Moving to a new building is somewhat exciting. The music area at the southeast corner of the structure had two spacious rehearsal rooms, adequate office and storage space. It was across the hall from the totally inadequate little auditorium, already described. 

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My colleagues at the school were Tom Hall, who directed the bands, and George Simonsen, a UPS grad, had the orchestra. The orchestra met in the choir room later in the day. 

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Tom Hall was slender and short in stature and had immense loyalty from his students. They knew Tom knew what he was doing. He insisted that the brass section be headed by cornets in the higher part...not trumpets. The theory was that cornets, with conical bore, had a better blend than the trumpet which had cylindrical bore and a brighter, more piercing sound. Tom's ideal sound was a true symphonic or wind ensemble approach. He didn't stress the "marching band" approach, though the band did do some half-time shows and, of course, played during football games. A pep band played during basketball games. 

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Tom, himself, was an accomplished flute player. He headed to Korten's music store at the corner of Broadway and Commerce in Longview each afternoon after school where he gave private lessons. (Several area band directors did this. Korten's provided practice (lesson) rooms and the local band directors shared an uncommon collegiality, I think, as a result of their lesson giving.

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George Simsonsen has a rather charismatic personality and his orchestras were always outstanding. George was a marvelous violin player with a flair for the dramatic. Kids loved him. He also took over the local symphony orchestra...the SWW Symphony...this after the retirement of the symphony founder, Irv Gattiker, who taught strings in the Longview schools.

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Toward the latter part of my years in Kelso, the choral program was "fed" by wonderful work by David Walworth, who was hired to handle vocal music at Coweeman Junior HIgh School.  John Poage taught choral music at Huntington Junior High, the other feeder school for the high school. John also did nice work and was very helpful in keeping kids involved in the program and moving on up to high school choral groups.

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It must be mentioned that David Walworth (and his wife, Ginger) were beginning what was to be a lifetime stay in Kelso and Longview. David not only turned out marvelous choirs (at all levels), but also went on to become supervisor of music for the Longview School District. Ginger taught elementary music in the Longview schools, most often at the Mint Valley school. The Walworths contributed mightily to the entire music scene in Cowlitz County. Ginger is a superior organist and still plays at Trinity Lutheran Church. David has directed the choir there for many years. Both are active, still, in leadership roles with the SWW Symphony...David as principal percussionist and Ginger at keyboard or percussion, as needed. 

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A sideways glance...

In about 1971, I started to get active in the teachers' association of the district, first as a building representative and by 1973, as president of the local union, the Kelso Education Association.

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But that story, in itself, was somewhat interrupted.

I had always admired the recordings of Robert Shaw, Roger Wagner, and Norman Luboff. In many way, the LP recordings of these groups became a model for the sound I was looking for with my own groups. I was enthralled with the LP put out by Wagner called "Echos of a 16th Century Cathedral." That approach to early music seemed ideal to me. I listened over and over to Luboff's "Songs of the West" and "Songs of the South" albums. The rich four-part writing for male voices and the warmth these voices brought to the mixed choir became ingrained in my mind. 

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I remember attending only one workshop with Roger Wagner. Mostly what I remembered was how nasty he was to the sopranos. I'm not sure one could call that "old school," for I'm more of the opinion it was more a quirk of Mr Wagner's personality...my impression, a not so nice part of it. I attended a concert of Roger's choir when they sang a concert in Portland's old Civic Auditorium. I loved it...to me, it was an amazing choral sound I could only hope to emulate. 

Recordings (LPs) were the principal means of "immersing oneself" in the music of such choral giants. I did a lot of listening in those days.

 

I never had the privilege of participating in a Robert Shaw event of any kind, though some of my colleagues have actually sung with him. However, I may have purchased every Shaw choral album produced during the 60's, 70's and 80's. I remain convinced that anyone aspiring to develop outstanding music groups (schools, churches, or community) should absorb the sounds of these marvelous choirs and then try to find out how these sounds were achieved!

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(In addition to the professional groups, one must also listen to the work of many of our university and college directors. Recordings were available as I began my career. Even more are available now.)

 

As an aside to the statement about "how these sounds were achieved,"  early in my career I was able to attend a week-long workshop in Denver that featured Paul Christiansen of Concordia College. I believe what I learned during this week was hugely influential in my approach to a choir tone. His concept seemed to be based somewhat on the idea of a superb string quartet. Uniformity of tone quality with not a hint of change of quality as one heard the cello to the viola to the violins. While I don't think he was saying that singers must sound "like" each other within a section, the overall effect had to be "one voice." With that in mind, the concept of UNISON was the emphasis. This has vital import with regard to balance, tone quality, intonation, and yes, blend. 

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Normal Luboff, probably as a means of promoting the music published by his company, Walton Music, began his summer workshops period. I attended one in Tempe, Arizona, and later another at Cannon Beach, Oregon. 

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I had always felt I could sing at a professional level, though not as a soloist...rather as a solid part of a choir. At the Cannon Beach workshop, Luboff talked a bit about how he selects singers for "The Norman Luboff Choir." (This was his touring choir...not the same group of people he hired for his recordings.) The shortened story is that I decided to audition for him right there in Cannon Beach. He was kind. Seemed to like what he heard. But a few weeks later I got a nice letter saying that "his bass section was returning almost intact from the previous year" and that he couldn't use me at that time. This was in about 1970 or 71.

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A couple of years later, this time at a Choral Associates (Walton, etc.) workshop at PLU in Tacoma I chatted briefly with him again, saying "I still think I could be an asset to the group...and what was the procedure for audition this time?" He told me to submit a tape with two songs, something from the "classical literature" and something "pop." I honestly can't remember the title I chose for the "classical" work, but I do remember traveling from Longview to Orcas Island to have Dale Mattson, a friend and a marvelous pianist who played "pop" style well, accompany me on the song "For Once in My Life."

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A bit later I got a letter from Norman saying he'd like for me to sing in the 1974 touring choir. He asked if I could meet the choir in Hollywood, California on a given date in January for a two-week rehearsal period. He outlined the schedule for the tour and how much (not much) that the job paid. (I think it was $175 a week.) 

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I now had to talk with my Kelso administrators about being gone from three months...basically the 3rd quarter...of the 1974 school year. They were amenable and agreed to find a substitute for me for that three month period. 
 

But I also had to talk with the Kelso Education folks. I had been elected president back in the spring of 1973 and was to start my term in that role for 1973-1974. The details were worked out and Mary Lou Salberg (always "thanks" to Mary Lou), the vice-president of the group was then to take over while I was gone.

 

I will cover the memories of the 1974 Luboff Choir tour in a later blog. HERE

 

What I do recall vividly is returning in April of '74 to find that negotiations between the Kelso Education Association and the school board were not going well. 

 

The short version of this period of time is that, much to my surprise, the KEA went on strike...the third such event in the history of the state of Washington. The issues were fairly plain, as far as I could see. It was not nearly so much about salaries and class sizes as it was about management style. The Association was saying, "we're in a place to see directly what needs to be done to make things better for kids." "We need to have a voice at the table when decisions are made that effect the kids, and us." It's perhaps an odd turn, but the very things that caused issues in the Kelso schools of 1974 became commonplace in school administrations several years down the road. The concept of "site-based management" was embraced by most schools fifteen or twenty years later. To us, it only made sense. To the Kelso superintendent and board it apparently seemed to be a threat to their "top-down" concept. 

 

The strike lasted for only three days. As often happens, a superior court judge, based on an injunction filed by the district, threatened jail for association leaders. I mean no bravado in saying this threat did not bother any of us...my chief negotiator, the late Richard Howell, Mary Lou Salberg, or any of the rest of the leadership group. For one thing, we felt certain that our landing in jail would, in fact, solidify the already strong support we had in the community. But late in the evening on a Sunday, we reached a tentative agreement. We met the next morning with the membership and they voted to accept the deal and the strike was over.

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Strikes are a strange thing. Battle lines are drawn. While almost all the teachers were "on board" with the strike, there remained a few who disagreed and who would have crossed picket lines had the school district attempted to keep the schools open. We had a strong sense that the community at large supported us. The teachers banded together (bonded) in a way I could never have imagined. 

 

We were helped by staff members from the Washington Education Association. Two distinct memories prevail. The first was when a WEA officer said to us...as we considered whether to strike or not, "Just remember the old saying, he who rides the tiger dares not get off!"

 

The second memory was that of  a WEA staffer saying (in a meeting of union representatives), "you'll find that there will be a 'hero' and a 'villain' in this operation. You might as well decide right now who that is going to be!" Deserving or not, the reps said our "hero" is going to be Howard. Our "villain" will be the school superintendent, Kenneth Schmauder. 
 

The year after the strike,  several of our Kelso teachers, including Helen Hemrich,  put together a "scrapbook" with many of the strike details. They sent it to the WEA. I received an award that year at the state meeting of union representatives in Spokane. It was called the "Teacher Advocate of the Year" award. While I was proud to receive it, I'm always aware that many times this sort of thing happens as a result of one's place at a given moment in "history." Our negotiator, Dick Howell, and other leaders were equally deserving of such an award.
 

 

Where did it go from there...
I taught two more years in Kelso. 

 

Somehow it began to feel like I was through. I wasn't ready to give up standing before a choral ensemble, rehearsing and performing, but I had reached a half-way point in my career as a teacher and felt it was time to move on. In some ways. I was aware of at least a couple of contributing factors.

 

I keep referring to a lack of a performance hall and the miserable excuse for an auditorium right across the hall from the choir room. It was a constant discouragement to know you had good sounding groups but had no "magic" from a stage to show them off well. Gyms and cafeterias simply don't cut it!

 

In a sense, some of us tried to rectify that issue in the early 70's. A small group, including the husband of a school board member as well as a local architect, proposed to the school board a plan to buy the old auditorium and gym in an attempt to save that part of the building as a community resource. We were fine with tearing down both the west side (part of the original building) and the east side (the part that had been added originally to be used as a junior high school. We wanted to keep the 1100 seat auditorium especially. We thought it would be a great asset to the city with some remodeling...especially of the electrical system. The school board and superintendent refused to negotiate in any way. (Eventually, in about 1986, the entire building was demolished.)

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The real dilemma was probably of my own making. I'm certain this can happen to many choral (and instrumental) directors in the public schools. If you read the beginning of my story you might have noticed I said something about "trying to make my high school choir sound as good as my college group." That notion never quite left me. 

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As I look back on it, I feel rather certain that (at least with my choral groups) I taught with a mixture of motivations. Foremost, I suspect, was that of "making that choir sound as good as it possibly could because it was a reflection of my skills." OK, it was mainly for me! 

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In a way, I'm still torn on this issue. Certainly, if the motive for working hard and for working students hard, especially to the point of "driving" them, is essentially one of showing off for colleagues and building a reputation as "one of the best" in the business, I see that as potentially harmful. But here's an interesting thing. I occasionally stopped by and enjoyed chatting with John Westervelt, former student and then manager of the Nissan side of Columbia Ford in Longview. I once told him I felt I pushed the choirs too hard and for my own motivations. John seemed astounded that I would say this. Basically, he said, "I was proud to be a part of such a wonderful sounding group."  Well, OK.  Somehow, I still think motivation matters. I'll be returning to this subject when I talk about my years at Mark Morris High School.

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Returning to the subject, or reasons why I quit teaching in 1976...
At this "mid-point" in my life, at about 38 years old, it just seemed time to try to make a living in another field.

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My five-year career as a real estate agent/broker. HERE


 

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