 cents on the dollar," Tiedtke says.

Please see TIEDTKE, C-5 It happened nearly 40 years ago, but Edwin Granberry has never forgotten how his friend John Tiedtke helped to save his son's eyesight. The boy was playing with a golf ball when it exploded in his face. "John had us on a plane to Jacksonville that night to see the finest eye surgeon in the Southeast," Granberry says. "Of course, I don't know how John would feel about my telling you this." Granberry was right to wonder. In his Winter Park home last week, Tiedtke, 76, looked uncomfortable as he denied the story.

But many of Tiedtke's other longtime friends remember the incident and confirm that Tiedtke did indeed take Granberry and his son to Jacksonville to see the surgeon. They also say that Tiedtke's denial is typical of the modest man who once rescued Rollins College from bankruptcy, who helped resurrect the Florida Symphony Orchestra and who saved the Winter Park Bach Festival, which begins its 49th season Thursday, from extinction. Everyone who knows John Tiedtke well talks about his modesty. "Look at the way he gave Rollins its tennis courts," says Robert Gross, general manager of the Florida Symphony. "There's a plaque at the courts.

But you have to walk on it before you see it." Tiedtke frowns. "It isn't any big thing to build some tennis courts," he says. ANGELA PETERSON SENTINEL John Tiedtke has made a life of helping out when help is needed. wore a wide-lapeled blue suit jacket from the 1940s that was ill-matched with a pair of baggy, equally ancient gray-flannel trousers. Very few of the choristers paid any attention to Tiedtke.

But Tiedtke's money and passionate interest in music are the reason the festival exists. "John inherited a great fortune, and he made scads more," says one friend, a prominent Central Florida arts figure. "John gets nervous and tense every time people talk about the good he has done," says Charles Micarelli, chairman of the board of the Orlando Opera Company. "I don't think he wants to be beholden to anyone and I know he doesn't want anyone to be beholden to him." Last week Tiedtke walked into a Bach Festival rehearsal and sat down quietly as the choristers sang Handel's Messiah. He WOFL decides artistic merits outweigh film's violence By Noel Holston SENTINEL TELEVISION CRITIC cities the movie has met with great ratings success.

In some cases it has outscored all competing programming. WOFL's telecast of The Deer Hunter comes during the final week of the February ratings "sweeps," when Arbitron and the A.C. Nielsen Co. are measuring viewership in every city and region in the country. The station's promotional effort has been un-precedentedly heavy.

Since Wednesday, WOFL has been running 10 radio commercials a day Please see HUNTER, C-5 But after deciding that they couldn't edit The Deer Hunter to their satisfaction, all three networks including CBS, which had first dibs because it helped finance the film decided they couldn't show it in its theatrical form either, and they passed it up. Without a network buyer, MCA, the parent company of Universal Studios, went the syndication route, selling the rights to The Deer Hunter to individual stations across the country. Where buyers were found Dallas, Chicago and Pittsburgh, among other larly a recurring motif of American prisoners of war being forced to play Russian roulette by their captors. Veteran local broadcasters have no recollection of an Orlando station knowingly televising an unedited R-rated film. WOFL's general manager, Nor-ris Reichel, says that editing The Deer Hunter would "destroy the artistic values and merits of the film." The standards and practices departments at ABC, CBS and NBC expressed similar feelings when the television rights to the movie first went up for grabs.

cludes Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken, whose best-supporting-actor Oscar was one of five collected by the film. The Deer Hunter will make its Central Florida broadcast-television debut Monday and Tuesday nights on independent station WOFL-Channel 35. The station is showing the movie in its original, uncut form, which the Motion Picture Association of America rated (no one under 17 admitted unless accompanied by an adult). The film contains profuse profanity and graphic violence, particu The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences called it the best picture of 1978. The National Coalition on Television Violence calls it one of the most dangerous movies of all time.

The movie is The Deer Hunter, an emotionally wrenching drama about the experiences of some young Pennsylvania steelworkers before, during and after their wartime duty in Vietnam. Its cast in Time has taken the edge off drama of Anastasia' Theater review Elizabeth Maupin KULTURE The Bok Tower a tribute to serenity LAKE WALES Once there was a man, a learned man who worked as a writer and editor and had won the Pulitzer Prize, who created a garden as a refuge for human and bird alike. In this garden he built a tower of pink-and-gray Georgia marble, and at the top of the tower he put a carillon of 53 bronze bells. When he opened his garden, people compared it to the Taj Mahal. They don't make tourist attractions the way they used to.

When President Calvin Coo-lidge dedicated Edward Bok's tower 55 years ago this month, Orlando had a population of about 27,000. The same year, Florida citrus would suffer from an infestation of the Mediterranean fruit fly, John Ringling would choose Sarasota as the winter quarters for his circus and the collapse on Wall Street would send the state's real-estate market reeling. Fifty-five years later, Disney, Mattel and Harcourt Brace Jovan-ovich have come to Central Florida, and a combination of talking mice, raging lions and leaping marine mammals with men on their backs has driven the simple pleasures of Edward Bok's garden out of mind and out of style. But the Bok Tower Gardens still stand on Iron Mountain, at 324 feet above sea level the highest point on the Florida peninsula, surrounded by the orange groves that link Florida's present with its past. Catching sight of the Bok Tower from the road below may lead visitors to believe they have stumbled upon a New England college campus: The Gothic tower rises in the distance like a citadel, overpowering all that lies beneath.

But, coming closer, one sees that this is a symbol of Florida a tower built partly of native coquina, pink and shining in the morning sun. No legions of tourists flashing American Express cards stand in line to see the Singing Tower, and at first the gardens may seem still. But gradually the sounds seep in the skitter of dried leaves along the walks, the rustle of the wind, the murmuring voices of old people making their way slowly through the grounds. Squirrels chatter to each other among the pink and white azaleas, and a glossy bird screams from the branches of a magnolia tree. At more sophisticated tourist attractions, relentlessly cheerful taped music rises out of the ground.

But here the music descends from the air, the hollow sounds of the bells reverberating in the distance Perhaps an outdoor shrine is not enough for the tourist in 1984: Marble, ironwork and stone carved into the shapes of pelicans and flamingos pale when compared with a toy-train ride through the history of Western civilization or a collection of life-sized mannequins of Hollywood stars. And tourists themselves are not what they used to be. According to the Federal Writers' Project's guide to Florida, published in 1939, men visiting Edward Bok's tower and gardens were "requested to wear presumably, a gentleman would not have needed even to hear such a request. But some things remain the same, and Edward Bok and the people who run his memorial have figured out one thing that all the entertainment conglomerates with all the business-school degrees in the world have not: People do not need to have their diversions presented to them in neat packages, their senses assaulted when they could be tickled and charmed. Sometimes satisfaction comes from looking and listening rather than being force-fed.

It may be old-fashioned. But sometimes the looking and the listening are all we have to remind ourselves that we are alive. 'Anastasia' Cast: Davin Light, Harry Richard, Connie Foster Direction: Michael Fortner Playwright: Marcelle Maurette, with English adaptation by Guy Bolton Theater: Edyth Bush Theatre, 1010 E. Princeton Orlando Times: 8 m. Wednesday-Saturday and March 1-3 and 2 m.

next Sunday Reviewer's evaluation: movie starring Ingrid Bergman, for which she won an Oscar in 1956. It's a romantic story, this legend of the little grand duchess, and the fact that it has clung to the world's imagination for six decades should come as no surprise. But the Maurette-Bolton play has not weathered so well. Even forceful acting in the Central Florida Civic Theatre's current production seldom brings it to life. This is not to say that the production at the Edyth Bush Theatre is not full of fine moments; it is.

Yet what once seemed like grand emotion in this well-worn play has become sentimentality over the years, and one leaves the play with nothing so much as the feeling: Why this? Anastasia takes place in 1926 Berlin, where a group of Russian emigres is trying to get into the Please see ANASTASIA, C-9 By Elizabeth Maupin SENTINEL THEATER CRITIC In July 1918, in the town of Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains of Russia, Czar Nicholas II and 10 others were shot to death and their bodies thrown down an abandoned mine shaft. Among those executed were Nicholas' wife, Empress Alexandra, and their five children: the young Grand Duke Alexis, who suffered from hemophilia, and Grand Duchesses Maria, Ta-tiana, Olga and Anastasia. Anastasia was 17 at the time of her death. That same night was born the legend of Anastasia that the Czar's youngest daughter had not died at all, that she had been shielded by the pile of bodies around her, rescued by a Bolshevik soldier and smuggled out of Russia to freedom. The legend has surfaced every few years since, most recently Reviewing key excellent, good, average, poor, awful last week when Anna Manahan, a woman many believed to be Anastasia, died at the age of 82 in Charlottesville, Va.

Manahan's story, freely rendered, was the basis for Marcelle Maurette's play Anastasia, adapted into English by Guy Bolton and made into a JUDY WATSON TRACY SENTINEL A reunion of royalty Connie Foster as Empress Dowager, Davin Light as Anastasia. The dung beetle's saga rolls along despite career setback By Denise Salvaggio OF THE SENTINEL STAFF 4. at the top of the world. Amid the people's adulation, the dung beetle continues the business that made it famous. After locating a source of cattle or human excrement, the beetle breaks off a small piece and uses its strong forelegs to shape it into a ball to be used for food or breeding.

In the process, it breaks down nutrients for return to the soil and helps keep pastures clean. Away from the cheering human throngs, a bit of intimate drama unfolds when the female dung beetle is ready to breed. Joining with the male to build anywhere from three to 20 "brood balls," she lays one egg in each. The ball provides food and shelter for the larva, which pupates in the space emptied by feeding. The final episode provides the story's climax.

Like so many other forms of fame, the scarab's position is not meant to last. Its empire eventually dissipates as Ra loses followers to other religions, and the scorned insect winds up back at the dung heap where it was discovered. The rise and fall of family fortunes form the basis of many popular television dramas. While most of these epics are concerned with the decline of industrialists, politicians or movie stars, Hollywood has neglected tracing similar events among non-human clans. But should a major network care to rectify this oversight, the history of the dung beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) would surely make for a riveting miniseries.

As befits such a show, the dung beetle belongs to a large family the scarabs, which boast more than 30,000 species around the world. The first episode would trace the dung beetle's climb to almost unimaginable fame, which begins in ancient Egypt around the year 200 B.C. Because the dung beetle is observed engaging in its daily activity of forming a piece of manure into a sphere and rolling it along the ground, believers in Ra, the sun god, associate this action with the movement of the sun across the sky. The unassuming dung beetle inadvertently be- comes a symbol for Ra, who is thereafter depicted as a giant scarab pushing the sun through the cosmos. The second half of the show finds this motif becoming a widely used design on jewelry and other personal adornments.

The dung beetle finds itself at the peak of its influence and is almost deified by believers in Ra. The beauty of the metallic green, stout-bodied scarab also enhances its popularity. Having been in the right place at the right time, the exalted bug is Yet the dung beetle seems to be content down on its old stomping ground. Though it is now an object of ridicule rather than worship, human opinion goes right over its head. The scarab doesn't have to read the script to realize that fate is fickle, and that happiness can just as easily be found in one's own back yard or pasture.

NEXT WEEK: The hornworm..