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.