Maestro of Strathmore

By Rebecca Adams

Halfway through a Montgomery County cable program about the arts, co-host Eliot Pfanstiehl seems to sense that the show is becoming a bore. After all, it serves as little more than a televised listings calendar. Yawn.

But the next topic — a local production of "The Wiz" — offers a chance for entertainment. Pfanstiehl seizes on it and suddenly belts out a song from the play. "Ease on down, ease on down the road!" sings the 54-year-old, shaking his balding head and pillow-shaped body to the groovy '70s tune.

That type of behavior is typical Pfanstiehl — spontaneous, irreverent, attention-grabbing. "He's a performer," says Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan.

The show-business antics have helped Pfanstiehl attract notice in his 21 years as president of the Strathmore Hall Arts Center on Rockville Pike in North Bethesda. On Feb. 5, the spotlight will shine brighter than ever with the opening of a world-class — and controversial — $100 million, 1,978-seat concert hall on the Strathmore grounds. Duncan has called the center the "single most important facility this county will build in our lifetime."

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, with the legendary Yuri Temirkanov as conductor, will be on stage opening night. But it is Pfanstiehl who is the true maestro of Strathmore. Determined, driven, single-minded, Pfanstiehl deftly steered his concert hall dream through political shoals to turn it into a reality. He and Duncan convinced the county and state to pay most of the $100 million tab for the hall — and Metro to expand and improve a nearby station. With his deep understanding of the arts world, pioneering spirit and world-class schmoozing skills, Pfanstiehl was perfectly cast.

Whether he's at a black-tie event or his favorite breakfast eatery, La Madeleine on Rockville Pike, Pfanstiehl seems to know everyone in the room. But most would say they hardly know him. When the curtain falls, Pfanstiehl is far more reserved than his public persona. He reveals little of himself. His tastes are fairly modest. His suits are sometimes rumpled. He drives a Geo Prism (which is the third car he's owned in his life — the others were a Dodge Dart convertible and a red Ford Escort station wagon). To even those people who have known him a long time, Pfanstiehl is an enigma.

He who laughs last, thinks slowest

Pfanstiehl is deadly earnest about his passions — the arts and the need for a sense of community in today's chaotic world. Argue with him about the merits of the new concert hall — and you will get a lengthy sermon. But lest you take him too seriously, he will invariably break the tension with a sly remark or a thoughtful question about your family. Or, occasionally, a tap dance.

His voice-mail message is equally disarming. Instead of a routine "hello," it starts with a randomly selected quote that he changes each Monday. Callers find the Chinese fortune-cookie approach so endearing that they have started e-mailing him quotes to use. "He who laughs last, thinks slowest!" his message announces one week.

The quirkiness is both natural and calculated. "I love spontaneity and creative thought, but I don't go into many situations where I don't have some plan," he says.

His charm comes in handy when he's approaching County Council members for money, introducing a Strathmore crowd to musicians preparing to perform, or trying to convince skeptics that the new music hall is a worthy investment. "This guy's charming and he knows how to work a crowd," says Peter Jablow, the president and CEO of the Levine School of Music, which will run music classes at the new Strathmore site. "He's a great politician."

Those political skills will be in demand over the next year as the music center opens. Its completion caps the 21st year of Pfanstiehl's tenure at Strathmore. It is his legacy.

The warmly elegant hall — with its alabaster art glass lighting fixtures, red birch wood walls, eggplant purple seats and stainless steel accents — is stunning. It also symbolizes the controversy that has threatened to grow louder than the music that will emanate from its walls. Critics have questioned whether the $100 million in public funds that built the hall should have gone to more urgent needs. Is it really worth more to taxpayers than 100 new school gyms? Or 10 recreation centers? Or four state-of-the-art public libraries? Why not attract more private dollars to pay for the building instead of placing the burden on county and state taxpayers?

Strathmore benefited from almost-shocking generosity: After the state and county had agreed to pay for the building, the Metro transit authority pitched in and expanded the nearby Grosvenor station, adding a 1500-car garage and a pedestrian crossing bridge connecting it to the hall — and picked up two-thirds of the cost.

Pfanstiehl says he was as surprised as anyone at Metro's offer. "I didn't dream it up. It came to us," he says. "If you believe in divinity, that was a time to start attributing it to a greater power than anything one knows or controls."

Skeptics who have challenged the concert hall idea since before ground was broken in 2001 are watching for problems. Pfanstiehl's biggest challenge will be to generate excitement about the center, not more complaints, and to avoid having to ask government for a bailout.

He shrugs at the prospect of criticism. "Pioneers get shot at," he says. "Anyone doing something on this level does get critics."

ENFP: Extrovert-Intuitive-Feeling-Perceiving

Pfanstiehl was a local personality long before joining Strathmore. When he and his twin sister, Julie Hamre, were ninth-graders at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, they were both nominated for class president and were forced to compete against each other. Because their father was a well-known fixture in the community, a Washington Star reporter heard of it and wrote a feature story about it. "There was never any question who would win," says Hamre. "It was the beginning of his great political career."

Since being elected class president each of his four years at Blair, Pfanstiehl (known as "Eliot" by almost everyone) has continually been involved in leadership roles. He graduated from an organization called Leadership Washington and in 1989 helped found Leadership Montgomery, a nonprofit Maryland group that trains individuals to be leaders at work and in their communities. He now takes off work a few days a year to participate in overnight training programs.

During the training, Pfanstiehl sometimes offers comic relief with parodies and skits. On the second day, he normally puts on a "news broadcast" making light of the activities of the previous day.

From the conferences, Pfanstiehl has developed an ability to size up people. He is fascinated by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, which identifies personality types by four main characteristics. Strathmore staffers say that he hires people not only on their individual merits, but also based on how they will function with the rest of the group.

"He collects people based on that test like other people collect coins," says Shelley Brown, the vice president of programming at Strathmore. "He wants one of every type. He believes a healthy organization has everyone represented."

For his part, Pfanstiehl's test results (ENFP — Extrovert-Intuitive-Feeling-Perceiving) show that he is an extrovert, intuitive, that he makes judgments based on what he feels rather than waiting for hard evidence, and that he lives in a flexible, spontaneous way, seeking to experience and understand life instead of controlling it.

Anyone who has gone to the trouble of taking such tests must spend time reflecting on what they mean, right? Pfanstiehl acknowledges having spent time analyzing his traits. "I'm shyer than I appear but more outgoing than most," he says.

In other words, quiet on the inside, but you'd never know it for all the noise.

If you ask Pfanstiehl a question about himself, he'll invariably deflect it with a response about Strathmore, or Leadership Montgomery, or perhaps, his family — which he says are the highest priorities in his life.

The work and service groups alone keep him busy. Not only is he involved in leadership groups, but he also has served as leader in groups for his Lutheran church and children's schools near his home north of Silver Spring, near Cloverly. His father, Cody, says that he has gotten so busy that his family has encouraged him to stop spending so much time volunteering.

"This isn't the time for me to slow down," Pfanstiehl protests. "Besides, I'm like a shark having to move in the water."

Pfanstiehl acknowledges that while he knows a wide range of people in the area, he no longer has much time to invest in deep friendships. "There are an awful lot of people I meet…, and the more people I know, the more value I bring to a given certain situation," he says. "But I don't drill down on one or two relationships besides my family."

Like father, like son

The single greatest influence on Pfanstiehl's life was his father, whom he counts as his best friend.

"He's an exact clone of my dad," says Julie Hamre, Eliot's sister. "They look alike, talk alike, and both have spent their entire careers dealing with the public."

Cody Pfanstiehl was the first spokesman for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. He, too, was involved in community affairs for years. When the younger Pfanstiehl was a child, he often tagged along with his father to community meetings or to work. Now, he continues that tradition by taking his own four children when he has community service meetings or nighttime events at Strathmore.

When people met the younger Pfanstiehl, one of the first comments was usually, "You must be related to Cody."

And in fact, the elder Pfanstiehl had worked on the original plan to build a concert hall at Strathmore in the 1960s, although his son says he did not know that until recently.

As a child growing up in Takoma Park, Pfanstiehl was exposed to the arts early by his parents, who signed him up for flute lessons. His mother and sisters played piano, and the entire family often visited Washington to watch plays or listen to music.

Pfanstiehl's entire family — 87-year-old Cody and stepmother Margaret, sisters Carla and twin Julie — still lives in the Baltimore-Washington area. He is particularly close to Julie, who is married to John J. Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense and current president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (The family says that Eliot and Julie, who refer to themselves as twins, actually are not — they were conceived a month apart but born at the same time.)

Pfanstiehl has lived in the Washington metro area his entire life, except for a brief two-year stint away at a college in Illinois after graduating from Blair High School in 1968. And most of that time, he has been involved in creating new organizations or expanding existing ones.

He moved back to D.C. to graduate from George Washington University with a bachelor's degree in psychology, not the arts or management. After college, he worked for the Maryland State Department of Education for two years. He got married, but it only lasted two years. He has been married to his second wife, Cynthia, a cultural anthropologist and choreographer, for 24 years. They have four children: three sons and a daughter ages nine to 20.

Dancing his way to the top

In the early 1970s, Pfanstiehl got involved in the arts through a community acting group known as Street '70, which was established by June Allen. The Montgomery County Department of Recreation took it over in 1973. With help from Pfanstiehl and others, it evolved into Round House Theatre in 1978 in Wheaton.

During his time as a dancer and choreographer with Street '70, Pfanstiehl and his sister Julie lived in a group house of actors, including Jerry Whiddon, who is retiring as artistic director in June after two decades with Round House Theatre, now based in Bethesda. "We'd be all up for all hours of the day and night, rehearsing the show," Whiddon recalls. "And he would come in and wing it as choreographer, wearing those Keds sneakers he had. I knew he had no idea where he was going with a number but before you knew it, you had a number. It underscored how nimble of foot this man was."

And still is?

"Sure, I think he channeled all that energy into a different kind of dancing, with donors or the County Council," Whiddon says. "Where I don't see him dancing on a sprung wood floor, I can see him dancing through his professional life."

Pfanstiehl continued his career in the arts when he served from 1974 to 1983 as the manager of the arts division of Montgomery County Department of Recreation. During that time, he helped create the Montgomery County Arts Council.

Pfanstiehl has come a long way from the days when he had to pick up arts critics and drive them to the suburbs in order to convince them that they should expand their coverage beyond the District. Pfanstiehl has been leading Strathmore since 1981, when he began working for the then-fledgling arts organization, which officially opened two years later.

He does not long to be on stage himself, he says, but his life revolves around supporting those who do. He has an "artist's temperament," he says — including a tendency to dream big. He is not a man given to doubts, either about his organization or himself.

"He pushes for his agenda," says John Gidwitz, former president of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which will be playing half of its schedule at Strathmore. Gidwitz met Pfanstiehl years ago when they were rivals competing for limited resources from the state. "He's very self-confident," Gidwitz says.

Gidwitz initiated the concert hall project eight years ago when he told county executive Duncan that he was looking for a summer home for the symphony. Duncan suggested Strathmore. One day in 1996, the three men — Gidwitz, Duncan and Pfanstiehl — looked over the landscape of the Strathmore grounds and got excited about the possibilities.

With Duncan's prompting, the County Council contributed $45 million to construct a concert hall and "not a penny more." That was matched by the state. Critics questioned such a large commitment from government. But in a time of budget surpluses, the expenditures seemed less extravagant. Ground was broken on April 11, 2001.

Earlier this year, controversy returned when the price tag for Strathmore swelled. Duncan asked the council to accept $3 million for cost overruns, warning that any delays in funding could derail the schedule for opening. Some members balked, saying that Duncan and Pfanstiehl took the funds for granted. "I was furious…because we learned of it late," says Montgomery County Council member George Leventhal. "It was presented as a take it or leave it deal. I didn't appreciate the way it was presented."

Leventhal and other council members, including as Tom Perez, eventually brokered a deal to give Strathmore the funds as a loan.

The episode was significant not because of the amount of money involved, which was minor compared to the overall cost, but because it revived questions about cost-effectiveness. It also raised ire over the manner in which Duncan, and some say Pfanstiehl, expected the council to rubber-stamp their demands. "Many people in the county will never go to Strathmore," Leventhal notes. "It behooved Eliot to be a little more sensitive."

One of Pfanstiehl's weaknesses, say people on the other side of the issues from him, is that he is so passionate and committed to the arts that he seems unable to really appreciate others' viewpoints. When people challenge the worth of the Strathmore expansion, Pfanstiehl says he is perplexed. "I don't know how people find bad in this," he says.

Pfanstiehl is infamous for having so many interests that he finds it difficult to find the time — or concentration — to zero in on one. Each of the Myers-Briggs personality types has a prayer, and Pfanstiehl laughs at his: "Oh, Lord, help me focus on one — look, a bird! — thing at a time."

Rebecca Adams is a reporter for Congressional Quarterly.