“O Sons and Daughters (of a Generous Mother)”
Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes? (Chico Marx)
Something for pleasure, something for fun, /Something for everyone, / A comedy tonight (Stephen Sondheim)
I headed off to college in 1954, convinced I would change the world.
On the outside, I was eighteen but inside nowhere near that. I’d graduated from high school so I was treated like an adult but inside I was still a kid with neither the experience nor emotional stability to act the grownup I wanted people to think me.
Even among small colleges, Hiram College stood out for smallness. It had five hundred students, evenly divided between men and women, and was located in a town –Hiram, Ohio—whose total population –250 people– was even smaller than the college’s. Unsurprisingly, most of the people who lived there were connected to the college in some way.
Small didn’t bother me, though. It felt comfortable. After all, I came from a town of 2,000 people and I had graduated in a class of 58 students. When I graduated from Hiram four years later, there were 86 of us. That seemed a lot to me but by comparison, my wife Esther’s high school class was nearly 300 strong and I have no idea how many graduated with her from Bowling Green State University in 1961 but I’m sure it was a lot.
I took off for college with my clothes, record player, twenty or so long plays (all jazz) and a carrier box of extended play records. (Interestingly enough, I took no books.)
I brought along an attitude too. I thought –no, I knew— I was hot shit. College was my chance to strut my stuff. Socially and emotionally, I was a disaster waiting to happen. And that’s exactly what did happen. Quickly. My immaturity, plus my tendency to voice my opinions before listening to what other people said made for a very rocky year for me. I bragged a lot too. I was fine inside the classroom but my outside life did me in. I won’t touch on the subject again so let me say that I managed to get my act together during my remaining three years at Hiram and I made friends –actually, lots of them, good ones—and I cut down, though never completely stopped, tooting my own horn too loud and too soon.
Without music, life would be a mistake. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Music wise, my freshman year at Hiram was a mixed bag. I signed up for chorus but once accepted into it, found it disappointing. The director, Mr. Proctor, was nice enough but he was an awful director with little feel for tempo, he was too tentative a director and the song choices for the chorus were not inspiring. Even worse, he favored music majors over the rest of us in the chorus. That meant I had no hope of making it into the small ensemble where the interesting (and demanding) singing took place. I stayed in the chorus for the year only because if I’d dropped it, there’d have been an F on my transcript (mixed chorus, one credit) and I wasn’t going to let that happen. But that was it. There’d be no chorus for me after that, never again in college. And though I didn’t know it then, never again afterwards either. My days singing in a chorus were ended.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Hiram Men’s Chorus: Alma Mater Cara
MUSIC & ME 