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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Posters, Plenty Of Posters Professor’s Legacy Outgrows Theater

Associated Press

When theater Professor Jack Freimann retired from Whitman College in 1992, the longtime instructor left more than the legacy of the hundreds of productions he directed.

He also left his posters - hundreds of them, maybe more.

Nobody’s quite sure how many promotion posters for Broadway and other theater and music productions Freimann gave to Harper Joy Theatre and other buildings around campus. Current theater Professor Nancy Simon now also adds to the collection.

From “Chorus Line” to “Godspell” to “Cats,” the assemblage of posters has grown so large that there’s no longer any room on the walls of the Harper Joy foyer or in its classrooms, auditorium and offices. Even the theater’s bathrooms are wallpapered with smaller Posterbills and other theater memorabilia.

“Before Jack left, he tried to hang as many of them as he could,” said Associate Professor Debbie Holmes. “I don’t think he wanted any white space.”

So now the new posters go into storage, along with other artwork stored by the college’s Sheehan Gallery.

Freimann’s poster madness has motivation.

A longtime personal collector of posters, he began putting them up at the theater in 1969. He later added autographed pictures from professional actors as a reminder to students and instructors that there’s a whole world of acting outside Harper Joy to conquer.

“There was a real unawareness in the students on the campus that there was such a thing as (professional) theater,” said Freimann in a telephone interview from New York, where he now lives.

The tales of how Freimann collected - or failed to collect - some of the posters are now legendary at Harper Joy.

In the early 1970s, he found a vintage “Godspell” poster crumpled in a gutter in Hamburg, Germany. He took it to his hotel, washed off the mud and borrowed an iron to remove the creases. It still hangs at the theater.

During a 1987 trip to Russia, Freimann was accosted by a police officer who caught him trying to remove a poster from a kiosk. He didn’t get into trouble with the law, but he also didn’t get the poster.

Whitman’s catalog lists it as the largest collection of theater posters in the world. Holmes and others at Harper Joy wonder if this is more of an urban myth.

But it may not be some day. Freimann continues to mail posters. He just sent several more he acquired on a recent trip to Paris.