An Extended History

In the late 1960s, the Bitter End (a "rock club" in NYC) started a national coffeehouse circuit. If artists wanted to play on the circuit, they had to go to New York City and audition at the Bitter End. If the people at the Bitter End liked them, then the artists were booked at the various venues on the circuit. UPAC Mother's Wine Emporium was one of these venues. Later on, when conflicts of interest arose in the circuit, Mother's led a major change: booking independently. This effectively broke the circuit, and gave coffeehouses much more freedom in booking the artists they wanted.

During the Student Union's first four years (~1969-1973), Rick Sawyer was Program Director. Sawyer started the folk tradition at RPI, and got the Union involved in the coffeehouse circuit. At that time, there were ten UPAC groups, all sub-committees of the Union Executive Board (E-Board) and designed to make sure the board did not spend their money unevenly: UPAC Women, UPAC Performing Arts, UPAC Club RPI, UPAC BSA, UPAC Comedy, UPAC Concerts, UPAC Bands, UPAC Mother's Wine Emporium, UPAC Cinema, and UPAC Summer. Many of these groups died off as the culture changed; we are now left with UPAC Comedy, UPAC Concerts, UPAC Cinema, UPAC Mother's, UPAC Lights, and UPAC Sound (Sound & Lights evolved as a result of the high demand of these services from the other groups; it was cheaper in the end to to buy all the equipment than to rent it for each event).

When Mother's first came into being, it had no space of its own. It hosted three shows per week (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday) in the McNeil room of the Student Union or in Proctor's Theatre in downtown Troy. It was usually the same performer all three nights of the week, which made it cheaper to book the artist as it provided them with the opportunity to do more than one show in the area. The Thursday night show was often broadcast over WRPI, and groups of people would send "spies" to the Thursday night shows to scope out the performance. If they gave good reports, they would come back with more friends on Friday and Saturday nights. Performers included the likes of Tom Chapin, Leo Kottke, and Greg Brown - all relatively big names at the time.

Julie Calzone, who was a student at RPI during the early '70s, spearheaded the idea of moving Mother's from the McNeil room into a real coffeehouse setting, and she did much of the physical setup of the initial Mother's location. At that time, Father's Food Emporium was already in place, so it followed that the coffeehouse would be called Mother's Wine Emporium.

In the beginning, Mother's did serve wine to its patrons. This soon proved to be distracting and detracting from the musical experience, however, so they stopped serving it themselves and allowed Chiripa's, a food service in the Rathskellar just outside Mother's, to take care of the serving of alcohol. Then when the drinking age was raised to 21, alcohol disappeared completely. Mother's now serves tea, coffee, and cookies and donuts.

Sometime in the late '80s, Mother's gradually stopped doing Thursday night shows. Classes were beginning to be more demanding, and the students who ran the organization had less time to work the shows. Mother's then began doing one or two shows per weekend; sometimes Friday, sometimes Saturday, sometimes both. Beginning in spring of 2003, Mother's began planning events for every Friday night (except school vacations), to establish Mother's as a place where bored students could always find something to do on a Friday night.

Through the years, Mother's has had good times and bad times, but one of the biggest crises that occurred was the "Mailroom Crisis of 1987." In April of 1987, Mother's was lacking good leadership and was slowly dying. A proposal came about in the E-Board to turn the Mother's space into a centralized mailroom for the students. The concept was approved by the E-Board as being a valuable service to students, and they decided that the incorporation of the mailroom in the Union was appropriate. They stopped at the actual decision of allocating space until they had adequate student input. If the mailroom was to take the Mother's space, Mother's would then begin using the DuMont room as its venue, and performance times would have to be changed to Saturday and Sunday evenings between 7:30 and 9:30pm. This caused quite an outrage, and calls and letters began to pour in to Rick Hartt, Kara Murphy (then President of the Union), and even to the Editor of the Polytechnic and the Vice President for Institute Relations. Students, faculty, community members, and performers wrote in to express their concern, and emphasized the importance of Mother's contributions to both RPI and its community. Many argued that if the move was allowed, it would effectively kill the organization. Suggestions were made to improve the leadership, and to work to re-establish it as a student tradition.

In addition to the shows on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, Mother's also used to hold workshops run by performers such as Pat Donahue and Roy Atkinson; during GM Week Mother's held a "Campus Talent Extravaganza," a campus-wide talent show which involved a contest as well as full performances by the winners. During Parents Weekend, Mother's used to hold two performances in Mother's as well as another show in the McNeil room for the parents. Although these events were a lot more work, workshops and the Campus Talent event were brought back in spring of 2003 to draw a wider crowd to Mother's.