If you’re from the Oswego area and enjoy live music, especially when played by folk singers and traditional musicians, you’re probably familiar with the Ontario Center for Performing Arts, currently housed at the city’s McCrobie Civic Center. Annually, about 40 local and national acts share their music at the Center, which is renowned for its superb staging and sound system. But the Center wasn’t always so well-organized, back when it began in the late 1970s.

The Oswego Music Hall, as it was first known, was the dream of Dick Reinert, and as I talked with those who were there at the beginning, people referred to Dick as an impresario, a visionary. That sounds pretty impressive, but those who knew him well—his family and close friends—described the Music Hall’s beginnings much humbler. In fact, before there was a Music Hall, there was a coffeehouse called The Lowlife Caffe. The whole Reinert family—Dick, his then wife Sue, and their children Steve, Joe and Alex—worked to bring that café to life.

“We’d moved back east from California because we felt it was our home,” Sue said. [Dick grew up in the Buffalo area and Sue was from New York City.] “It was a familiar place and we thought it was time for Dick to start his career since he’d just earned his PhD in Oceanography.”

The Reinerts stopped in Oswego to visit friends and Dick was hired by a foundation connected to SUNY Oswego. They found an apartment, a cold-water flat in the downtown area owned by the Mitchell family. The Mitchells also had several properties on Water Street, a rundown area along the Oswego River. “Mitchell was a maverick in Oswego,” Sue said. “His reputation was that he didn’t care what the establishment said, he just did what he wanted.”

Sue and Dick had an idea for one of those buildings known as Old City Hall. “Back when we lived in New York City, we’d gone to coffeehouses and liked them,” Sue explained. “So we decided to open a café. When we rented that space on Water Street from Mitchell, he didn’t care who came as long as we paid the rent.”

The Reinerts had their work cut out for themselves to make the space into a comfortable setting for coffee and conversation. “The building was dilapidated,” Sue said, “so we had to bring in utilities and bring it up to code. Dick’s brother knew about construction and he helped.”

The Reinert boys also have memories of how it all started. “As kids, we’d come home from school and bounce between our apartment and the space at Old City Hall,” Steve recalled. Steve’s brother Alex remembered “when we first went into the space that would become the café there was an old candy vending machine. We raided it for whatever was still in it.”

One of the Reinerts’ friends, Mary Loe, tried to recall how they furnished the space. “I’m not sure where they got their tables, chairs, dishes and silverware for the café. We donated a pew that we’d gotten when a local church closed. I don't know where they found their glass case for baked goods, but it was just the right touch for the café.”

One more piece of equipment was needed before the café could open. “We wanted a coffee machine like we’d seen in Greenwich Village coffeehouses,” Sue said. “We found a used Gaggia in Toronto. It could do espresso and steam milk. We drove there in our Saab and the thing weighed a ton. We put it in the back of the car and drove home.”

“They named that coffee machine Lena,” Mary remembered, “after a coffeehouse in Saratoga Springs.”

The Reinerts came up with a fitting name for the café, considering its questionable setting on Water Street, which was mostly known for its bars. “Dick was talking to his mother,” Sue said, “and she was very negative about our idea. ‘All this riffraff would come,’ she said. I think she mentioned various people she considered bad. That’s when I said, ‘Ah, we’re gonna call this the Lowlife Caffe.’”

Finally, opening night came. “Mom made baked goods,” Alex said, “and we boys were the waiters.” Everything was free that first night. Word spread and people came, sometimes in groups. College professors held classes there. “The students would order pots of tea and the café windows would get all steamed up,” Sue said.

The Reinert boys waited tables for a while, then two college students began helping out. “Wayne Hochberg and Paul Hannon took over serving customers,” Sue said. “Wayne had been a New York City waiter and he played guitar. Paul was an artist and he designed our sign, with that unique spelling caffe. The name stuck.”

One thing was for sure: people felt welcomed there, and Mary Loe suggested why. “There were lots of young faculty coming to teach at Oswego in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, and they lived in the community. Young people were looking for something like the café.”

With Lowlife’s popularity one might think that it was a big money maker. Not so, said Sue. “We had no idea how to run a business. We did manage to pay the rent, but I have no idea whether we made money.”

“The Caffe was never going to make money,” Steve explained. “That wasn’t what my parents were looking to do. In a way, they were hippies and they were activists, so they wanted a space for people to share their music, their poetry, their political views. Meetings to plan rallies were held at the Caffe.”

The Lowlife only lasted a few years, but Dick’s love of music and appreciation for performance artists got him thinking about an abandoned space next door to the café. “He started booking performers and they played in that space,” Mary remembered. “In the beginning, there were some very tiny audiences. One time, my family of five was 90 percent of the audience.”

But as everyone associated with Dick Reinert will tell you, it wasn’t about big crowds or traditional success. “I think my father always preferred to fail trying to do something spectacular rather than succeed at something modest,” Joe said.

Lots of folks back in the ‘60s and ‘70s seemed to appreciate that, as Joe explained. “My parents somehow got people to help them create the Caffe and Music Hall. Many put in a lot of sweat equity there. I remember meeting this guy later in life and we got talking and found out we both had lived in Oswego for a time. He told me that he knew my parents and had helped them start the Lowlife. ‘I looked up to your parents,’ he told me. ‘They were doing things out of principle.’”

Forty-five years later, the Oswego Music Hall is still focused on those principles and it’s still entirely volunteer-driven. In next month’s column, we’ll hear from some of those volunteers who carried Dick Reinert’s dream forward.