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EDEN — An energetic team of former Morehead High teachers and students is poised for celebration, now that their fundraising campaign is ending successfully with the installation of nearly 1,700 new seats in the school’s R. Duane Best Auditorium.

Of course, since the auditorium’s namesake himself is involved, that celebration will involve plenty of music.

“I’m going to have my final alumni choir there,” said Duane Best, the now retired choral director and music teacher in whose honor the 50-year-old auditorium was renamed in 2003. “It’s going to be fun.”

That will be Nov. 19 at the auditorium’s golden anniversary celebration, when $250,000 in new seating and stage curtains will be dedicated.

The group also raised an additional $19,000 to refurbish the auditorium’s sound system and restore its Steinway piano.

Count Morehead band director Sean McClure among those most grateful for the renovation.

“It will be great because we can go back to hosting events here,” McClure said, noting that worn-out seating made that increasingly difficult in recent years.

“We didn’t feel like we could accommodate people and make them comfortable.”

In fact, the whole community is getting new seats because the building, erected in 1961, is the city’s only auditorium. Over the years, it has played host to well-known acts for the larger community, ranging from performances by the late piano wizards Ferrante & Teicher to country music sensation Ronnie Milsap.

A key to the successful money-raising effort was the affection and great respect so many residents feel for Best, said fellow Morehead retiree Wanda Harris. Best taught at the school 38 years before retiring in 1998.

He remembers when the auditorium was under construction and still a skeleton of steel girders for part of the first year he taught at the high school in 1960.

He would go on to direct a dozen well-received high school productions on its stage, including such Broadway musicals as “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Oklahoma!” and “Hello, Dolly!”

Leaders of the fundraising group of former teachers and students — most of whom studied under Best — are amazed at how consistently the contributions kept growing week by week, month by month after they launched the effort in November 2009.

“Can you believe that in this economy, we were able to raise a quarter of a million dollars?” asked Fern Ragan, retired Morehead English teacher. “I don’t believe it, a quarter of a million dollars. But we did work hard.”

Best’s wife, Gloria, traces the campaign back to casual conversations several years ago in which people who care about the auditorium and its heritage would discuss ways to commemorate its approaching half-century anniversary of culture, student assemblies and graduation ceremonies.

After a while, a consensus emerged around the worn seats, she said.

“The seats were just the obvious project to take on,” Gloria Best said.

Under the banner of the R. Duane Best Scholarship Fund, the group amassed contributions from about 1,400 people.

Hundreds pledged at least $150 to name a chair in honor of someone they wanted to recognize, said Susan Cunningham, treasurer for the fundraising effort.

“I’d estimate that over 90 percent (of money raised) came from individual contributions,” said Cunningham, who had a lead role in Duane Best’s 1968 production of “Oklahoma!” when she was a senior at Morehead.

Now, workers are changing out the old seats for new.

And it’s almost time for a Saturday evening celebration that will include performances by the high school jazz band, the Morehead vocal ensemble, a middle school chorus and an impromptu chorus made up of returning students from Duane Best’s nearly four decades of choral groups and glee clubs.

Gloria Best said there’s a lesson in the way the community came together to make it all possible at a time when many are struggling financially.

“Even in the worst of times, if you put your mind on something positive, it lifts you out of what’s not working to what is working.”

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com