Ella Fountain Pratt died last week at age 94. The Herald-Sun front page story on July 30th chronicled her long and enduring impact on the arts in Durham. When I came to Durham in 1984 to be marketing director of Central Carolina Bank, the bank was small by regional or national standards but still one of the few corporations of any size that was actually headquartered in Durham. As the administrator of a sizable marketing budget and the bank’s charitable contributions, I suddenly found myself thrust into the middle community life in a way I had never been in my hometown of Richmond.
One of the things that I was asked to do was serve on the board of the Durham Arts Council which is where I met Ella Fountain Pratt. However, my most vivid recollection of her was the force she was during the production of the street opera at Brightleaf Square. The bank had been asked to help underwrite part of the cost of the production to the tune of $10,000, an amount that seemed huge at the time. While she seemed to effortlessly oversee the production, I was struggling mightily to convince branch managers to use the tickets we had by virtue of our sponsorship to host their best customers at the event. She was more successful than I was but I still remember the event as one of those key turning points when a few influential people began to see that there might be some hope for downtown Durham. A few years later as one of the founding board members of Downtown Durham, Inc. we recognized that arts were already there as a foundation to build a revitalization campaign. It’s taken twenty years but it actually seems to be working.
In more recent years, when I’d occasionally see Ella Fountain Pratt around town she always had a cheerful greeting and I could see a vague sense of recognition in her eyes of me as someone that may have helped the effort in the distant past. However, there is no doubt of the role she played in Durham’s cultural life. There are, in fact, a lot of people that never gave up on Durham and she was one of them. Several others are mentioned in the Herald-Sun article and there are many more that struggled on while skepticism remained the more fashionable attitude. Ella Fountain Pratt certainly deserves an honored spot in Durham’s mythical hall of fame.
