Lebanon
When Glazer wasn’t busy helping build Northern Stage, he was directing plays at Hanover High School, or acting in another production at the Parish Players. The city of Lebanon also relied on Glazer’s writing skills and accuracy for its meeting minutes, as did a weekly newspaper that ran his regular columns.
But while many people would agree that Glazer was talented and creative, friends and family also praise his calm, patient temperament and supportive nature.
It’s those qualities they say will be missed after he died suddenly while sleeping at home on July 1, 2018. He was 61.
“He was more than funny. He was so supportive and reliable,” said Alexandra Barcus, Glazer’s longtime partner. “I can’t imagine anyone else being that kind. He had the biggest heart.”
Glazier was born on Jan. 28, 1957, and spent much of his childhood with family on Long Island. While he played music in high school, Glazer chose to study English while attending State University of New York in the 1970s.
Glazer majored in English and would often tell people he was “going to be an Englishman” after graduation, said Dr. Deborah Glazer, his ex-wife, who met him while serving on the school’s ambulance team.
“He was one of the few people who was on the ambulance service that wasn’t trying to get into medical school,” said Deborah Glazer, who is now a physician at Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital.
They married when she was in medical school at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, N.Y., where Glazer studied social work. They then moved to Lebanon after she finished her residency in 1985, and had three children –— Shannon, Adrienne and Christopher.
“He really delighted in his children. He always treated them as people,” she said. “He never talked down to them.”
Deborah Glazer said she and Charlie were very different people.
While she enjoyed the outdoors and skiing, he was much more focused on theater and music.
The two personalities likely provided their children with a balanced upbringing, she said.
However, the couple ultimately divorced around 1990.
“He was probably the most reasonable person you’d ever meet,” Deborah Glazer said. “He didn’t make stuff up. He was just very up front about everything.”
Their oldest child, Shannon Glazer, was born in 1979, about five years before the family moved into their Poverty Lane home. She remembers growing up in a supportive and creative household.
“My dad was very, very kind,” Shannon Glazer said. “He was just very affectionate and also very honest with us too. If we asked him a question, he answered it truthfully.”
Glazer also tried to impart an appreciation for live performances early into his children’s lives, taking them to concerts and other live performances.
Although Shannon Glazer remembers being the least active in theater, her father did direct a high school production of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery that she held a small role in.
Adrienne Salvagni, the family’s middle child, said she inherited her father’s temperament.
“I was the one who was most like him. If you ask my siblings, they’d say I was a daddy’s girl,” she said. “He was very calm, very kind and very patient.”
Salvagni remembers following her father around as a little girl, asking him any question that came to mind.
“He was like my Google,” she said, adding it wasn’t easy to tire her father out.
Glazer was the same with Salvagni’s children. He had two grandchildren, Scott and Morgan.
“It’s funny because he’s in New Hampshire and I live in Albany,” Salvagni said, tearing up. “We didn’t get to see him all the time but my son always really felt close to him.”
Glazer always knew how to make his grandchildren laugh, and would use his theater experience to make funny faces and tell the best stories, she said.
“He would read stories to my son and he was just the best reader” Salvagni said. “Whatever book he would read to my son, he was just so engaged.”
Glazer also threw himself into Upper Valley theater, teaching, directing and acting in productions with the Parish Players and other theater companies.
Glazer was hired in the 1990s to direct several plays at Hanover High School, including productions of The Philadelphia Story and Much Ado About Nothing.
“One of the greatest things about him was that he was just interested in helping (students) put out the best performance they could come up with,” said Bill Hammond, who was drama director at the time.
Glazer had a talent of projecting the emotion that acting required, and would often lead students by example, said Hammond, who is now principal at the Marion Cross School in Norwich.
“He knew when to pull humor out. He also knew when to add ideas with more seriousness,” he said. “He had that balance.”
Hammond also saw Glazer on stage, and said the actor was capable of a wide range of expressions.
“He was one of those flexible face kind of people, Dick Van Dyke-style,” Hammond said. “His versatility was impressive.”
His creativity also extended to music, and he played keyboard and sang in several area bands, including The Screwtops, which specialized in 60s and 70s hits.
“Charlie was really good. He was not only a really accomplished keyboard player but he could sing,” said Lance Mills, who played guitar, bass and sang for The Screwtops.
Glazer was capable of singing challenging Motown hits and was a schooled musician, capable of reading music and known for making few mistakes on stage, Mills said.
“He just loved being in the music and that’s the vision I have of him,” he added.
Mills recalls one gig the band played at Lake Morey Resort. The crowd wasn’t too big until a wedding reception finished downstairs and the guests all came up to watch the band.
Eventually the band had to play a slow song and chose John Lennon’s Imagine. As they started playing, the bride and groom gravitated toward the center of the dance floor.
“Charlie started singing and everybody else just started singing too,” Mills said. “That was when you could see the euphoria on Charlie’s face.”
Glazer was also instrumental in the creation of Northern Stage, the professional theater company in White River Junction, where he was both on-stage and directing the nonprofit’s communications.
“He basically did every single job ever” said Brooke Ciardelli, who founded Northern Stage in 1997. “He literally filled every single job ever in the history of the company.”
Glazer began volunteering his time to Northern Stage during its first season, more than three decades ago.
At the time no one knew whether the group would have any success. Ciardelli said the whole idea of a professional theater company only came about after she fell in love with the Briggs Opera House while visiting the Upper Valley on a film scouting trip.
“We did eight shows with eight performances a week, which to this day Northern Stage doesn’t do,” Ciardelli said. “For the first three shows, I don’t think we had more than 10 people in the audience.”
But during the final show on New Year’s Day 1998, Ciardelli walked out to speak to the audience and encountered a sold-out crowd. That’s the moment she and Glazer knew they had created something special.
“He never wavered in this belief of this crazy idea,” she said. “There was no evidence that (Northern Stage) would work.”
For years after, Ciardelli said she and Glazer built an incredible working relationship. Every speech she gave, every letter to donors and all of the promotions keeping the group going was largely his work, she said.
“He was the most extraordinary writer,” she said, adding the two “saw every disaster, every glory” together.
Besides his sense of humor, she said, Glazer had the ability to “communicate exactly the right feel of something.”
Between 1992 and 1996, Glazer lent his writing talent to the Journal Opinion, a weekly newspaper in Bradford, Vt. He served as a copy editor and then as paper’s managing editor for those years, before later going on to write a regular humor column called “News You Can’t Use.”
“Charlie did not only receive an education, he educated others in journalism’s fine arts,” the paper wrote in an editorial shortly after Glazer’s death. “He enticed new local writers to these pages, and mentored them with patience and humor. Some of those recipients of his good graces still write for us.”
Glazer was also a fixture at Lebanon City Hall, and had recently celebrated 20 years writing meeting minutes for the City Council, Planning Board, Zoning Board and other city commissions.
“He had an incredible sense of humor and just a quick wit,” said City Clerk Sandi Allard, who added that Glazier always made himself available to cover a meeting. “He was just an all-around great guy.”
Glazer was known to take all of his notes using shorthand, and officials frequently relied on his reliability and accuracy,
“Rarely did he have to listen to the tape,” Allard said. “The quality of his work was just phenomenal.”
Shortly after Glazer’s death, the City Council gathered to honor their longtime recording secretary, reading into the minutes a resolution that celebrated his “wit, novel character, contagious sense of humor, gentle reminders, and insistence on the correct spelling of one’s last name provided context to all of the meetings he attended.”
The City Council then awarded Barcus, his longtime partner, with a framed copy of the resolution honoring Glazer, and wished her well as onlookers held back tears.
“(I’ve) been sitting here 11 years, never saw him angry or frustrated,” Councilor Bruce Bronner told Barcus as she thanked the officials one by one.
The last 18 years of Glazer’s life was spent in Lebanon with Barcus.
Barcus said she initially met Glazer when he performed at one of her junior high dances. The two quickly became friends but later lost track after he left for college.
Years later, she said, they reconnected through a mutual friend.
“He said I should come up and visit, so I did and never left,” Barcus said.
She remembers Glazer as a kind soul, someone who would drop all of his plans to take care of friends and family without having to be asked. In 2005, Barcus became seriously ill and required several operations.
“He was incredibly kind to me,” she said. “When I was sick, he took me everywhere and anywhere I had to go.”
Barcus later had periodic appointments in Manchester that Glazer would drive her to.
“The last time we went down together, we sang. Going down, I think we sang a 60s cut of songs,” she said. “I have the disc in the car. I play it all the time.”
“The only thing I have against him is the lack of time he had,” Barcus said. “I would have taken it all, but I couldn’t have it.”
Tim Camerato can be reached at tcamerato@vnews.com or 603-727-3223.