Dot McClure's was a generous, active and well-lived life

Next month the Springer Opera House, now officially the State Theater of Georgia, will observe the 50th anniversary of its reopening. A musical titled "St. Elmo," based on the Victorian novel by Columbus' Augusta Evans Wilson, was performed Sept. 23, 1965, before an audience in a Springer that was really only about one-third restored.

The survival and restoration of that third -- not to mention the glorious renaissance that woujld follow -- was something between a miracle and an act of community heroism. Because only about a year earlier, the historic theater's next contractual engagement was to have been with a wrecking ball.

Nobody was more instrumental in stopping that wrecking ball, and bringing in restorers and renovators instead, than Dorothy "Dot" McClure, who died last week at 89.

The contributions to area arts and culture by Dot McClure and her late husband Chuck McClure, prominent Columbus broadcasting executive, were by no means limited to the Springer. Their creation of the McClure Family Foundation has borne and continues to bear fruit for local arts, entertainment and cultural endeavors.

But of all those projects, the Springer was Dot McClure's first major triumph and remained her first love.

Ron Anderson, who recently retired as the Springer's associate artistic director, said McClure's "love and spirit will always be at the Springer hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of young people have been affected by her love and her spirit and her impishness and her guidance."

One of the theater's annual events has been Dot Day, when McClure would sit on the stage in a big yellow polka-dotted hat and tell Springer Academy students the Springer's story. Paul Pierce, the theater's producing artistic director, believes (and he is far from alone in this) that the work of Dot McClure and others in saving the Springer had profound effects that went far beyond the theater itself -- indeed, that it was the beginning of serious historic preservation in the city.

"The very next year the Historic Columbus Foundation was founded, our first historic preservation ordinances were created, making it impossible for the destruction of something like the Springer Opera House to ever happen in the future of Columbus," Pierce said. "Everything we see downtown today started on the corner of 10th Street and First Avenue in 1965, when Columbus, Ga., had been going in the other direction and had pretty much abandoned downtown."

In 2010 Dot McClure, through the family foundation, gave $3 million to kick-start a capital campaign called Set the Stage. That campaign funded a new children's theater, a learning park, classrooms and other improvements. In October 2013, the new children's theater was officially dedicated as the Dorothy McClure Theatre.

It is known, as it would have to be, as The Dot.

This story was originally published August 3, 2015 at 5:03 PM with the headline "Dot McClure's was a generous, active and well-lived life."