Joseph Creanza, 80, retired dean of Roosevelt University`s Chicago Musical College, was the person who initially proposed the restoration of the Auditorium Theatre. He had helped Roosevelt to purchase its home in the Auditorium Building in 1945 by mortgaging his own house.
A memorial service for Mr. Creanza, who had retired to Sun City, Ariz., in 1984, will be held in Chicago at a future time. He died Friday.
”He was most proud of the Auditorium,” his wife, LaVerne, said. ”He used to walk in and out of there in the 1940s when the theater was being used as a USO headquarters. He saw the possibility of restoring it and went to the president of Roosevelt in the late 1940s and suggested the school restore the theater, which is part of the same building as the school.”
Mr. Creanza had a part in urging the school to buy the Auditorium Building itself in 1946 and had put up his house as part of the bond to do so. The Auditorium, which was built in the late 1880s by architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, was considered one of the world`s best theaters for acoustics. In 1941 it had been abandoned and during World War II was handed over to the United Service Organizations (USO), which installed bowling alleys in it. The restoration took almost a decade after funds were first solicited. It was reopened in 1967.
Mr. Creanza was born March 1, 1905, in New York. He spent his youth in Italy, France and Switzerland. Most of his childhood education was received in France. He returned to the United States in 1929 and became a language teacher, with music his avocation. In 1935, he received a master`s degree from the University of Chicago. He taught languages at Lewis Institute, now Illinois Institute of Technology, and at the YMCA Loop College before joining the faculty of Roosevelt University at the time of its founding in 1945.
He served as a school trustee from 1947 to 1953. Despite no formal musical training, he was chosen to be dean of the school`s musical department in 1946. He played a key role in the 1954 merger of the musical department and the Chicago Musical College, founded in 1867 by Florenz Ziegfeld.
While Mr. Creanza was its dean in the early 1960s, Roosevelt`s musical school was cited by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra`s Eugene Ormandy along with such musical schools as Curtis, Julliard, Eastman, Peabody and the New England Conservatory of Music as the equal of the best music schools in the world.
”I am flattered,” Mr. Creanza told a Tribune reporter, ”but personally, I am too critical to agree with this listing.”
He retired in 1970.
Survivors, besides his wife, include three daughters, Kathleen, Adrienne and Carol Freeman; a son, Philip; and three grandchildren.
