Rae Ellsworth is watching the panhandling ducks that work the banks of the Fox River behind her restaurant, the Mill Race Inn of Geneva, and worrying about the weekend.
It is an afternoon early in June, and on the upcoming Saturday, the Renaissance Repertory Company, which she helped launch nine years ago, will open a summer season of classical drama dedicated to her late husband, Judge William H. Ellsworth. A painful knee ailment is threatening to interfere with her plans for that gala occasion.
”I`m not used to this,” she says, referring to the inconvenience of her infirmity. ”Lots of people will be here Saturday to honor Bill on opening night-our children and our friends. I can`t disappoint them.”
Her gaze wanders beyond the ducks, where a concrete footbridge leads to a mid-stream island, Geneva`s Island Park. There, an open-air stage framed by towering trees awaits the players.
”Bill was so steeped in the theater. After he finished at the University of Iowa, it was a tossup whether he`d go on to the Pasadena Playhouse with his fellow-graduate and good friend MacDonald Carey or to Harvard Law School. Harvard won out.”
She recalls when she and her husband first encountered the idea of performing Shakespeare and other classical drama on Island Park. A friend put them in touch with a Northern Illinois University drama professor who was searching for an outdoor setting for a repertory company.
”We were so excited when she suggested doing Shakespeare there,” she says. ”We said, `This is terrific,` and we formed a board of five people to get it going. We didn`t know what we were doing. Nobody knows how to establish a theater company, for heaven`s sake. We had all kinds of problems at first.
”That first summer we did `A Midsummer Night`s Dream,` and it was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. It was so simple-the costumes, the stage, the whole concept. The stage was a series of uprights and platforms built into the trees. People brought their own chairs and sat with their backs to the sun. We started, as we still do, at 6 o`clock; the sun sets as the performance ends.
”I`ll never forget how the setting sun came in on that first performance. Puck`s very last speech was `So good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends . . . ,` and there was this glow of pinkish sun like a spotlight on his face.”
Polly Aschom, a Geneva resident who served on the first board of the Renaissance Repertory Company with Ellsworth, agrees that the company faced early problems. ”But,” she says, ”Rae had good insight into what was needed in the infancy of Renaissance Rep. She was so supportive, so helpful. Her commitment was total.”
Aschom, now a manufacturer`s representative in Chicago, once described Ellsworth as ”a businesswoman . . . (whose) generosity of time, energy and spirit go far beyond her commercial interests. She cares about Geneva`s cultural and business health and growth. She is the essence of community involvement . . . a nurturer-of ideas, of ideals, of individuals.
”Rae is a very good delegator,” says Aschom. ”She finds people, encourages them, supports them in the community.” She ticks off a few examples where the Ellsworth presence made a difference: as member and president of the Chamber of Commerce; organizer of a mini-Chautauqua series;
charter board member of the Kane County Tourism Association (the first county tourism group in Illinois); cochairman, with her husband, of Geneva`s celebration of the nation`s bicentennial and the town`s sesquicentennial.
Of those celebrations, Ellsworth says: ”These were combined efforts; we had a lot of people helping. We had a cochairman who did all the practical things. Bill and I were the conceptualizers. We`d be driving along in the car and start conceptualizing, start talking about how we`d do this or that, and by the time we got to where we were going, we`d have the whole thing planned. ”For one pageant, we made the Fox River out of plastic bubble wrap, rolls and rolls of it, all over the football field.”
Jean Gaines, director of the Geneva Chamber of Commerce, recalls the unique flavor of the town`s sesquicentennial in 1985. ”Remember, every town in this area had one about this time. Rae and Bill wanted one that would be not a tourist or visitor vehicle, but something that would be a hometown celebration.”
Five special events were scheduled: a birthday party with massed church choirs, patriotic songs and home-baked cakes on the courthouse lawn; a Swedish Days parade; a family picnic on Island Park; street dances; and a gigantic history pageant, written and produced by the Ellsworths, held on the football field.
Gaines says: ”Rae has served on so many committees. I can`t think of a time that I ever called Rae for help that she didn`t give it. For instance, we have over 200 buildings in Geneva on the National Register of Historic Places; she was one of the early members of that committee.”
A few years ago, Gaines relates, Ellsworth offered to host the traditional old-timers coffee hour, held during Geneva`s Swedish Days, at the Mill Race Inn. ”No charge, of course,” adds Gaines, ”and she still does it. I can`t tell you how that revived interest in the coffee. We have some senior citizens, 90 or so, who arrive that day at 8:30 in the morning to be sure to get in for coffee at the Mill Race Inn.
”That was typical. Rae has always had great vision. Instead of just being worried about the Inn, her attitude has always been: What`s good for Geneva is good for the Mill Race Inn.”
The inn has been in Ellsworth`s family since 1946, when her father, Ray Johns, bought it from the original owners, the Forsyth sisters. Marjorie and Ann Forsyth had opened it as a tea room in 1933, housed in a converted blacksmith shop beside the Fox River. By the time he acquired the Mill Race Inn, Johns had developed a nationwide chain of highly successful fast-food shops, had moved to Wayne and had become, in his daughter`s words, ”a country gentleman.”
His retirement was short lived. The charm and beauty of the Fox River Valley and the challenge of developing the little summer tea room into a year- round enterprise changed his life and the life of his only child. After Johns died in 1964, Rae returned from the East where she had been living to take over his restaurant. She was past 40, the divorced mother of four children and, she insists, ignorant about the restaurant business.
”My father told me when I was 16, `Don`t ever get involved in a restaurant.` But when he died, his attorney said to me, `Do you want to sell the Mill Race Inn?` And I said, `What?! Sell the Mill Race Inn?! That`s our heritage, mine and my children`s!”
Her pride in Geneva and its traditions were matched by that of her late husband. Bill Ellsworth was a judge of the 16th Judicial Circuit and a widower when the pair married in 1974. It seemed a match made in heaven.
”It was always hard to think of one without thinking of the other,”
says Edgar Crane, a former Geneva mayor. ”They complemented each other so well. Even when he died, at the funeral there was not so much a sense of overwhelming grief, as a sense of gratitude for his life, this great pleasure in having known him.”
Last year, despite diagnosis of his cancer, the Ellsworths began constructing the home they had planned for so long. In September, they moved in, and a month later, Bill died there.
A friend of the couple recalls the beauty of Rae`s last gesture to her husband: She invited friends to scatter his ashes, mixed with wildflower seeds, over the meadow adjoining their new home.
The sun is lowering now over the Fox River, and the ducks are clambering up the banks in search of dinner. Rae Ellsworth makes one more point: ”I have this passionate love of this town. To me, it`s the heart of the valley. It`s so genuine and completely unplastic. The shops and boutiques have just grown up in the old Victorian houses along 3d Street in a natural way, versus, say, Long Grove. We have such a viable center of town; we`ve had towns such as Winnetka come and ask us how we do it.”
A lot of Geneva residents share Rae Ellsworth`s feelings about their town, according to Crane. ”Many people here put a great deal of effort into making this a nice community. To all of them, Rae is a symbol or epitome of the best. She`s an example, a model, a real leader.”
