Jun 16, 2024 5 min read

When the Town Hall South lecture series began in the fall of 1969, the bootprints of the first men on moon were still fresh, and so was the Beatles’ “Abbey Road.” “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” had just made its maiden bow on British television and “The Brady Bunch” did the same in America. Still fresh to the White House, Richard Nixon’s public approval was at 60%.

“Abbey Road” still periodically pops back up on the Billboard Top 200 album chart, and “The Brady Bunch” and “Monty Python” endure in reruns. Town Hall South enjoyed a similar type of durability over almost a half-century, but changing audience habits, rising costs and the cornucopia of options people have to be entertained and enlightened all started rattling the foundations of the South Hills institution over the last several years, and the decision was made that the 2023-24 season would be its last.

Almost 55 years after Town Hall South began with a talk by Syndey Harris, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist and drama critic, it ended May 10 with a visit from Henry Winkler, the actor and writer who played Fonzie on the ABC-TV series “Happy Days.”

Maureen Ludwig, a former chairwoman of the Town Hall South board, wonders if “maybe it’s just a great idea whose time has come and gone.”

The series began as a community outreach effort under the auspices of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Upper St. Clair. It followed in the footsteps of a similar lecture series in Fox Chapel, and was meant to enliven the cultural scene in the South Hills, which in 1969 was thought to be pretty barren. All the profits were earmarked for charitable organizations, and over the years those included Washington City Mission, South Hills Interfaith Movement and the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council.

After Harris, the first season included consumer affairs reporter Betty Furness; journalist Rod MacLeish; horror film star Vincent Price; and the physicist William Pollard. In the years that followed, a wide array of figures from the media, politics, literature and the arts were booked for Town Hall South. They included the poet Maya Angelou; novelist Tom Wolfe; Olivia de Havilland of “Gone With the Wind”; John Lindsay, the former mayor of New York; the opera star Beverly Sills; and historian David McCullough.

Former board chairwoman Susan Redfield wrote in 1994 that the committee that selected the speakers “prided itself on being well read and aware of what was going on politically, economically, and socially in the world. We each tried to cover the early morning ABC, NBC and CBS talk shows to see what was ‘in’ at the time and what issues were important.”

The first lectures happened at the South Hills Village Theater, and the first season had a little more than 1,100 subscribers who paid about $15 apiece – about $132 in 2024 dollars – for season tickets. Membership reached its peak in 1981, when the series moved to Bethel Park High School. When a state-of-the-art theater was completed at Upper St. Clair High School in 2003, Town Hall South found its third and final home.

Town Hall South membership was once so robust and tickets so hot that no marketing was necessary – all the board had to do was announce a season of the daytime lectures, and a rush for tickets would follow. However, as time went on, its older subscriber base was not being replenished by new members, and Town Hall South began boosting its profile at events like Upper St. Clair’s Community Day, and it teamed up with the Community Foundation of Upper St. Clair. But it didn’t move the needle enough.

“For decades, a lot of the same people were coming,” said Janette Clements, the board’s final chairwoman. “We had great difficulty getting new people to join.”

She added, “We made more of an effort to get Town Hall South out there. We tried to make much more of an effort to be visible in the community.”

Both Clements and Ludwig believe that lecture series like Town Hall South have come to face intense competition from the gusher of information that can be found through a mouse click or two. There are podcasts out there on every subject from Alfred Hitchcock to botany, and TED Talks offer free lectures from experts on topics in business, education and many other fields. YouTube and C-Span are also bursting with interviews and lectures with any number of luminaries.

“There’s a lot out there to read about on the internet,” Clements said. “It’s not a great replacement for a live lecture and the sense of community you get from going to a live lecture with your friends and neighbors.”

Escalating costs in booking speakers also squeezed Town Hall South. A headlining speaker could run about $30,000 or $40,000, Ludwig said, along with associated costs that included accommodations and transportation. She noted, for instance, that speakers could once be picked up at the airport by a volunteer, but after author David Halberstam was killed in a California car accident in 2007 in a vehicle driven by a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, many speakers began demanding professional drivers.

“Even before the pandemic, expenses were increasing, but particularly speaker fees,” Clements said.

Then, there was the fact that the Town Hall South lectures happened on weekday mornings, shutting out potential subscribers who hold down 9-to-5 jobs.

“It’s become more difficult for people during the day to go out and see a live lecture,” Clements said.

When it was announced that the 2023-24 season would be the last one for Town Hall South, the door was left open for it to continue “in a different, more sustainable form.” But it’s not clear right now what that form could be.

“Hopefully it will come back in some form,” Clements said. In the meantime, she believes, Town Hall South’s long run and the roughly 260 speakers it brought to the South Hills over the decades “is certainly something to celebrate.”