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10/10/2018 08:30 AMLife, as its practitioners know, has its good days and some days with far more challenging moments. Chester resident Fritz Jellinghaus has just had a very good day, special recognition at the Governor’s Patron of the Arts Awards for his more than 40 years as both member and chair of the Connecticut Arts Council. Old Saybrook resident Alva Greenberg was also honored at the ceremony for her work as a patron of the arts.
But then there is the summer day many years ago, a summer day, that Fritz would just as soon forget. He was working for WHYY, the public television station in Philadelphia and the station was running a promotion at Wanamaker’s, then the best-known department store in the city. It was, as Fritz recalls, a sweaty, sticky day and he was selected to wear a hot and heavy, but iconic, public television get-up: the big bird costume.
Things started out well enough until one child poked him and looked closely into the big bird headgear Fritz was wearing.
“You have a mustache. You’re not big bird,” Fritz recalls the youngster shouting.
Fritz turned his head quickly, but further disaster ensued. The beak of his costume scratched the youngster’s cheek.
Hiccups such as that aside, Fritz has worked as a publicist, a fundraiser, and a promoter of arts and cultural institution for his entire professional career with large public relations firms, museums and educational institutions, and with his own company on several occasions.
The Connecticut Arts Council, to which Fritz has devoted so many years, is a part of the Office of Tourism of Connecticut’s Department of Economic and Community Development. It oversees grants from both the state of Connecticut and the National Endowment for the Arts and monitors the progress of the projects involved.
Fritz is also the president emeritus of the Cultural Alliance of Fairfield County, a founding member of the Southeastern Connecticut Cultural Coalition, and a former board member of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven.
He has been involved with marketing and communications campaigns for prestigious institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection, and the New York Public Library. Most recently he was vice president of development at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, which is closing its campus in Old Lyme at the end of this school year. Now he is again working as an independent arts consultant.
“I always had the confidence that I could run a company; I have had some success, some not, but I never had to do anything else,” he reflects.
In whatever job he did, Fritz had the same message: The arts make everybody’s life more rewarding. He particularly regrets the impulse in difficult economic times for corporations to cut back on their corporate giving.
“It’s important in a recession to cultivate the arts,” Fritz says. “They get sidelined, but they are vital to everything we do, from housing policy that incorporates the arts to social justice like bringing arts to prisons. Arts should be organically integrated into the community.”
In fact, he adds that artists have the kind of innovative approach that corporate problem solvers need to tackle complex tasks.
“Artists take risks; they can wipe the slate clean and start all over; they know how to think outside the box,” he says.
As a child, Fritz, who grew up in northern New Jersey, was introduced to visual art by his godmother, the editor of Art Digest, who took him on museum expeditions in New York City. His introduction to dramatic art was more traumatic. He recalls when he was around 10 years old, being called upon at a school function to recite the Gettysburg address after the original young orator had gotten sick. It was not a moment of triumph.
“I said four score and seven years ago, and then I just split,” he remembers.
The arts actually brought Fritz and his wife Cynthia Glacken to Chester from Fairfield County some 14 years ago when he was working on a campaign for the Wadsworth Atheneum with longtime Chester resident Peter Good.
“This town is magical. It has a certain laid-back quality and it is a place with talented, interesting, and creative people,” he says.
One of Fritz’s contributions to local activity came after he saw a postcard advertising a ladies’ night out in Chester. He decided to form his own group of male contemporaries called Knights Out to meet every couple of months.
At first, he recalls everybody competed in preparing food.
“Then we discovered Pasta Vita,” he says.
Much of Fritz’s childhood was spent reading because he had a heart defect that made sports difficult. Open heart surgery at the age of 10 in 1957 corrected the problem, but he says he was always the last one picked when choosing sides for a team. Though he played some tennis when he held a leadership position in Boca Raton, Florida for the International Museum of Cartoon Art, Fritz says his hesitancy about physical fitness lasted until very recently when he joined the Valley Shore YMCA Silver Sneaker program, about which he is now enthusiastic.
“I have a trainer, I’m lifting weights,” he says.
Fritz is now working on a memoir. He is calling it Thanks for Having Me, a phrase he first heard when he was listening to an interview on National Public Radio.
“It’s my life as a guest of unforeseeable hosts; I have met so many interesting people in my career,” he says.
So far, he has written 300 pages.
“I don’t know where to stop,” he confesses.
Fritz has had has guidance from longtime Chester resident and author Lary Bloom, who now lives in New Haven, and his wife Suzanne Levine, a poet. They have suggested ways to make the book relevant to a wide audience.
“They tell me the things you say have got to matter; why should people care?” Fritz says.
That advice, he admits, gives him pause.
“It makes me wonder: What if nobody cares? But I am having a wonderful time doing it,” he adds.