Comments:
Wally Meier didn’t take to college at first and joined the US Air Force where he may have found the talents he would develop the rest of his life. In the service he began to play banjo in a folk group and eventually played in 22 countries. By 1962 he was ready to finish college and become a teacher, but with a more definite focus than he had when he first started college. He took his bachelor’s degree from SUNY at Buffalo and went immediately into teaching art. Once he began in Weedsport, NY he was there for good, and the record shows that “good” is more than a matter of time.
As soon as he arrived in Weedsport, some 20 miles west of Syracuse, he started the Community Theatre program and introduced musical theatre in the high school. Challenged with limited budgets and grand ambitions and eager students, Wally developed low cost “one-set-fits-all” designs for musicals. His special love has been Musical Theatre International and its programs for the Broadway Junior Collection. He also became the sponsor of a magic teaching program in the middle school and still performs magic shows for the schools.
Free from his daily teaching routines, he now volunteers in the schools, producing and designing the annual musical theater productions. He also serves as a design consultant for Music Theater International, and pursues his own course as a kinetic artist. He has also been active in Boy Scouts, having been an Eagle Scout himself, and he has designed many Scout emblems and insignias.
Wally was elected one of the three honorary members of the Weedsport Performing Arts Hall of Fame.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
(from Shakespear’s “As You Like It”)
