Sandy Speer had a glass-framed poster from World War II on his office wall opposite his desk. The print read, “Loose lips sink ships!”, which he fervently believed. After contemplating the poster for 15 or 16 years, I asked him why it was off-center on the wall. Sandy looked at me askance and said, “I can see who’s in the hall reflected in the glass.”
Moral: Sandy Speer sees all. And he did. Sandy—who started as a part-time house manager at Kentucky’s Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1965 when he was just 25, and retired as its executive director in 2006, holding myriad administrative in the interim—collected every shard of information available and then made the decisions that made ATL a national and international power in its field. He was the chess master of arts management.
And boy, did we have fun. We loved our work. We were comrades of the long march. In 32 years we never had an argument, though we did have some icy silences. Sandy’s ice could always trump mine.
He protected me artistically, and I protected him fiscally. We talked continually at work, wandering in and out of our side-by-side offices sharing insights, doing business, bound by our ambitions for ATL and a shared, deeply cynical sense of humor. Actually, we never socialized one-on-one outside the building. We’d already done that all day.
Some in the building assumed that Sandy was the bad cop and I was the good cop, which endlessly made us chuckle. He humanized me and talked me down from my revengeful nature with his supreme good sense.
Above all, he was a gentleman of the old school. He even taught me what a shrimp fork was. And keep a secret? He was like a bank vault. Oh, and he was a gentleman who knew the value of a dollar, particularly the theatre’s. I used to go on fundraising sorties with Sandy into corporate offices, but I could never sense what had gone down during the meetings, so Sandy would read the room for me. Correctly. It was like having the world’s best translator.
Fiscal intelligence? He had it. He also led me through the complexities of Louisville like an assured tour guide. Without him (and I mean this), I would have been just another garden-variety artistic director and ATL just part of the general theatre mob.
Sandy was funny, smart, wily, heartfelt, mysterious, and he was, luckily, my best friend and co-conspirator. I miss a lot of things and people having left Louisville, but mainly I miss walking the 10 feet into Sandy’s office and plotting how to be the best damn theatre in America—while Sandy checked the poster to see who was in the hall.
Jon Jory was artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville from 1969 to 2000. He now lives in Santa Fe, N.M. This tribute first appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal.
