Entertainment

April 26, 2009

Former Sem student has ‘reel’ zest for life

Former Sem student has ‘reel’ zest for life

By Mary Therese Biebel mbiebel@timesleader.com
Features Writer
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More than 80 years ago, when Curtis Montz was a student at Wyoming Seminary in Kingston, the darnedest thing happened.

“There was a gorgeous strawberry blonde who came as a post-graduate,” he said. “I was smitten. We used to talk, leaning against the fence ....”

“Then, all of a sudden, I found out I had ‘guard.’ Five ‘guards’ for socializing.”

When a student had “guard,” Montz said, it meant he had to march for half an hour, on a kind of patrol, carrying a gun whose barrel, as he recalls, had been filled with concrete.

“It wasn’t waterboarding, by any means,” he said.

Still, it was a punishment.

“I never touched her,” he said of the red-haired damsel. “To this day I don’t know what I did wrong.”

Actually, as Montz recalled just days before his 80th-anniversary reunion, he and his classmates of so long ago had a strong sense of right and wrong.

“Our physics teacher Mr. (William E.) Traxler was chairman of the honor court, and he really believed in it. He’d pass out exam papers and leave us in the room. We so respected him, we would’ve killed anyone that cheated.”

Montz, 97, of Kingston, has plenty of school-day memories, but when he attends the reunion celebrations at Wyoming Seminary’s Kingston campus next weekend, he doesn’t expect to see too many other members of the class of 1929.

They would, after all, be closer to 100 than to 90 years old – as he is.

“My health is quite good,” Montz said last week during one of his customary, late-morning breaks at Grico’s Restaurant in Kingston, where he likes to have coffee with a table full of friends.

The obvious thing to say would be that Montz is in great shape for 97.

“He’s in great shape for 47,” said his friend Howard Berman of Kingston.

“Well, my balance (isn’t as good as it once was),” Montz said.

“He’s talking about when he’s on the balance beam,” Jim Ferris of Kingston explained.

“He tried out for Ringling Bros.,” Clayton Karambelas of Kingston added.

“My backflip’s not what it used to be,” Montz conceded.

All kidding aside, his friends said, the secret to Montz’s health and vigor is staying active and engaged. He regularly travels to New York City to see plays, shows up for work every day at the F.M. Kirby Center and spent two weeks visiting China in September.

“I told him he shouldn’t walk the entire Great Wall in one day,” Ferris interjected. “I said to break it into two parts.”

For the record, Montz said, he was content to step onto the Great Wall. He did not walk its entire length.

Also for the record, Montz spent only two years at Wyoming Seminary.

He started school in Hazleton, back in the days when children were promoted to the next grade in the middle of the school year if they received high grades.

Looking back, Montz said the practice was “a dumb idea” that resulted in his graduation from Kingston High School when he was only 15.

To give him time to mature before college, his parents sent him to Wyoming Seminary from 1927 to 1929.

Then he studied journalism at Penn State but found no newspapers were hiring when he graduated in 1933. So he went to work for The Boston Store – the forerunner of Boscov’s -- where one of his early duties involved measuring draperies. Later he moved into merchandising and promotions.

In the mid-1980s after Al Boscov led the drive to revitalize the old Paramount Theater, Montz accepted a job at the then-new F.M. Kirby Center for the Performing Arts.

He’s been there ever since, and if you’ve seen a foreign or artistic film at the Kirby recently, it’s likely Montz selected it for the series that bears his name.

Montz and his wife, Edythe, are the parents of three children: Kathryn Miller, Harry Montz and Burrell Covey, each of whom followed their father to Wyoming Seminary.

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