Tom Patterson enjoyed the theater, but his real goal in creating the Stratford Festival was to revive the fortunes of the faded Canadian town where he was raised.

He turned that idea into the largest classical repertory theater company in North America.

Today the Stratford Festival is performed on four stages around the city in a 12-play season that spans April through November. More than 1,000 professionals work full time, and the operation has an annual budget of $45 million. Half of Stratford's 2006 audience of 525,000 was drawn from the U.S.

Tom Patterson's son, Tim, said the greatest lesson his father taught him was "the power of the idea."

Patterson's dream of a theater festival in his hometown took shape in 1937, when Stratford, shaken from the Depression, focused on new paths to recovery. Patterson saw the festival as a way to add culture and life to his city and to shake off its image as a railroad town.

Stratford, like so many North American cities in the 20th century, depended on a single industry for its well-being. For Stratford, in Ontario province 160 miles northeast of Detroit, it was the Canadian National Railroad's sprawling maintenance yards. They put meat and potatoes on every employee's table for more than 80 years.

Those days were fading by the time World War II came and went. The rail yards were closing. Stratford needed new ideas. And fast.

Capitalizing on the town's namesake — Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare's birthplace — was a natural link to Patterson. He long thought that with an aptly named Avon River running through it, a theater festival might work for Stratford. After returning from war duty and while writing for a Toronto magazine, he followed up on his dream.

Fill Those Seats

Patterson never saw himself as a famous actor or director. He wanted to draw crowds to Stratford.

"Because I did not know what was involved in producing a play, I was able to concentrate on getting people there to see what might happen on stage," he wrote. "It was a practical, childlike, even childish vision of the theater. And, just as sometimes happens to children's wishes, it would come true."

Patterson was not daunted by what might have been the steepest learning curve in the performing arts. He recognized the difference between being unintelligent and being ignorant, and made that point to anyone who questioned his qualifications.

He was willing to ask, knowing that while he might be rejected, he stood a chance at getting what he wanted.

He drove himself on intuition, but understood he would have to prove a market existed before anyone else would commit money and talent to his plan. He acknowledged that what began as his "good idea" led to a relentless drive.

"Quite simply, one thing led to another until I was obsessed," he wrote. "And by late 1951, I knew that the festival was going to happen, because I was going to make it happen."

He acknowledged his mentors, chief among them Tom Orr. It was Orr, a successful local insurance broker, who saw parallels between Stratford, Ontario, and Stratford-upon-Avon in England. So much so that he sought to create a park system for the city that copied the Avon River's path.

Orr's resourcefulness included dealing with the wreckers of an abandoned stone building to haul the loose rock to the Avon River. Then he bargained with the city for itinerant laborers who for free built the stone walls and embankments that surround the Shakespeare Garden.

"It was Orr, more than anyone, who helped me realize that one can, indeed, make things happen," said Patterson in his memoir, "First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival." "He taught me that one cannot just sit around hoping and waiting."

Patterson understood the value of linkage. He never asked a famous person for anything more than support. But his skill was in how he used that oral endorsement.

"I used both sides against the middle," he wrote. "I never used subterfuge. . . . Like the famous Hollywood producer who tells a famous director that has a certain star, then tells the famous star that he has a famous director, I was able to put a deal together."

Realizing he needed a big-name actor or director to lead the festival, he considered Laurence Olivier.

Others prevailed upon him to consider a more likely candidate: Scotland's Tyrone Guthrie, considered at the time the greatest Shakespearean director in the world.

"Great, let's get him," Patterson remembered saying, without admitting that he had never heard of the man. His enthusiasm for the project caught Guthrie by surprise.

"He had no great influence to back him, and no great reputation," Guthrie said in his memoir, "Renown at Stratford." "But Mr. Patterson's perseverance was indomitable."

The Shakespeare Garden and surrounding city park paid off in a second critical way. Guthrie wanted some sense of what this obscure Canadian town had to offer as a festival site. Aerial photos of the Stratford city park were sent to him along with corresponding photos of Stratford-upon-Avon. The two were nearly identical.

Guthrie signed on in 1953 and quickly recruited actors Alec Guinness and Irene Worth for the first season.

Guthrie was drawn to the project for the simple reason there was no tradition. He would not have to fight a status quo to get what he wanted. In his autobiography, Guthrie said the project appealed to him because of the questions he was asked by organizers when he visited the first time.

They wondered about costs, about how many people would come, about how long the season would be. Guthrie told them those were their concerns. He liked his freedom on the artistic side. It sealed the deal.

The first season was a critical and financial success. Ticket sales alone covered costs. The first play performed on the stage was Shakespeare's "Richard III." The first words Guinness uttered were the familiar "Now is the winter of our discontent/made glorious summer by this son of York."

Festive Time

Through the decades since that night, the Stratford Festival would be challenged to meet an ever-growing budget. Today, on firm financial footing, the festival is ranked among the top acting companies in the world.

Patterson remained general manager of the festival until 1967 and was associated with the festival until his death at 84 in 2005. One of the company's four main stages is named after him.

At a memorial service in Stratford not long after his death, actor Christopher Plummer toasted him, saying, "Tom invented the festival, but he invented all of us actors and the audience, that tenacious little firebrand and maker of miracles."

BY DAN MOREAU