We’ve Got a Contest Winner

Without the aid of his yearbooks (back in Gibsonia) while still down in Florida, Pete Brandt nailed those football players mentioned in my poem “A Has-Been” (see posting for June 14). I’ve since realized the grand prize, the gold and black pencil, is from the first football season (1955), which no doubt enhances its value on the collectibles market, although the poem was written about the 1956 team. That was the second year when we finally started to win games and play at home. Winner of the consolation prize (a program from the NAHS vs. Darlington game (a 28-0 win for NAHS) is none other than Bill Young, currently known to us as Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Classmates. The correct answer (tricky because there are two possible Bobs):

Bob Good or Bob Richard
Andy Sohngen
Stan Cleva
Wally Barker
Randy Brandt
Jack Chotta

An Overdue Thank You

Well, I’m still on a music kick this week. To get you in the mood, click on the title to go to a YouTube link of the Clemson University band, playing the Dixieland classic, “Tiger Rag,” as its fight song. (And remember to shout “Hold ‘em Tigers” at the right times.)

I’ve always loved bands, especially in parades. But since coming to Iowa, I now know just how passionate people can get about them. Meredith Willson, who created “The Music Man,” hailed from Mason City, Iowa. His musical, which was a huge hit on Broadway in 1957 (then a movie in 1962), is about the reverence in which marching bands are held throughout the Midwest as the citizens of River City demonstrate. The promises of traveling conman Professor Harold Hill to solve their problems by creating a boys’ marching band are gullibly believed. And when the kids miraculous strike up “76 Trombones,” Hill is taken in by River City, too (particularly Marian the librarian).

Members of my immediate family have each had their band experience. Including my own cameo performance playing George M. Cohan’s “Give My Regards to Broadway” on the glockenspiel in the St. Patrick’s Day parade (March 1955) along Fifth Avenue. Janet Gilleland and I joined but soon resigned from the Perrysville Fireman’s Girls Drum and Bugle Corps after that appearance. My husband spent his junior high school years in Lancaster, Pa. playing a sousaphone (left). He was the only kid big enough to haul it around, although the uniform trousers suggest the school wasn’t expecting anyone quite so tall. He soon grew tired of removing various detritus—such as pieces of hotdog and bubble gum wrappers—from the bell after every football game. Our daughter Lia seemed to be striking a blow against male dominance of the trombone by taking up that instrument for a couple years. When she got braces it proved too painful to continue playing—by then, the spit valve on her second-hand instrument was sticking way too frequently anyway. Our most successful musician, Brenda, played clarinet throughout high school and opened my eyes to just how important the band was at Ames High both for camaraderie among the members and its role of representing the school in parades, pep rallies, and athletic events. Both of my sons-in-law also took up wind instruments in school. Alas, none of us continue to play—but we all learned to appreciate what making music as part of a group entails.

Looking through NAHS yearbooks of our era I’m struck by how little attention those stalwart members of the Tiger Marching Band received. Although the six majorettes and drum major rated a two-page spread, the rest of the band (58 strong) also rated only two pages in 1958. And unlike the majorettes, whose names were listed as captions to both photos and again mentioned in the accompanying blurb, the band members remain anonymous (except for the color guard and the officers). I looked back to previous yearbooks; in 1957, again the band rated a 2-page spread but no names, and in 1956, they only rated one page but without even a group picture, much less names.

The Midwesterner in me cries “Unfair!” I talked to Bill Young about this the other day. He was in North Allegheny’s band from the beginning and quite serious about music. He remembers all the practicing individually and during band class, the half-time shows, the bus trips to Shaler or Hampton for Friday night football games. According to him, NAHS’ band teacher, the late Robert Testa, was “a prince” and one of those talents who can play every band instrument and listen with great patience to all those sour notes that novices inevitably make. Bill remembers once after a French-hornist made a gaff, much to her embarrassment, Testa stopped the band and demonstrated just how easily it could happen. By changing the angle of the mouthpiece very slightly, he showed how you could to be off-key in 5 or 6 different ways.

So today I want to bring NAHS Tiger Marching Band of 1958 back for an encore. We didn’t give you the credit you deserved for all your hard work and wonderful contributions to so many school activities, but you guys rocked. Let me name and thank each of you:

Karl Aveard, a drummer who really did continue to play in rock bands after graduation
Bob Benjamin, another drummer (captured in the photo right with Karl)
Chuck Gruber, sousaphonist (who no doubt has his own detritus stories) and band vice president
George Gunn, drummer (and timpanist with the orchestra)
Bill Young on saxophonist, initially entered college as a music major but could not see himself becoming another Mr. Testa so changed to chemical engineering. (See these three in left photo)
The three Benny Goodmans of the class were Richard Sass, Pete Thurston, and Bill Vestal (photo left). Bill also served as NAHS’ first drum major (1956-58); Bill Young enviously recalls Vestal’s trousers actually tailored for a smart fit—unlike the rank and file. Also the memorable piano-tuner routine Bill pulled off at one musical assembly.

I sadly regret that it's too late to thank Mike Thurston, trumpeter and band president in 1957-58 (right).

To fast-forward: If you’d like to see a video of the huge North Allegheny Marching Band entering Newman Stadium in August 2007, click here.

And Finally, a Postscript

After that earlier posting “When NA was the new high school” (4/12/08), I had this note about the NAHS school color from Bob Beilstein: “I was on the committee in 8th grade charged by Dr. Vonarx with coming up with the colors, and we had three choices—green/black, green/white, or red/white. Tom Maxwell was the faculty adviser and he said that after he went to Pitt, he always liked their colors, black/gold. To appease him, we added black/gold to the colors voted on by the school. (Of course, none of us, including Tom Maxwell, realized that Pitt's colors were blue/gold).

As is well known, black/gold won the student vote, only to be challenged by the juniors and sophomores coming out from Perry High. Vonarx then said we would have another vote, but prior to that vote, he arranged a special pep rally out on the football field where the band came marching out onto the field followed by the new football team—all in their new black and gold uniforms. Spectacular! Black/gold won the second vote hands down.”

Strangers within Our Gates

That biblical phrase, used in the fourth of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:10 and later in Deuteronomy), is a theme that began for me in 1957. What reminds me of it is a program in my scrapbook for my last piano recital on an evening in June 1958 at the home of my piano teacher, Marlen Geier. I played Chopin’s “Polonaise in A Major”—wish I still could.

Marlen was special. She, her parents, and older brother had been transplanted from Germany to Ingomar shortly after the war (WWII). I always wished I knew their Coming to America story. The family seemed serious, silent, and rather sad whenever I came to their house for my weekly lesson. Marlen was then a student at Carnegie Tech’s College of Fine Arts (in music) when I first started and later a vocal music teacher for 7^th and 8^th graders at NAHS. She chose very hard classical pieces for me to learn and seemed to think I was more capable than I did. I liked the fact that she never praised me on weeks when I really hadn’t practiced enough and was trying to scrape by because I was a good sight reader.

That sight-reading skill had come in useful when someone needed to accompany hymn singing at Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings or for Junior Choir practices. During the 1957-58 school year, Marlen offered me a paying job (50¢ an hour, I think) to go over to Gumbert School for Girls one evening a week with her and accompany their chorus, which she would be directing. I jumped at the chance to get to know her better on those rides.

Strangers in suburb paradise?

Gumbert was located on a bluff overlooking McKnight Road where the Ross Park Mall is today. It was Allegheny County’s female counterpart to Thorn Hill School for Boys, which was located out on a farm in Warrendale. Since Thorn Hill closed in 1980, some former JDs have written fond memoirs about the farm and the practical skills they learned there. I don’t think anyone has rhapsodized about Gumbert. It was cramped, drearily institutional, and when we arrived at 7 pm, always smelled of overcooked cabbage. The adolescent girls who made up the chorus had the unhealthy look of too much starchy food and were forlornly dressed in the castoffs of older people. What I liked about them though was that they were high spirited and happy to see us and to sing their lungs out.

In fact, they would mob me, wanting to touch my clothes and admire whatever I wore. At first, I felt uncomfortable, but since they seemed anxious to see what a teenager from the outside world might be wearing, I began dressing for the occasion. I tried to wear something different every session. Then one wintry night, things got out of hand. Girls who at first were just running their hands over my fur-blend sweater set, started to yank on my scarab bracelet, grab the kilt pin on my pleated skirt, and pull my pageboy-ed hair. They were at the point of striping me by the time some of the school staff intervened and roughly dragged the ringleaders away—as I stood all askew, shakily watching and not knowing what to say or do. That ended the weekly fashion show. My attempt to entertain had only gotten them in trouble.

As for their singing, this group was not a knock-off of the Obernkirchen Children’s Choir. Or, although most were of a similar skin shade, the Silvertones of Barbados. Vocal timbre was sadly lacking. Sometimes they shouted and bellowed or when miffed, made no sound at all. I don’t think they ever considered listening to each other and attempting to blend voices. Two-part harmony—sopranos and altos—what was that all about?

So Marlen struggled to get them just to sing in unison such old standbys as “The Ash Grove,” (Welsh folk song—click on titles to link to audios of these songs) “The Happy Wanderer” (originally “Der fröhliche Wanderer”) and “For the Beauty of the Earth” (she had to sneak in her countryman J.S. Bach, too). Something with contemporary appeal was “This Old Man” (with a knick knack paddy whack, give the dog a bone), made popular in 1958 because of Ingrid Bergman’s movie “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness”—and afterward Mitch Miller got a hold of it.

That June the parents of the Gumbert School Chorus were invited to a year-end concert to hear what the girls had been practicing. It made me terribly sad. Not many parents showed up, and those who came didn’t look much better off than their daughters. These families (likely dysfunctional) were the strangers within the gates of the North Hills. Those girls, isolated up on that bluff, were completely alien to the lush green hills and woods that surrounded them. Local realtors had an unwritten understanding about selling homes to “colored people,” as they were then called. It was still a decade before Fair Housing legislation prohibited redlining. Did a single black student attend NAHS while we were there? If so, he or she was very much alone.

Ingomar's Diversity

In those days Ingomar had a black population of one: Thomas “Tug” Seymour, who lived in the basement of the Ingomar Volunteer Firehall and did odd jobs for people. Tug was from the South; he was relentlessly cheerful and obliging and could play a mouth organ, banjo and kick drum at the same time—the epitome of an Uncle Tom. As a kid, he fascinated me, and I took every chance to talk to him. I loved to listen to that accent. Probably I recognized in him the only other African American I “knew”—Uncle Remus in Walt Disney’s “Song of the South (1946). (Click on title to hear "Zip-A-Dee-Do0-Dah.") And I never had an inkling what life was really like for Tug or what he really thought.

As I reflect back on a Pittsburgh suburb of 1958, I know that I can’t impose and judge it based on my current views after the sea change in American society since then. But my discomfort, more likely dismay, at the vanilla-ness of the place still haunts me. It had a lot to do with my efforts in the 1960s to get as far away from home as I could, to make friendships with people as different from me as possible, to marry a bookish European who had spent his childhood in a DP camp in Germany (and whose family initially reminded me of Marlen Geier’s). In the photo below, taken in Karlsruhe, Germany (1949) he's the kid on the left.

Perhaps the desire to escape the familiar is part of growing up for many. But my quest went even farther: to become a stranger myself, the alien within some Other’s gates.

The Floods of 2008--and a Contest for Blog Readers

Sorry, friends. This week I’m just too preoccupied with the present—and future—of my adopted state of Iowa to write much about the past. My husband and I here in Ames, as well as our daughter and her family in Wisconsin, are not suffering as so many Midwesterners are right now. Yes, we mopped up a few leaks after the torrential storms that have dropped about 8 inches of rain in this area over the past two weeks.

On May 29, Ames got 5 inches overnight, and the next few days were when most of the damage was done to homes, businesses, parks, and student’s cars left in parking lots anywhere near our two creeks—Squaw and College—and one river, the Skunk. Ames got skunked all right. This past weeks other parts of the state got socked—Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, and Des Moines especially.

The other curse has been the tornadoes that flattened the town of Parkersburg in May and destroyed the Little Sioux Scout Ranch in the loess hills of western Iowa this week. I’m continually proud of the Iowa spirit of fighting back: hundreds of people filling and preparing levees out of countless bags of sand; the boy scouts, who soon proved that they indeed were prepared (click here for one scout’s story); and all the people who followed instructions of state and city officials to help, evacuate, or even just follow the jingle drummed into our heads when driving our cars in flash flooded areas—“Turn around, don’t drown.”

One hundred miles east of us in Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, where both of our daughters and sons-in-law have studied (and later two of them taught), summer school classes were canceled on Friday. Every able-bodied student, faculty, and staff member was needed to fill sandbags and protect campus buildings. The photo (right) shows part of one of the “bucket brigades” set up from the basement to the third floor of the library that were formed to hand up, a few at a time, all the books and dissertations stored in the basement—over 100,000 volumes. To read the story, click here.

Well, that’s the Iowa I love. And as I said at the beginning, I’m worrying about it right now. (Photos from Des Moines Register)

On a lighter note…

Enter the Senior Moments’ Contest!

Readers ask me how I remember such minutiae about North Allegheny in the mid-1950s. I have to confess, it’s not that I possess a photographic memory. I’m a packrat; I’ve kept scrapbooks and saved mementoes that probably should have been chucked long ago.

When looking for something else the other day, I came across the January 16, 1957 edition of The Cardinal News, published by Wauwatosa High School (NW suburb of Milwaukee, WI). Its exchanges section contained a poem by one Barbara Sweeney.

I didn’t recognize it at first, and thought I must have saved it because someone else had my name (I’ve already discussed the multiple-Barbara problem). After reading the first line (with raised eyebrows), I realized I had written it for The North Star in December 1956.

A Has-Been

By Barbara Sweeney

I’m just a “has-been” at N.A.H.S.
The boys used to love me, I freely confess.
Just ask Bob or Andy—you’ll certainly see,
They once enjoyed spending their evenings with me.

Lots of other guys liked to be with me, too—
Stan, Wally, and Randy, to mention a few.
They took me out often on Friday night
And in their strong arms would hold me tight.

September, October, in lots of ways,
Were really wonderful “Courting Days!”
When I passed by for all to see,
A lot of strange boys made a play for me.

I was only with Chotta now and then,
But one pass from him had me hooked again!
I was dropped and kicked—but ‘twas all in fun
For I knew they loved me, everyone.

Things are different now.
They don’t see me at all.
Because, you see,
I’m just a
FOOTBALL!

(Hope you didn’t miss my sophomoric cleverness in shaping the lines to look like a football)

So here’s the contest: Without looking at your yearbooks, can you tell me the full names of the six gridiron heroes of 1956 who are mentioned in my poem? The first to email me the correct list will receive (if they come to the reunion) the authentic black-and-gold pencil sold by the 1956 NAHS football team to earn money. Consolation prizes will be programs from NAHS football games—the 5 we actually won that year. Winners to be announced 28 June 2008.

Eligibility Rules: To enter this contest you must be a member of NAHS Class of 1958 but not a member of the aforementioned football team. (That would be like shooting fish in a barrel, after all.)

A Commencement Address for the Slackers

In summer 1986, my elder daughter, Brenda, had just finished her freshman year at the University of Iowa and decided that she really liked art history courses better than journalism. At the time, Donna Chase, a Pittsburgh friend of ours, had a major role as visual arts coordinator for downtown Pittsburgh’s annual outdoor extravagance in Point Park, the Three Rivers Arts Festival. Donna invited Brenda to serve an internship with her for the month of June, helping with the set up and wrap of the exhibit and serving as a go-fer during the 2-week run. While Brenda learned a lot about artists and the public’s perception of modern art, it was a nice excuse for my husband and me to spend a long weekend at the Oakland apartment on loan to her.

Meanwhile, the youngest son of my long-time Ingomar friend, Carolyn Kummer Gaus, was graduating from high school during our visit. Carolyn asked me to join her and her husband Don for the ceremony, which was held outdoors at the football field of North Allegheny Senior High School in Wexford. In 1977, NAHS eliminated the student speeches in favor of a newer tradition (perhaps my vapid 5 minutes had contributed to the decision but more likely it was the growing number of successful alumni). As the program stated, “It is a distinct privilege to select a commencement speaker from our many accomplished graduates. As former North Allegheny students, our speakers bring a unique relevance and authenticity to the program.” Already back in 1980, Bill Vestal had a return engagement as a commencement speaker as part of that new tradition. (Later, in 1991, Bob Beilstein, then a member of the North Allegheny school board, gave the address at his daughter Laurie's graduation).

Let’s Skip to the Chase…

Imagine my surprise, upon arriving at the ceremony, to find the Distinguished Alumni Commencement Speaker for 1986 was none other than an old friend from the Class of 1958, Dr. William K. Bauer AKA “Skippy.” He was last mentioned in this blog on May 24 (re favorite teachers, when he told of his brush with plagiarism and the life-altering counsel offered by Mr. Conway) in case you missed it.

After 1958, Bill had earned academic degrees from Slippery Rock, Chapman College, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. Having begun his career as a teacher, he had gone on to hold administrative positions with the Community College of Allegheny County. The previous year (1985) he had been appointed President of the Community College of Beaver County. He was also the father of three NAHS students—Jay (Class of 1988), Ann (1989), and Ken (1990). But his presence alone wasn’t what made the evening memorable. He gave a commencement speech that I’ve never forgotten. It was perfect! After I called and congratulated him on it the following day, he kindly sent me a copy.

You see, my mother had a role in Bill’s career. I had come home in tears one spring day in 1958 because Bill had just received the letter from Slippery Rock rejecting his application. Mom believed this was a major blunder on some admission director’s part, and “the Mayor of Ingomar” (as she was affectionately known around our house) never hesitated about righting anything she perceived as an injustice. She immediately got on the phone to her friend Dr. Thomas Carson, N. Allegheny district’s supervising principal. Through some intervention on Dr. Carson’s part, Bill was allowed to take several summer courses at Slippery Rock with the understanding that if he passed them, he would be conditionally admitted for the fall term. Well, the rest is history; he actually finished his bachelor’s degree in three years. Although, by 1986, my mother had lost her sight and was in failing health at a nursing home near me in Iowa, she must have asked me dozens of times before she died to read Bill’s speech to her. She always smiled and laugh in the right places, too.

Please click on the underlined phrase to go and read Bill’s speech. I promise you, it’s a gem. Because it’s online as a Goggle Document, it may take a few seconds to download so please be patient.