Photo: Martin Studio

1932

Seeing Little Women productions through Heddie's eyes is a trip through history. For the 1932 productions, at age fourteen, she was an usher -- a good opportunity to watch her uncle D. Ripley Gage play Mr. Laurence. She remembers that the show went "on the road" to Cambridge and that her mother did costumes, while her father whistled the robin.

The 1932 production was not Heddie's first experience with the Players. She could very well have been born in a Players' trunk since her mother and father met in a production of Pricilla, an operetta about the Pilgrims. Instead, she managed to be born in the Root family farmhouse, where she has lived her entire life, and to make the Veterans' Building, as 51 Walden was then called, her second home.