The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • 33

The Orlando Sentinel, Sunday, February 1 9. 1 984 C-5 TIEDTKE From C-1 Bach Festival linoup the Rollins campus where he spends time working on his farms' business, on his own investments and on the business of the arts in Central Florida. When Rollins found itself in financial distress in 1948, he was the first man that then Rollins College president Hamilton Holt called on for help. Within an incredible three-year period, Tiedtke was to help save the college and the Winter Park Bach Festival and resurrect the FSO, originally called the Winter Park Symphony, which had died in 1943. Holt asked Tiedtke to serve as the college's treasurer for three months.

It was December and Tiedtke had just married his wife, Sylvia. He and his bride were supposed to fly to Jamaica for their honeymoon. But he accepted Holt's plea for help and ended up serving not three months but 20 years, eventually becoming vice president and later chairman of Rollins' board of trustees. When Tiedtke began to go over Rollins' books, what he found shocked him. The college had a deficit of $174,000, an outstanding bond for $250,000 and no money to meet its Jan.

1 payroll. Banks would not lend Rollins money because they considered the college a poor risk. With another Rollins official, Tiedtke loaned the college $25,000. Then he flew to the Northeast, with his bride and Holt in tow, to raise more money from Rollins' friends and trustees and to try to float a new bond, for $500,000, that would pay off the old one and provide money for the payroll. He succeeded, and Rollins has never had a serious deficit since.

Tiedtke and his wife then took off on their second wedding trip, this time without Holt. When they returned, the Tiedtkes decided to make Winter Park their permanent home. Their two children Tina, 31, an aspiring entrepreneur who is starting an art-film theater in Maitland, and Philip, 33, a toy manufacturer now also make their homes here. "But I thought if we were to going to live here, wouldn't it be nice to have a symphony orchestra?" Tiedtke invited the old members of the symphony board into his office to see if there was any interest in reviving the orchestra. Except for that expressed by Jessica Dyer, a longtime resident of Winter Park, there wasn't.

So Tiedtke and Dyer set about forming a new board, acquiring the services of musicians and finding a music director. Two years later, in 1950, Tiedtke found himself in the by-then familiar position of savior this time of the Winter Park Bach Festival. The festival had a deficit of $2,000 and was about to be voted by its board into extinction because the death of Isabel Sprague-Smith, its founder, had left it without financial support. Tiedtke paid the deficit, and has served as the president of the organization ever since. In the more than 30 years since he helped save three of Central Florida's major cultural institutions, Tiedtke has continued to be one of the area's most important arts patrons.

He serves on the board of Loch Haven Arts Center, on the board of the Orlando Opera and on the FSO board. And it's hardly any secret that Tiedtke has been paying the deficits of the Bach Festival and of the Rollins Concert Series for years. Many of his gifts are said to be anonymous. "If I were to tell you how much he's giving anonymously," says one person who serves on a board with Tiedtke, "your teeth would drop out." Says John Tiedtke: "That's an exaggeration; it's really not that much." But Tiedtke will not divulge how much he gives to the arts and to education. Even Sylvia Tiedtke says she doesn't know.

"No one but his banker and his secretary knows," she says. "I never ask. It's none of my business. It's John's money." This year's Winter Park Bach Festival highlights five of J.S. Bach's cantatas and Handel's Messiah, which will be played in a new performing edition that clears away some of the overlay that has disfigured the work since Victorian times.

Performances will be at 4 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday and at 8 p.m. Saturday in Knowles Memorial Chapel on the Rollins College Campus. Thursday's performances will be devoted to the five cantatas Bach wrote for the church year: Cantata No.

61, part I of the Christmas Oratorio and Cantata No. 65 at 4 p.m.; Cantatas Nos. 4 and 11 at 8:30 p.m. On Friday, Messiah will be performed: part I and the beginning of part II at 4 p.m.; the rest of part II and part III at 8:30 p.m. On Saturday at 8 p.m., an abridged version of Messiah will be performed.

The performances will be conducted by Ward Woodbury, leading the Bach Festival Choir and members of the Florida Symphony Orchestra. The vocal soloists are soprano Nan Nail, tenor Charles Bressler, mezzo-soprano Elaine Bonazzi and bass Thomas Paul. Most performances are sold out, but some tickets, priced at $10, are available for Saturday night's performance of Messiah. Call the Bach Festival, (305) 646-2182, for further information. STEPHEN WIGLER "They were a better buy than the stocks." He bought more and more municipal bonds.

By the time Florida's economy began to revive, in 1938, John Tiedtke had made a fortune of his own. He went on to make and continues to make an even greater fortune in the Everglades in the sugar business. saw that the United States Sugar Corporation was paying its taxes. I thought something must be good about the sugar industry because nobody else could afford to pay their taxes." For as little as $10 an acre, sometimes for as little as unpaid back taxes, Tiedtke bought several hundred acres in the Everglades and began cultivating sugar. The business is called Shawnee Farms and now consists of vast tracts of land cultivated in sugar cane.

Did he know anything about the sugar industry? "No," Tiedtke says. "But it wasn't hard to learn." "He never goes into anything without knowing everything about it," says Keith McKean, 68, who, like his brother Hugh, grew up around the corner from Tiedtke in Orlando and has known him all his life. "I remember when John decided to start growing lettuce. He read everything there was to read about it and then went to California to study how it was done there." When Tiedtke wasn't spending his time on his Everglades plantations, he was living in Winter Park, and there his association with Rollins College began. During the spring semesters, he taught photography classes.

By the 1940s, he began teaching business courses. He still goes every day to a rented office on HUNTER From C-1 cars. We don't need dead humans. It's very irrespon-I sible for broadcasters to continue showing the film." I Radecki says the odds of WOFL's Deer Hunter, telecast instigating an imitative shooting accident are low. But, he asks, "Is it worth taking that chance just to make a few bucks?" WOFL's Reichel said Thursday that he was aware of any shooting accidents being associated, with showings of The Deer Hunter.

"We certainly don't want to give anybody any ideas as to what to do during or after the movie," he said. Reichel himself has taped advisories that will precede each night's presentation. Like the other spots" WOFL has been running, these advisories warn viewers that a "graphic and provocative" movie is about to be shown "unedited, uncensored." Reichel acknowledges that such a disclaimer may act as a lure as well as a caution "to some people who are not aware of the movie. But look at the competition we're up against on Monday and Tuesday nights." er is "too powerful a promotion of Russian roulette" to be allowed to air unedited. The accidental shootings that have occurred during or soon after viewings of The Deer Hunter in some cases involved drinking, Radecki says, but there was no evidence of depression or mental illness among the victims.

Radecki readily acknowledges the movie's artistic merits. "It's a high-quality movie," he says, "a well-made movie." But he contends that the movie "really makes it out that heroes don't die from playing Russian roulette. It's the junkies, the scum who die. The heroes use Russian roulette as a way to trick the Vietnamese and escape. It gives the message that you can find out if you're a hero by playing Russian roulette." Radecki notes that "if people watch an advertisement for Chevrolet cars, obviously everybody doesn't run out and buy a Chevrolet.

And the ones who do might have had other things in their lives that influenced their decision besides seeing the advertisement. Russian roulette-style, after seeing the movie. Thirty of them died. Most, like the characters in the film, are young men from blue-collar backgrounds. One victim was 8 years old.

Another was 12. Before Chicago independent station WFLD showed The Deer Hunter in November 1981, the National Coalition, already citing 28 shooting incidents linked to showings of the movie on broadcast or cable television, urged the station to excise the Russian-roulette sequences. Chicago newspapers echoed the request. WFLD showed the movie in two parts. Two nights later, two men who had watched the telecasts a 26-year-old plumber and a 28-year-old tool-and-die maker accidentally killed themselves while playing Russian roulette at their respective kitchen tables.

The coalition subsequently petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to revoke WFLD's operating license. The FCC declined to act on the request. The coalition's founder and chairman is Dr. Thomas Radecki, a psychiatrist who is a consultant to the medical faculty of the University of Illinois and maintains a private practice. In a telephone interview last week from his office in Decatur, 111., Radecki argued that The Deer Hunt- for The Deer Hunter on Orlando's six highest-rated radio stations.

The station has also taken out ads for the film in The Orlando Sentinel and TV Guide, and its own on-air commercials are running hourly. The ads double as viewer-discretion advisories, warning of "scenes of explicit violence and profanity." Extending these efforts, WOFL's promotions department has contacted local ministers, asking them to counsel their congregations. "We don't want to offend anybody," Reichel says, "but we also like to provide a balanced programming schedule to our audience. And this is a fantastic, phenomenal movie." But offending people perhaps should be the least of WOFL's concerns about The Deer Hunter. The National Coalition on Television Violence, a watchdog organization that monitors violent behavior in television programs, says there have been 34 reported cases since The Deer Hunter went into circulation of people accidentally shooting themselves, The competition includes the second and third installments of CBS' Master of the Game miniseries and the network-TV premiere of Superman II on ABC.

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