Cultural Olympics

With the Olympic Games well-publicized as high-strung, hard-boiled contests of national brawn, the fact that the original Peloponnesian games brought together poets and artificers as well as wrestlers, runners and javelin hurlers is of importance chiefly to classicists. But for years that fact has been bothering a sturdy, swart Philadelphian named Samuel Stuart Fleisher. Since he and his brother Edwin retired from their prosperous family cotton yarn mills, they have collected art and musical manuscripts, busied themselves with philanthropies, gently propagated Brother Samuel's dream of "Cultural Olympics" which every artist in the U. S. could enter. Last week Samuel Fleisher's Olympics were simultaneously taken up by two good businessmen: President George Howard Johnson of Philadelphia's big Lit Brothers department store, and a onetime Morgan partner, President Thomas Sovereign Gates of the University of Pennsylvania.

Merchant Johnson, who has helped Samuel Fleisher with a modest project to collect baskets of flowers from sleek Radnor estates to distribute in the Philadelphia slums, became interested in the Cultural Olympics and promised to write a blank check to launch them if Mr. Fleisher would get a solid organization behind him. In Philadelphia no organization is more solid than the University of Pennsylvania and the pair called on President Gates. Not averse to making news or friends during his money drive for the University's 1940 Bicentennial, President Gates last week agreed.

Samuel Fleisher's idea is that every district in the U. S. should hold careful tryouts in such arts as piano playing, trombone tooting, painting, drawing, weaving, embroidery, short story writing, ballet dancing. Winners would compete against winners for national prizes. These, Sponsors Fleisher, Johnson & Gates decided, will not be medals or trophies but scholarships in recognized institutions. Businesslike President Gates announced that Dean John Harrison Minnick of his School of Education is at work on "details" and already hunting for a capable director. Tryouts for the first contest, in the Philadelphia area, are scheduled for spring.

Said Sponsor Gates: "The primary purpose of the Cultural Olympics will be first to discover, and second to encourage both children and adults who have latent talents in cultural pursuits. ... It is expected that the future development of the program will provide for a far greater number of competitions to be conducted over a much larger area. . . ."

Sponsor Fleisher, his dream so close to realization, turned up beaming to celebrate his 65th birthday at Philadelphia's Graphic Sketch Club. His private philanthropy, the Graphic Sketch, was founded in 1897 to give instruction to anyone who wanted to paint, draw or sculp. Now housed in a neat, four-story brick building, the club hires twelve instructors, has 3,200 enrolled students who should be prime Olympic prospects. They pay no fees, range in age from four to 90, start in the beginners' class on the top floor and work down to the life classes below. At his club office, which contains a mocking bird and three big tanks of tropical fish, Mr. Fleisher talked up the Cultural Olympics to birthday visitors, bobbing up momentarily to scoop baby fish off the top of the tanks lest their voracious parents eat them. Said he: "I am very satisfied. In Europe the dictators are leading children to hate and here we will be teaching ours to love beauty."

Said Sponsor Johnson: "No, I don't know how much it will cost."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.