"How the character and traditions of Santa Claus evolved over centuries"

by Stephanie Sy and Mary Fecteau

[This bit of American Christmas lore aired on PBS News Hour on Christmas Day, 25 December 2025.  I’ve occasionally posted some sort of seasonal offering on or near holidays, such as Christmas or Hanukkah, even one on Valentine’s Day, so here’s a conversation about how Santa Claus came to be the “jolly old elf” we traditionally see in the U.S. whenever he’s mentioned or seen (say, around a mall or department store at this time of year).

[Speaking of Santa, earlier this year—I was late for Yuletide ’24—I posted a piece on NORAD Tracks Santa, the defense alliance’s official Santa site, called “Here Comes Santa Claus” (3 January 2025).  Other Christmas-related posts have been “‘Is There a Santa Claus?’” (25 December 2009), “‘It's a Wonderful Life Was Based on a “Christmas Card” Short Story by Philip Van Doren Stern’” by Daven Hiskey (26 December 2016), and “Spirit of 1907 Christmas, Recovered in 1999, Completed in 2016” (21 December 2022).  I even did a Hanukkah post last year, “Dreidel” (6 January 2024); the holiday in 2023 was 7-15 December, so I was a little late with the post.]

William Brangham [substitute anchor for the “PBS News Hour”]: So, for this next story, we need to warn you. If you have small kids in the room, you may want to mute this and come back a bit later, because we’re talking about that visitor from the North Pole, OK?

This Christmas Day, many good boys and girls welcomed that familiar visitor last night, the jolly man in the red suit with a sleigh full of gifts. But that white bearded figure that we all recognize as Santa Claus, he is a relatively modern creation shaped over centuries.

Stephanie Sy recently talked with an author who unwraps the surprising history of Old Saint Nick.

Stephanie Sy: That author is Gerry Bowler.

And his book “Santa Claus: A Biography” [McClelland & Stewart, 2005] traces how the legend of our favorite bearded gift-giver evolved over centuries.

[Gerry (G. Q.) Bowler (b. 1948) is a Canadian historian whose research focuses on the intersection of religion and popular culture, especially Christmas. He has taught at a number of universities in western Canada and spent 25 years with the University of Manitoba as a Professor of History.]

Gerry, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the “News Hour.”

So I want to hop right into it.

Is Santa Claus – and – I quote from the book – a figure of mythology or a creature of literature or a tool of a clever capitalist?

Gerry Bowler, Author, “Santa Claus: A Biography”: He is a wonderful myth, about 1,700 years old, American in renovation and largely a conspiracy by families.

So it changes over time.

Stephanie Sy: Saint Nicholas was an actual fourth-century bishop [traditionally 15 March 270-6 December 343, Anatolia (modern-day Turkey)]. What was he most known for?

Gerry Bowler: At the time of his life, he was known for generosity.

But when he died, a cult grew up around him inside Christianity that made him the most influential, popular male saint on the Christian calendar. He was the patron saint of so many things, but probably his most famous miracle in the Middle Ages was his resurrection of three murdered boys who had been chopped up and put in a pickle barrel.

He discovered this and put them all together again. So he becomes the patron saint of children. And thus around maybe the 12th century, he was someone who parents and the church said came on December 6 [his feast day] to bring presents for good little girls and boys to leave something in their shoe.

[The tradition of leaving something in children’s shoes in celebration of St. Nicholas (on 6 December, St, Nicholas Day, or its eve, the night of the 5th) stems from legends associated with the historical figure Saint Nicholas of Myra. In the most famous story, St. Nicholas tossed bags of gold coins through an open window or down the chimney of the house of a poor man with three daughters but no dowry for them.  One bag landed inside a stocking or shoe left by the fireplace to dry.

[These acts of secret generosity formed the basis of the tradition of children in many cultures, particularly in Europe, leaving their shoes or stockings out on the eve of St. Nicholas Day. Adoption of the tradition spread among the German, Polish, Belgian, and Dutch communities throughout the United States. Americans who celebrate St. Nicholas Day generally also celebrate Christmas Day as a separate holiday and some of the traditions and rituals of St. Nicholas Day, such as leaving out a stocking to be filled, have become traditions of Christmas here.]

Stephanie Sy: So, Gerry, it sounds like there’s this darker side of the Santa Claus legend to talk about here that a lot of people are unaware of.

Gerry Bowler: Well, in the 1500s, when Protestants abolished the cult of saints, parents had to have some kind of magical gift-bringer. They still wanted that aspect.

In many places, they turned to the Christ child. In French, you call it Le petit Jésus. In German, it’d be Das Christkindl. The Christ child is certainly a great Christian symbol, but he lacked two things that Saint Nicholas had had. One, the baby is obviously not going to carry a big sack. And, two, he’s not scary.

And Saint Nicholas could scare kids into good behavior. So what happened in Germany and in the Northern Europe was that the Christ child started becoming accompanied by scary helpers. They carried a whip or switches or a chain.

In Austria, of course, we have Krampus, which looks exactly like the devil. So he’s one of those scary helpers.

Stephanie Sy: So this goes back to your first answer, which is there was this conspiracy of families. Are they basically at the root of the Santa Claus that we know today?

Gerry Bowler: Well, a number of New York poets and thinkers and rich landowners wanted to make Saint Nicholas the bearer of good things and also a bit of a threat to bad kids.

The first poem that takes Saint Nicholas out of his Catholic bishop’s uniform and puts him in a fur-trimmed red robe is called “A Children’s Friend” in the 1820s. It’s a poem that describes this Christmas Eve midnight gift-bringer who comes equipped with a reindeer-powered sleigh.

[A Children’s Friend (whose full title is The Children’s Friend: A New-Year's Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve) is an 1821 booklet published in New York City by William B. Gilley, a well-known bookseller and a neighbor of Clement Clarke Moore (see below).

[The poem, called by its first line, “Old Santeclaus with Much Delight,” which has been adopted as its title, was published anonymously. While some have historically attributed it to Clement Clarke Moore, modern scholars often credit the publisher William B. Gilley (ca. 1785-1830) or the illustrator Arthur J. Stansbury (1781-1865) with its authorship.

[A Children’s Friend was intended to be a small series of children’s booklets published by Gilley in the early 1820s, offering moral lessons and engaging stories to foster positive behavior. (“Old Santeclaus with Much Delight” was Number III in the series. The title of Number I was “Infant Thoughts,” intended as a moral and educational tool for young children. The titles or themes for Number II are not well-documented.) The series was intended to be ongoing; however, there’s no evidence the series extended significantly beyond the initial installments.

[The original is a small, 6-inch paperback containing eight hand-colored lithographic engravings (considered the first in a book in America). It sold for 25 cents for colored copies and 18¾ cents for plain ones ($7.10 and $5.40 in 2025, respectively).

The next year [1823], Clement Clarke Moore [1779-1863; resident of Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood] takes that sleigh, multiplies the reindeer, and writes a poem for his family.

Stephanie Sy: And the poem you’re referring to there is “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

Gerry Bowler: “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” a “Visit from St. Nicholas.” And it goes viral, as it were.

[The poem’s formal title is “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (actually, “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas”), but it’s more commonly known by its first line: “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” The poem was first published anonymously in the Troy, New York Sentinel on 23 December 1823, having been sent to the paper by a friend of Moore.]

It’s adopted by families first in the Northeastern United States. Then it spreads to Canada and throughout the rest of America.

Stephanie Sy: So, in other words, there’s sort of this amalgamation of traditions that are folded in and layered on.

Gerry Bowler: That’s the nature of Christmas. Christmas is very adaptive. By 1900, Santa is pretty much set, though, except with the addition of Rudolph in 1939.

(SINGING [“Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the 1949 song written by Johnny Marks (1909-85) and first recorded by Gene Autry (1907-98), based on the 1939 story Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer published by the Montgomery Ward Company.])

Gerry Bowler: And despite all kinds of efforts by Hollywood and commerce to make him in their image, he’s remained pretty stable since then.

Stephanie Sy: Why do you think the legend of Santa Claus has endured for centuries?

Gerry Bowler: Because it is so valuable to families.

Saint Nicholas is this embodiment of generosity, of unmerited favor, to which you add a fantasy, a midnight gift-bringer from some place enormously exotic, powered by reindeer, for crying out loud. It serves to give kids an idea of fantasy, of generosity.

So, as long as families continue to love Santa Claus, it doesn’t matter what Wall Street or any particular denomination happens to be for or against him.

Stephanie Sy: That is Gerry Bowler, the author of “Santa Claus: A Biography.”

Thank you so much for joining us. Happy holidays.

Gerry Bowler: My pleasure, and merry Christmas.

In the 1860s, renowned political cartoonist Thomas Nast [1840-1902] created the distinctly American image of Santa Claus we recognize today: a jolly, plump, grandfatherly figure.

[Thomas Nast’s first depiction of Santa Claus was an illustration titled "Santa Claus in Camp," published on the cover of the 3 January 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly. This initial rendition, from the middle of the Civil War, differed significantly from the modern, non-partisan figure he later became.

[Santa was depicted as a staunch Union supporter during the American Civil War. He is shown sitting in a sleigh distributing gifts—such as warm clothing and Bibles—to Union soldiers in a military camp. Instead of his now-standard red suit, Santa wore a jacket patterned with white stars and trousers with stripes, mimicking the American flag. Santa is shown holding a “jumping jack” toy that is a caricature of Confederate President Jefferson Davis with a noose around his neck. (Nast was a Republican, the party led by Union President Abraham Lincoln.)

[Influenced by his German heritage (Nast was born in Germany) and Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” Nast drew Santa as a small, plump, elflike figure with a full white beard.

[While this was his first direct depiction, Nast also included a secondary illustration in the same issue titled “A Christmas Furlough,” which featured a smaller Santa delivering presents through a chimney in the background of a domestic scene.]

[Stephanie Sy is a PBS News Hour correspondent and serves as anchor of PBS News Hour West.  Throughout her career, she served in anchor and correspondent capacities for ABC News, Al Jazeera America, CBSN, CNN International, and PBS News Hour Weekend.  Prior to joining News Hour, she was with Yahoo News where she anchored coverage of the 2018 Midterm Elections and reported from Donald Trump’s victory party on Election Day 2016.

[Mary Fecteau is an Emmy Award-winning Producer at PBS NewsHour. Her work has aired nationally on PBS.

[I’m not Christian, so Christmas has no significance to me as a religious holiday.  I do share in the cultural festivities—we had a tree in our home and we exchanged gifts—but in my family the significance of 25 December is that it’s my birthday.  Last Thursday was my 79th.

[Over the years, I’ve spent Christmas in some far-off places.  I’m not even counting the places where I was living when 25 December came around—Washington, D.C.; Koblenz, Germany; Berlin; New York City.  On this continent, I’ve marked the holiday in Chicago; New Orleans; Williamsburg, Virginia (for an 18th-century celebration); Mexico City; and Quebec City.

[On the way to New Hope, Pennsylvania, in 1985, my parents and I stopped to watch Washington Crossing the Delaware at Washington Crossing.  In 1976, I had performed the role of Hessian Colonel Johann Rall, the mercenary defender of Trenton who was defeated by Washington’s Continentals on Christmas night 1776, in William Mastrosimone’s Devil Take the Hindmost (see my post “Johann Rall: A Historical Portrait,” 10 and 15 December 2009).  The play was presented in the bicentennial year; the historical reenactment we saw was staged on the 209th anniversary of the crossing.

[Abroad, I saw Christmas in Paris on my 16th birthday in 1962 and London the next year.  Zermatt, Switzerland, home of the Matterhorn, was the site of three holidays after that, and one in Gstaad.  Zermatt’s on the side of a mountain and climbs up the slope toward the ski areas.  You get there by a special, small-gauge rail line and one stop up the mountain is a village called St. Niklaus.  Of course, we called it “Santa Claus Town.”  At night, the village of Zermatt looks like a giant Christmas tree because of the lit-up chalets and hotels climbing up the mountainside.

[I observed one memorable holiday at the 700-year-old home of a family of friends in the tiny French town of Villefranche-de-Lauragais in 1971.  On Christmas morning, I cooked French toast for my hosts, which was a great astonishment for the Humiliens on two counts: first, the idea that I would (or, I suppose, could) cook for them was a surprise; second . . . well, French toast isn’t French!  They’d never heard of such a thing.  They were so thrilled, they talked about this event for years to come.   

[I was in Shanghai on Christmas 1980, followed by Cairo in 1982.  Christmas, of course, isn’t a holiday in China, but they mark it for us tourists.  Christmas Eve dinner was a special banquet at a hotel in Shanghai.  Marvelous and exquisite! Shanghai, because of its history as a European enclave, is proud of its reputation for European cuisine.  I still have the menu from this Christmas Eve meal (see “Travel Journal: People's Republic of China, 1980 – Part 2” [27 December 2021]).

[In Cairo on 25 December, also not a holiday in Egypt, we went to Giza to see the sound and light show at the pyramids.  Now, I’m not a big fan of sound and light shows; I find them hokey and enervating.  The most interesting thing about the performance at Giza was that it was the same show that Roger Moore’s James Bond was at in the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me—when he first encounters Jaws (see “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982 – Part 9” [11 August 2021]). 

"Defying the Odds Far From Broadway"

by Michael Paulson 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series 

[This article ran in the New York Times of 16 December 2025, Section C (“Arts”), reported from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Naples, Florida.  It’s posted on the paper’s website as “As Regional Theaters Struggle, Some Defy the Odds,“ 16 December.

[Previous entries in the “Regional Theater” series, as well as some posts that are just relevant to the regional theater in America:

•  “‘Bigger Than Broadway!’" by Richard Zoglin (12 September 2024)

•  “Art Will Out” (3, 6, 9, 12, and 15 August 2024)

•  "Wish You Were Here" by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho (6 July 2024)

•  "‘If You Rebuild It, Will They Return?’: Regional Theaters Struggle to Revive” by Rob Weinert-Kendt (11 May 2024)

•  "‘Audiences Are Back, More or Less’" (18 March 2024)

•  “‘Theater in rural Appalachian Virginia brings regional themes to the stage’" by Jeffrey Brown and Alison Thoet (17 March 2023)

•  “A Crisis In America's Theaters” (13 September 2023)

•  “The Regional Theater: Change or Die” (3 October 2023)

•  “Regional Theater: History” (8 October 2023)

•  “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts” (5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 30 November, 3, 13, 16, and 19 December 2023)

•  ‘‘‘In rural Oregon, regional theater sparks a creative revival’" by Jeffrey Brown (27 August 2018)

[In the article reposted below, there are several plays mentioned.  I’ll provide some background facts on the plays in the afterword to this post.]

Theaters in Naples, Fla., and Milwaukee are among a handful of regional companies that are thriving.

America’s regional theaters are facing difficult times: staging fewer shows, employing fewer workers, and running deficits more frequently than before the pandemic.

But not all of them are struggling. Some are booming.

In Wisconsin, Milwaukee Repertory Theater has finished the first phase of an $80 million renovation of its three-theater complex in an old power plant along the Milwaukee River. In Naples, Fla., Gulfshore Playhouse has just begun its second season in a new $80 million complex with a curved facade meant to evoke the nearby sand and sea.

Both theaters are now breaking their own records. Milwaukee Rep’s staging of “Come From Away,” the first show on the theater’s renovated main stage, has just ended its run as the highest-grossing production in the company’s 71-year history. And Gulfshore Playhouse’s current production, “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas,” is breaking every record for that company, with a nightly waiting list for people seeking seats.

Kristen Coury, the Playhouse’s chief executive and producing artistic director, described her programming mantra as “up and known.” Translation: When deciding which shows to produce, she selects ones that are upbeat and well-known.

“We’re at a moment now where there’s a lot of poke-you-in-the-eye theater, like, ‘I don’t care what you think — this is good for you, and I’m going to make you feel like a terrible person, and you better buy a ticket anyway,”’ Coury said.

“My first covenant is with the audience, and I care about what they think,” she added. “People don’t want to spend money on a show they don’t think they’re going to like.”

The Milwaukee theater’s leaders, though making different choices in all sorts of ways, make a similar point. “We actually like our people,” said Mark Clements, the artistic director in Milwaukee. “We’re not trying to be didactic and lecture people.”

For a struggling industry, these two theaters — and a handful of others — are models of success: They are producing a healthy menu of shows, drawing large audiences, running budget surpluses and raising money for capital projects. But they are definitely in the minority.

American theaters, after some initial signs of recovery postpandemic, have more recently taken a second dip, according to Jen Benoit-Bryan, the executive director of SMU DataArts, a national arts and culture research center at Southern Methodist University [Meadows School of the Arts, University Park, Texas].

The numbers are grim — from 2023 to 2024, theater attendance fell 19 percent and income fell 37 percent, according to SMU DataArts. “Everybody is hurting, but theaters are hurting at a different scale than other arts organizations,” she said.

Figuring out what thriving theaters have in common is complicated. They vary in location, size and degree of influence, and include companies like Pasadena Playhouse in California and the Guthrie Theater in [Minneapolis,] Minnesota.

A number of them (but not all) seem to share a few distinctive attributes: communities with less-competitive cultural landscapes, where the theaters have high visibility and civic standing; programming philosophies that prioritize what audiences might want to see over what artists believe audiences would benefit from seeing; and the lingering benefits of having minimized the duration of their Covid shutdowns, which helped audiences maintain the theatergoing habit.

At the start of the pandemic, Gulfshore laid off three-quarters of its staff, opting to safeguard its resources for reopening. “While we were doing that, other theaters were spending a truckload of money keeping people employed for a year who were doing nothing but sewing masks,” Coury said.

Milwaukee Rep, on the other hand, retained 95 percent of its staff, believing it would allow them to restart more quickly. The theater was worried about a talent drain, which many of its peer institutions experienced during the pandemic; it also arrived at the pandemic with sizable cash reserves, giving it options.

“We took a very different path than the rest of the field,” said Chad Bauman, the theater’s executive director. “We were doing performances when almost nobody else in the entire country was doing them.”

Milwaukee Rep, founded in 1954, is one of the nation’s oldest professional regional theaters. Gulfshore Playhouse, founded in 2004, is one of the newest — it was just admitted to the League of Resident Theaters [LORT], a national association of 81 leading regional theaters, in 2022. Both theaters have big dreams — they hope to attract pre-Broadway productions, which bring revenue and attention to regional theaters, but are hard to book, because expectations of audience, staff and facilities are high.

The two communities are quite different. Milwaukee is a sizable, historically blue-collar, overwhelmingly Democratic city, while Naples is small, packed with affluent retirees, and heavily Republican.

A commonality: The two areas have a lot of captains of industry. “We have the highest per capita amount of former C.E.O.s,” Coury said of Naples. She added that 90 percent of her fund-raising is from individuals, rather than corporations or foundations, and the biggest donors are Jay and Patty Baker, who gave $20 million. (He is the former president of Kohl’s.)

Milwaukee still has a robust corporate community, and the Rep has done better than many of its peers at attracting corporate contributions — the biggest donor to its renovation project is the largest Wisconsin-based bank, Associated Bank, which gave $10 million, and for which the theater center is now named. (By coincidence, the Bakers previously lived in Milwaukee and supported Milwaukee Rep.)

Both theaters’ capital projects faced significant damage from big storms. In Naples, Hurricane Ian knocked down several walls of the new Gulfshore Playhouse while it was under construction in 2022; in Milwaukee, intense flooding in August caused $7 million in damage to a production facility where the theater had been storing sets and costumes (including for its mainstay production of “A Christmas Carol”) while building its new home.

Gulfshore, which produces seven shows a season, has been growing fast; since the pandemic its annual budget has risen to $14.5 million from $3.6 million, and it now has 83 full-time employees. Its new main stage theater is nearly twice the size of the one in its former home — 368 seats now, compared to 200.

The theater opened its first season in its new home with “Anything Goes” and closed with “Sweet Charity.” It’s debatable if “Sweet Charity” is actually upbeat, because it ends unhappily for the protagonist, but both shows are indisputably classics, with songs that have become standards and big dance numbers. In between, Coury programmed two crowd-pleasing plays, the suspense drama “Dial M for Murder” and the farce “Noises Off.”

At the same time, in the new building’s 125-seat black box theater, Gulfshore staged three plays with sobering themes but a track record of success: “Every Brilliant Thing,” which deals with depression and suicide (and will have a Broadway production this season); “The Lehman Trilogy,” about the rise and fall of a financial empire; and “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” about Billie Holiday as she is grappling with addiction.

“My first question is always, ‘Is it good?”’ Coury said. “Not, ‘Do you feel like it will teach a good lesson?’ and not ‘Which agenda is attached to it?’ Just ‘Is it a good play?”’

Milwaukee Rep, with a $17 million annual budget and 125 employees, is a larger and more established company. It is producing 12 shows this season, including “The Lehman Trilogy” and “The Piano Lesson” [1987] (a Pulitzer Prize winner [1990] by August Wilson [1945-2005]) as well as two Agatha Christie-related shows, and expects to do 13 next year. It also does lots of new work, and, unlike many of its peers, has a 14,000-person subscriber base that has remained remarkably loyal.

[Milwaukee Rep has scheduled an Agatha Christie Festival for the 2025-26 season. It will consist of Mrs. Christie (2019; 14 April-10 May 2026), a play by Heidi Armbruster (b. 1976) that explores the real-life 11-day disappearance of Christie (1890-1976) in 1926 through the eyes of a modern-day superfan; and And Then There Were None (1943; 26 May-28 June 2026), a production of Christie’s own stage adaptation of her best-selling 1939 mystery novel. (Both the book and various adaptations are sometimes presented under the title Ten Little Indians.)]

“Obviously, theaters are struggling, and Milwaukee has bucked that trend,” said Ayad Akhtar [b. 1970], a [2013] Pulitzer-winning playwright (for “Disgraced” [2012]) who grew up in a Milwaukee suburb and serves on the Rep’s board. “There’s multigenerational industrial family support, and programming an artistic experience that is worthy of being thought about and at the same time can sell a lot of tickets.”

Akhtar’s “McNeal,” a play about artificial intelligence that debuted on Broadway last season, will reopen the Rep’s black box theater, with up to 220 seats, early next year.

The redone theater complex features some distinctive amenities — the main stage, with up to 670 seats, has different tiers, and the nicest seats (proving quite popular) are leather, with cup-holders and premium pricing. And the theater’s leadership can wine and dine donors in a backstage V.I.P. suite, with a window overlooking preshow warm-ups.

The theater’s leadership is proud of its status as an outlier, noting that not only is it defying downward trends on attendance and giving, but that it is also thriving in a state that has among the lowest levels of public arts funding in the nation.

The theater puts its three goals — to entertain, provoke and inspire — on banners.

“Where some have gotten into trouble is that they’ve over-rotated in one of these directions,” said Bauman, the executive director. “The secret sauce to programming is that if you’re an audience member, we have a really great, diverse mix of programming, and we never over-rotate in any one of those sides.”

[I found the practices of both the theaters about which Michael Paulson reports troubling, however successful they’ve been financially.  The "mantra" Paulson cites for Gulfshore, "up and known," sounds like the preference at an Off-Off-Broadway company where I interned as literary adviser for a graduate class in dramaturgy, the StageArts Theater Company. 

[I described that company in some posts on ROT, and their own criteria for plays they liked was "beautifully crafted plays that speak to the best in us."  They also said, "We believe that the qualities most absent in plays of the last few decades are a positive view of human beings and a respect for dramatic structure."  I said that this meant the "well-made play," with the added criterion of what I called "a happy ending" (I was being moderately sarcastic).

[The main difference with these companies is that StageArts produced new plays (because they thought that would attract reviewers, producers, and donors).  When I convinced the artistic directors to consider older plays and revivals, though I tried to steer them to less-well known scripts, they still applied their standard criteria—the well-made play with "positive" conclusions.

[What the two troupes in the Times article are producing seem to be largely audience-pleasers with little depth.  When they say they're catering to their audiences by producing plays they'll like—what they're doing is pandering, mostly to the lowest common denominator of their potential audience.  Most of the plays mentioned in the piece strike me as theatrical pabulum.  (It doesn't surprise me that Milwaukee Rep is a little more dramatically interesting than Gulfshore.  Milwaukee is a legit theater town; I saw some interesting pieces when I was there.  Naples strikes me as a middle-brow retirement community.)

[No dramaturg or literary manager is mentioned in the article, much less interviewed.  I'm sure Milwaukee Rep has one on staff, though Gulfshore may not.  One of the dramaturg's second-tier responsibilities is to try to expand the taste of the theater's community a little each season.  At the two houses profiled, no one seems interested in trying that.  That's just sad.]

[The information on the plays Paulson names in his report is compiled here for readers who want to know a bit about them.  Milwaukee Rep presented Come from Away, which had its professional première in 2015 at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California, as a co-production with the Seattle Repertory Theatre.  It’s based on the true account of the town of Gander on the island of Newfoundland in Canada during the week following the 11 September 2001 attacks, when 38 planes, with nearly 6,700 passengers, were diverted unexpectedly to Gander International Airport in the town of about 11,000 because the airspace over the U.S. was closed.  The characters in the musical are based on actual Gander residents and the stranded travelers they housed and fed.

[The show was conceived by Michael Rubinoff, a Toronto lawyer, theater producer, and associate dean of visual and performing arts at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario.  He turned to Canadian husband-and-wife team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein.  The play’s title, Come from Away, is a traditional Newfoundland term for anyone—tourists, migrants from other parts of Canada, business travelers—who was not born on the island.

[The play transferred to Broadway, opening at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on 12 March 2017 and running until 2 October 2022, after playing 25 previews and 1,669 regular performances.  It was nominated for seven Tonys in 2017, winning for Best Direction of a Musical for Christopher Ashley, as well as Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Book of a Musical, and Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical for Jenn Colella.

[Irving Berlin’s White Christmas was staged at the Gulfshore Playhouse from 14 November to 21 December 2025.  It’s a musical based on the Paramount Pictures 1954 film White Christmas with a book by David Ives and Paul Blake, and music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.  The musical premièred in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2000 and then toured the U.S. in 2004 and the United Kingdom in 2007. 

[The stage musical played a limited engagement on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre from 23 November 2008 through 4 January 2009, for 53 performances and 12 previews.  It returned for another limited run from 22 November 2009 to 3 January 2010.  It was nominated for two Tonys in 2009 and six Drama Desk Awards, but won none; the return engagement wasn’t nominated.  Irving Berlin’s White Christmas played in London’s West End in 2014 and 2019, in Australia in 2009, elsewhere in England in December 2023 and January 2024, and toured the U.S. several times between 2007 and 2019.

[The Milwaukee Repertory Theatre’s 50th-anniversary production of A Christmas Carol will run from 25 November to 24 December 2025.  It’s an adaptation by the Rep’s own artistic director, Mark Clements, who also directed the production.  The music for Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s current adaptation of A Christmas Carol was written and arranged by John Tanner, a Milwaukee Rep Associate Artist.

[Anything Goes (1934) at the Gulfshore Playhouse ran from 1 to 24 November 2025.  The classic musical has music and lyrics by Cole Porter and a new book, based on the adaptation for the 1987 Broadway revival, by Timothy Crouse and John Weidman.  (The original book was by P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, revised by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.)

[The Broadway début was at the Alvin Theatre (now the Neil Simon) on 21 November 1934, with Ethel Merman as Reno Sweeney.  It ran for 420 performances, becoming the fourth longest-running musical of the 1930s when it closed on 16 November 1935.  It became a popular standard, including three Broadway revivals and at least one Off-Broadway staging, mostly for its Cole Porter score.]

[Sweet Charity (1965), based on the 1957 Italian film Nights of Cabiria (Le Notti Di Cabiria) by Federico Fellini, will close out the Gulfshore 2025-26 season from 10 April to 4 May 2026.  Directed and choreographed for Broadway by Bob Fosse, who conceived the stage version, starring his wife and muse, Gwen Verdon, as a dancer-for-hire at a Times Square dance hall.  (Her name was Charity Hope Valentine!)

[The musical had music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields, and a book by Neil Simon.  After a tryout at the Shubert Theatre in Philadelphia starting on 6 December 1965, the production moved to Detroit for a month, and then premièred on Broadway at the Palace Theatre on 29 January 1966, and closed on 15 July 1967, for 608 performances and 10 previews.  The production was nominated for nine Tony Awards, winning for Fosse’s choreography.

[The play was revived on Broadway in 1986 and 2005, and Off-Broadway in 2016, picking up more awards each time.  Its West End première was in October 1967, starring Juliet Prowse and running for 476 performances.  It returned to London in 2009 and 2016, and played in Australia in 1967 and 2014, and toured the country in 2015.

[Dial M for Murder will be mounted by Gulfshore on 16 January-6 February 2026 in a double adaptation: first Alfred Hitchcock for his 1954 screenplay from Frederick Knott's original 1952 play; then from Hitch to Jeffrey Hatcher’s 2022 version for the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, California.  Hatcher made some changes, not the least of which is to switch out the unfaithful wife’s male lover (that would be Grace Kelly and Robert Cummings in the flick) for a woman—a change Gulfshore maintains.

[The Hatcher adaptation of the movie has never played Broadway, but Knott’s original play, called Dial “M” for Murder, was at the Plymouth and then Booth Theatre from 29 October 1952 to 27 February 1954.

[Gulfshore will present Michael Frayn’s 1982 farce, Noises Off, on 27 February-20 March 2026.  Derived from a one-act play called Exits Frayn wrote, which was performed in 1977, the backstage comedy was inspired when the playwright was in the wings in 1970, watching a performance of The Two of Us, a farce that he had written.  He decided the play was funnier from backstage than it was from out front and he was moved to write a play “from behind.”

[That play became Noises Off, which premièred in London in 1982.  It transferred to the Savoy Theatre in the West End, where it ran until 1987.  On 11 December 1983, a production opened on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre (now the Lena Horne), where it ran for 553 performances (11 December 1983-6 April 1985).  It was nominated for four 1984 Tony Awards including Best Play, but won none; and was nominated for Drama Desk Awards, winning for Director of a Play for Michael Blakemore and Outstanding Ensemble.

[Noises Off has become a staple of both professional theater companies and community theaters on both sides of the Atlantic.  Since Frayn has rewritten the play many times over the years—the last revision was in 2000—there are many differences between the 1982 and 2000 scripts.  I couldn’t verify which version of the text Gulfshore is using, though I imagine it would be the latest revision, or some combination, perhaps, making sure that the latest updated references have been incorporated.

[Duncan MacMillan’s Every Brilliant Thing is a 2013 solo, immersive play written with Jonny Donahoe.  It’s a life-affirming exploration of mental health, depression, and resilience told through the lens of a narrator’s lifelong list of everything that makes life worth living.  Gulfshore staged it from 14 November to 15 December 2025.

[After selling out at three consecutive Edinburgh Festivals, Every Brilliant Thing is touring worldwide.  It ran at New York City’s Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village from 14 December 2014 to 29 March 2015.  The West End production of Every Brilliant Thing, featuring Daniel Radcliffe, is scheduled to open at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre in March 2026 for a two-month run.

[Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy (2013), adapted by Ben Power, will be produced at Gulfshore from 30 January to 2 March 2026.  The three-act play was originally written in Italian, but premièred in Saint-Étienne, France, in a French translation.  It’s been translated into two dozen languages and is one of the most produced plays in America.

[The play tells the story of the Jewish immigrant from Bavaria who arrives in America and founds the firm that becomes the Lehman Brothers. It eventually collapses in 2008 and brings the global economy down.  Three actors play the Lehman brothers and their descendants.  The Lehman Trilogy was produced in the U.K. at the National Theatre in 2018 under the direction of Sam Mendes.  That production transferred to the United States at the Park Avenue Armory, in New York City, from 22 March 2019 to 20 April 2019. 

[The production’s scheduled return to the U.S. was delayed by COVID, but the play did open on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre on 14 October 2021 and ran until 2 January 2022, for 82 performances and 21 previews.  It won 2022 Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play (Simon Russell Beale), Best Direction of a Play (Sam Mendes), Best Scenic Design of a Play (Es Devlin), and Best Lighting Design of a Play (Jon Clark).

[The Lehman Trilogy has been criticized for playing down the role of the Lehman family in slavery and for the crude, caricatured way in which it portrays their Jewishness.

[Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, a 1986 play with music by Lanie Robertson about Billie Holiday, premièred in Atlanta, Georgia, directed by Woodie King, Jr., and was then produced Off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in 1986.  When the production closed in 1987, it had run 281 performances and won the 1987 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Book (Robertson).

[The play was staged in theaters around the country, then opened on Broadway at Circle in the Square (Uptown) on 13 April 2014 and closed on 5 October.  It won the 2014 Tony Awards for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play (Audra McDonald) and Best Sound Design of a Play (Steve Canyon Kennedy); McDonald also won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play.

[Gulfshore will produce Lady Day from 20 March through 27 April 2026, which already includes an extension.  (For a report on a 2006 production of Lady Day, see “Two Looks Back (Play Reports from Rick’s Archives),” 23 July 2016.)

[Milwaukee Rep will mount their production of The Lehman Trilogy from 13 January to 8 February 2026.  The cast includes the Washington, D.C.-based actor Edward Gero (see “Amadeus (Round House Theatre, Bethesda, MD)” [6 July 2011], “Red (Arena Stage)” [4 March 2012], “The Originalist (PBS)” [17 July 2017], “The Originalist Squared” [7 August 2018]).

[1987’s The Piano Lesson by August Wilson is the fourth in his Pittsburgh Cycle, set in 1936.  (It was the fifth to be composed.)  It received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and will run at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater from 24 February to 22 March 2026.

[The first production of The Piano Lesson opened on 26 November 1987 at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and closed on 19 December.  The show played at several important regional theaters, then, on 16 April 1990, it opened on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre, where it ran until 27 January 1991, a total of 8 previews and 328 regular performances.  It was nominated for five Tonys in 1990, including Best Play, but won none; it received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play.

[The Piano Lesson was revived on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre from 13 October 2022 to 29 January 2023.  The production was nominated for the 2023 Best Revival of a Play Tony but didn’t win; it did win, however, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play.  An acclaimed Off-Broadway revival opened at the Theatre Row home of the Signature Theatre on 18 November 2012 and, after many extensions, closed on 20 January 2013 (see “The Piano Lesson” [14 December 2012]).  It received four 2013 Lucille Lortel Awards, including the Outstanding Revival Award, plus two Obies and the Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Play Revival.

[Ayad Akhtar’s 2012 one-act play Disgraced was his first stage play.  It premièred at the American Theater Company, Chicago, in 2012, and then was produced at Lincoln Center in New York City at the Claire Tow Theater in the fall of 2012, where it was extended several times.  It went to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, opening on 23 October 2014, receiving a nomination for the Best Play Tony for 2013 and won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  Disgraced ran for 27 previews and 149 regular performances, closing on 1 March 2015.

[Akhtar’s McNeal ran from 30 September to 24 November 2024 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, its Broadway house.  It will play the Milwaukee Rep from 10 February to 22 March 2026.  The play follows Jacob McNeal, a brilliant novelist obsessed with his own legacy and fascinated by artificial intelligence.  Set in the "not-too-distant future," the production explores the price of greatness and raises questions about art, truth, and originality. The Milwaukee Rep production features high-tech elements, including projections and special effects.

[Since April 2015, Michael Paulson has been the theater reporter of the New York Times.  From 2000 to 2010, Paulson covered religion for the Boston Globe, where he was part of the Globe team whose coverage of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.  Since 2010, he’s worked at the New York Times, where he initially continued his religion coverage.  His work at the Times reflected his early politics roots and continued to tie religion to national issues.   Paulson has covered theater at the New York Times.]

The Tale of the Greatest Upset in Motorsports History

 

[Not long ago, I picked up a copy of the “Metropolitan” section of the Sunday New York Times of 30 November 2025 which I’d laid aside to read later.  In “Metropolitan Diary,” a weekly column in the Times that features short, reader-submitted stories about life in New York City, I was intrigued by the very first offering:

Snappy Driver

dear diary:

As an ad man in the 1960s, I used to regularly go to a restaurant called Le Chanteclair on East 49th Street between Fifth and Madison.

The place was adorned with car racing trophies and memorabilia, and the man who ran the front of the house was from France and always elegantly dressed.

Not long ago, I picked up a book at the library called “Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best.”

Turns out the elegant Frenchman at Le Chanteclair was René Dreyfus, the driver who beat Hitler’s best.

neil fox

[What attracted me was the reference to the Jewish race car driver who beat Hitler.  I had to look that up and find out more about René Dreyfus and what race or races he won against Nazi drivers.  (The online version is entitled “Metropolitan Diary: ‘It Was the Start of a Frosty Relationship.’”)  Here’s what I learned:]

In the book Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best by Neal Bascomb (Mariner Books, 2020), the author recounts how French driver René Dreyfus and American heiress Lucy Schell's team (Écurie Bleue), driving a French-made Delahaye 145, beat the Nazi-backed German Silver Arrows (Silberpfeile) teams, whose drivers included the legendary Rudolf Caracciola, driving Mercedes-Benzes, in the 1938 Pau Grand Prix in a town of 78,600 in southern France, 31 miles (50 kilometers) from Spain.

(Écurie literally means ‘stable,’ referring to horses, and it can also refer to a ‘team’ of horses.  In motorsport, however, it can mean ‘team’; Écurie Bleue would be Team Blue.  In other instances of a sports or work team, the correct French word would be équipe.)

This victory was a significant morale boost for the French and a symbolic blow to the Nazis’ claims of Aryan supremacy, reportedly leading Hitler’s regime to attempt to erase all records of the race after their invasion of France in 1940.

René Albert Dreyfus (1905-93), according to Rodney Walkerley, a British reporter who covered motor sports, had “The Look—a stare of searing intensity and undying affection that lets you know, without a doubt, Dreyfus was put on Earth to drive cars fast” (exact source unknown).  Nick Donofrio, the New York Times researcher for Special Projects who reviewed Bascomb’s book, called him “a Max Baer of the asphalt, Jesse Owens on wheels” (“The Need for Speed,” New York Times Book Review 31 May 2020).  

(Walkerley (1905-82) wrote for Motor Sport from 1927 and The Light Car from 1930.  He also wrote several books, including Grand Prix 1934-1939 [1950] and Moments That Made Racing History [1959].)

A nearly fatal accident, and the loss of several friends on the circuit, destroyed Dreyfus’s confidence.  The crash, often cited as nearly ending his career, occurred on 14 April during the 1932 Grand Prix of Comminges in a privately-owned Bugatti.  Dreyfus hit a patch of road where another driver had just crashed in a downpour.  His car skidded, hit a tree, became airborne, and flipped, throwing him onto the road.  He was hospitalized with a severely injured shoulder and various cuts, but recovered to eventually join the Bugatti factory team.

Then, with the rise of fascism in Europe—Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Duce of the Fascist Party, was appointed prime minister of Italy in 1922; António Salazar (1889-1970) became prime minister of Portugal, a quasi-fascist dictatorship, in 1932; Hitler (1889-1945), Führer of the Nazi Party, was elected chancellor [prime minister] of Germany in 1933; Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Caudillo of the Falangist Party, became prime minister of Spain in 1936—he was banned from competing with the best teams and the fastest cars—Maserati, Alfa Romeo, and Mercedes—because he was Jewish.  An unlikely partnership with an American race enthusiast and a floundering French auto manufacturer would see his faith in himself return. To beat the Hitler-supported Silver Arrows, however, Dreyfus would have to find reason, and purpose, to risk everything.  It’s a story of faith and redemption, set on the perilous stage of motorsport with a backdrop of Nazi arrogance.

Born in Paris, the only child of an American industrialist, Lucy O’Reilly Schell (1896-1952) could have spent her life in the luxury which the wealth of her family made possible.  Instead, she volunteered to be a nurse during World War I, and when peace broke, she turned to racing cars.  A skilled driver, she broke with convention to become a top Monte Carlo Rally driver.  

Hitler’s Silver Arrows (so-named for their burnished-aluminum bodies) on the rise, she sought a new challenge, namely toppling the Nazis from their perch atop motor racing.  She started her own Grand Prix team—the first, and only, woman to do so—then financed with her inherited millions the construction of a formula car from scratch.  She chose a down-on-its-luck French firm named Delahaye to build her car and selected René Dreyfus to be her champion.

After ascending to power, Adolf Hitler declared that Germany would soon reign supreme in Grand Prix motor racing.  Success there would prove the might and prowess of the Third Reich—and help spur the “cavalry of the future” (Kavallerie der Zukunft).  This Third Reich propaganda phrase was a reference to the National Socialist Motor Corps (Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps, or NSKK). 

The NSKK was a paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party, conceived to train a host of men in driving and motoring skills, establishing the foundation of a mechanized army.  The organization was very effective in providing manpower for the Wehrmacht’s motorized infantry divisions.  

Hitler envisioned the NSKK units, mounted on motorcycles and in motor vehicles, as a highly mobile, spearhead force, ideal for reconnaissance and fast deployment, fulfilling the traditional light cavalry missions of scouting and quickly positioning troops, but with the speed and technology of motorization rather than horses.  Tanks and other armored vehicles were already fulfilling the traditional heavy cavalry role of shock troops.

Toward this end, the German war machine spurred—and subsidized—the German automotive industry to develop and manufacture the highest quality vehicles possible, and domination of motorsport was the first test of that capacity.  Also integral in Hitler’s plan for a “motorized Germany” was building a nationwide highway system (the Autobahns) and putting every German family in its own automobile (the Volkswagen, or “People’s Car”).

To accomplish this scheme, the Führer funneled millions to Daimler-Benz and Auto Union, the two lead auto manufacturers, who then recruited their country’s best drivers to the task of victory.  Foremost among them was Remagen-born Otto Wilhelm Rudolf Caracciola (1901-59).  

Although an unflappable race driver, Caracciola had a killer instinct that had made him the top racer in the world.  Matched with the Silver Arrow race cars built by Mercedes, he was all but unstoppable year after year, winning three European championships between 1935 and 1938.  He became the standard-bearer of Nazi dominance of the Grand Prix, raising his arm in a Nazi salute after each win and featuring in Reich propaganda that labeled its drivers, “swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, strong as Krupp steel.”  He was the perfect rival for René Dreyfus.

They were the unlikeliest of heroes. René Dreyfus, a former top driver on the international racecar circuit, had been banned from the best European teams—and fastest cars—by the mid-1930s because of his Jewish heritage.  Charles Weiffenbach (1870-1959), head of the down-on-its-luck automaker Delahaye (1894-1954), was desperately trying to save his company as the world teetered toward the brink.  And Lucy Schell, the adventurous daughter of an American multi-millionaire, whose fortune came from the construction business and subsequent industrial investments, yearned to reclaim the glory of her rally-driving days.  ($1 million in 1938 would be worth $23 million today.

As Nazi Germany, with its obsession with fast cars and Hitler’s plans to motorize Germany’s civilian population as well as its Wehrmacht, launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, these three misfits banded together to challenge Hitler’s dominance at the apex of motorsport: the Grand Prix.  Their quest for redemption culminated in a remarkable race that is still talked about in racing circles to this day—but which, soon after it ended, Hitler attempted to completely erase from history.

Bringing to life this glamorous era and the sport that defined it, Faster chronicles one of the most inspiring, death-defying upsets of all time: a symbolic blow against the Nazis during one of history’s darkest hours.  In the opening race of the 1938 season on 10 April—the Anschluß, the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich, had been just 25 days earlier, on 12 March—Dreyfus drove the Delahaye to a shocking upset of Caracciola and Mercedes in the Pau Grand Prix. 

The race (as recorded on The Golden Era of Grand Prix Racing):

[Rudi] Caracciola took the lead of the race followed by [René] Dreyfus, [Maurice] Trintignant [French; 1917-2005], [Dioscoride] Lanza [Italian; 1898-1977], [Gianfranco] Comotti [Italian; 1906-63], “Raph” [Georges Raphaël Béthenod de Montbressieux (Argentinian-born French; 1910-94)] and Matra [Yves “Yves-Marie” Martin (French; 1911-84)].  On the twisty Pau street track Dreyfus was able to keep pace with the leader and actually pass.  Caracciola re-passed but by now the Mercedes team must have known what would happen.  The fuel consumption of the Delahaye was about half of that of the supercharged Mercedes cars and the track had become slippery from oil and rubber making it impossible for Caracciola to use the power advantage of the Mercedes-Benz.  With half of the race gone Caracciola came into the pits for fuel.  The braking and gear changing on the Pau track had got Caracciola's old leg injury to make itself known and he gave over the car to [Hermann] Lang [German; 1909-87].  Dreyfus took over the lead never to be challenged again as he was running on a nonstop strategy.  Lang’s car developed plug trouble but it is unlikely that the Mercedes team would have won that day even with a healthy car.  The team had to admit that they had been beaten squarely and fairly.  So Dreyfus went on to a sensational victory, taking the flag almost 2 minutes in front of Lang.  Comotti was third in the other Delahaye followed by “Raph”’s Maserati.

(Caracciola had suffered a life-altering leg injury during a practice run for the 1933 Monaco Grand Prix.  Driving an Alfa Romeo for his own privately owned team and car [i.e., not an official, factory-backed team], a brake failure caused him to crash violently into a stone wall at a turn.  The crash resulted in multiple fractures to his right thigh and hip, and he spent six months in a plaster cast from the waist down and was confined to a wheelchair.  His doctors initially told him he’d never race again. 

(Despite the disability, Caracciola returned to win three European Championships [1935, 1937, 1938].  However, the old injury continued to plague him.  His right leg healed roughly two inches (five centimeters) shorter than his left, leaving him with a lifelong limp.  At Pau, the physical toll on his weakened leg of braking and changing gears forced him to hand over his car to a teammate.)

That year, Dreyfus was named the Race Champion of France.

Dreyfus had won the Grand Prix of Monaco in 1930; from 1925 to 1950, he’d become an international race driver of such excellence that he was awarded the Legion of Honor by President Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970; President of the French Republic: 1959-69) in the early 1960’s. 

In 1940, Dreyfus came to the United States on special leave from the French Army, which he’d joined as a truck driver when the war started, to drive for France in the Indianapolis 500.  He placed 10th in the race.  He didn’t return to France after the race, but joined the U.S. Army in 1942, after Germany invaded France two years earlier, serving as an interrogator in the Italian campaign.  He later brought his family to the United States and became a citizen in 1945, after World War II.

He founded Le Chanteclair at 18 East 49th Street off Madison Avenue (Manhattan’s Midtown East) in 1952 and for 25 years was one of the more popular dining locales for international auto racers.  The restaurant had the ambience of urban sophistication combined with the warmth of a French country inn.  

Dreyfus and his brother Maurice (1904-94), who ran the front of the house, were known for greeting patrons warmly and remembering their names, making everyone feel like an old friend.  The restaurant served classic and haute French cuisine and was well-regarded for its traditional French repertoire and extensive wine cellar. 

Le Chanteclair closed in the mid-1970s.  René Dreyfus, who was born in Nice, died at 88 of an aortic aneurysm at New York Hospital in Manhattan.  In 1983, he published a memoir, My Two Lives: Race Driver to Restaurateur by René Dreyfus and Beverly R. Kimes (Aztex Corp).