Jeanette Orndoff Campbell, 89, former owner of the Main Point, a music hall in Bryn Mawr where young talents including Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and James Taylor were introduced to local audiences, died of complications from hip surgery Oct. 22 at Stapeley, a retirement residence in Germantown.
Mrs. Campbell booked acts, baked gingerbread and brownies, made the coffee and cider, and offered bed and board to performers at the Main Point from its opening night in a 1964 blizzard until it closed in 1981. By then, the club was operating in the red, and musicians, grateful that Mrs. Campbell had given them a chance, raised money to pay her bills at benefit concerts, her granddaughter, Heather Fowler, said.
"My life began at 46, when my husband and I got the idea that the Main Line needed a place for nice folk music after we were at the Philadelphia Folk Festival," she told a reporter in 1975. "It was a really spiritual awakening for me. So we pooled our money with four other couples and opened the Main Point."
After the other couples gave up their interests and she and her husband, William Campbell, divorced, Mrs. Campbell said, the Main Point became her "entire life."
Riding the crest of the acoustic music boom, the club welcomed then-obscure artists like Joni Mitchell and Arlo Guthrie. Bruce Springsteen sang "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City," "Hey Santa Ana," "Secret to the Blues," and "New York City Serenade" at the Main Point as the opening act on Jan. 3, 1973. He returned to the club several times as a headliner.
Every Thanksgiving, Mrs. Campbell made vats of turkey chili to feed music makers, who packed audiences in for six shows over the holiday weekend. Times changed, though. The Main Point couldn't compete with newer venues even after it expanded its seating from 196 to 270.
When the club closed, Mrs. Campbell, who lost most of her sight as a young woman, worked as a cook at a retirement home for several years and took classes at Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center in Wallingford. She continued to enjoy folk music, her granddaughter said, but also developed a taste for classical music.
A native of Waynesburg in Western Pennsylvania, Mrs. Campbell was a lab technician at Abington Memorial Hospital before marrying and raising a daughter, Susan Campbell.
Mrs. Campbell is survived by her granddaughter. Her daughter died in 1999.
A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Nov. 18 at Germantown Friends Meeting, 47 W. Coulter St., Philadelphia.
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