Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007 - (Page 31)

New York was the center of live television and you had all those great shows like Hallmark Hall of Fame, U.S. Steel Hour, and Show of Shows, which were in effect mini-Broadway shows. So where Hollywood might have had prop houses for the movies, New York really just had Newel to supply those sets.” Luckily for Newel, antiques were cheap at the time, so the supply grew and grew. “In the ’50s after World War II, you could go to Europe and buy whatever you wanted for next to nothing,” Baer says. he adds. “There are a record number of pilots being shot now, and we at Newel are very much involved in them. They are really fun projects, and they put a whole different spin on the use of antiques ….” In addition to Sex and the City, the antiques of Newel have graced the sets of many popular TV shows, including All My Children, Law & Order, and other pilots. Newel also does window displays for stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, Ralph Lauren, and Bergdorf, “as well as special events where they need interesting antiques,” Baer adds. A vocation and an avocation Baer’s path to running the family business wasn’t quite a straight line. As a high school student in the Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion, he was more interested in athletics than academics, playing varsity soccer and lacrosse. “My father’s very close friend was an alumnus of Penn,” Baer recalls. “His son was attending Lehigh, and he was so impressed by his son’s education, what he was getting out of Lehigh, that he said, ‘You’ve got to have Lewis look at Lehigh.’” He did, and liked it enough to apply for early admission. But he wound up on the waiting list because, in his own words, “I was not a great student.” Baer still vividly remembers the afternoon in the spring of 1968, during the middle of a lacrosse game, when he saw his father walking from their home two blocks away across the ﬁeld to tell him that he had been accepted at Lehigh. “They rolled the dice on me,” Baer says candidly. He played soccer and lacrosse his freshman year, but struggled in the classroom. During his first semester, he was on the verge of ﬂunking out, New York Stories Now that the ﬁlm industry has come back to New York in “a big way,” as Baer puts it, Newel is doing even more with major movies. “When I was in college, we were doing The Godfather series and things like that—you can actually see all of the productions we’ve done since we’ve instituted a computer program on our Web site,” Baer says. The long list of Newel’s movie props includes a 1930s Italian red lacquered iron dining table that appeared in Inside Man; a French Victorian-style bronze dore rope design billiard ﬁxture that was used in The Stepford Wives; and a pair of 19th-century Italian Renaissance-style painted glass windows with scrolling grotesques and putti around a coat of arms that appeared in Reversal of Fortune. Newel has also capitalized on the recent boom in TV pilots that are shot in New York City. Typically, directors would shoot a New York City scene in Vancouver, but the city and state have created “some great tax incentives that level the playing fields with other states and countries,” Baer says. “The industry is very happy to come to New York because of the resources of the city,” but managed to pull his grades up at the end. He then took a hard look at his life at Lehigh, and the three things that were most important to him: “academics, sports, and having a life.” “I realized I wasn’t going to have a career in soccer and lacrosse, so I left the sports teams and my grades shot up,” he says. “I wound up graduating with honors.” Baer says he has tremendous admiration for Lehigh’s scholar-athletes today, who balance a demanding academic workload with dedication to athletics. “The term ‘scholarathlete’ takes on real meaning at Lehigh,” he says. Armed with a degree in accounting, Baer went to work for Price Waterhouse in Philadelphia, one of the Big Eight accounting firms. “I PHOTO COURTESY OF NEWEL fall 2007 31

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007

Table of Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Arts & Culture Sports Research Cover Story - Forward March Little Man Overcomes Huge Odds Lights, Camera...Antiques Linderman Renewed From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News

Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007

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