32. The Indiana State 4-H Band ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

In the second summer that Robert participated in Ouibache, he played clarinet in the Indiana State 4-H Band.

It was the summer before his junior year, and the big concert band was 116 members strong. The director was Roger C. Heath, who was an assistant director at Purdue University. He would go on to found the band program at Virginia Tech. He had earned his degrees at the University of Colorado and had taught in Montana before coming to Purdue.

Heath had assembled a challenging concert for such a young concert band with limited rehearsal time. Part I included “Slavonic Folk Suite,” and Part II concluded with “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

The director tolerated no monkey business, and he demanded excellence. Robert’s jaw grew tired from playing passages again and again with only seconds of instruction in between. Everyone felt increasingly on edge. During the rare breaks, band members discerned that Mr. Heath was displeased.

The final rehearsal before the concert was tense.

“Trombones,” Mr. Heath said, “that passage must be cleaner. Try it again!” He gave the downbeat with his baton. “No! Cleaner! Try again!” Another downbeat. “Still not clean enough! Again!”

Next, the tempo was of concern. “Band, you are rushing!” Mr. Heath said. “Keep your eyes up here, and keep the tempo with me!”

The band played the passage again.

“Still rushing! Still not looking up here!”

The volume was a problem. Mr. Heath said, “The audience wants to hear the piccolo. You must bring down the volume!”

The band played the passage again.

“Still can’t hear the piccolo! Still not bringing down the volume! Again!”

The band played the passage another time.

Finally, there was no time left.

Mr. Heath set down his baton and stared at the band for several seconds. “This evening,” he began, “I will be all smiles and roses, no matter how well or how poorly you perform. At the end, I will still be all smiles and roses, but, if you have performed poorly, I will not tell you that you performed well. I will simply say nothing.”

With those words, Mr. Heath turned on his heel and was gone.    

 

On that Tuesday evening, June 30th of 1970, the band members slowly filed onto the stage of the vast Edward C. Elliott Hall of Music for the Seventh Annual Concert of the Indiana State 4-H Band, to perform for the public during the Fifty-Second Annual 4-H Club Roundup.

Robert felt dread all the way to his toes, and his stomach kept doing somersaults. He could not remember ever having been so nervous before a band concert, although he certainly had experienced nervousness before many a piano solo. He took his place amid the clarinet section. (A few years later, he would be first chair of the second clarinets in the famed Indiana University Marching Hundred, and, in Robert’s senior year in college, he would be named the Outstanding Bandsman, an honor he would share with drum major Fred Kelly.)

Wearing a black suit and bow tie, Mr. Heath stepped onto the stage to the applause of the packed hall.

He was all smiles and roses.

During the intermission, he was all smiles and roses.

At the end of the concert, he remained all smiles and roses.

Robert breathed a big sigh of relief when the program was over. The music had made a hit with the audience, for the applause was like thunder. After bowing, Mr. Heath turned to the band and said, “You—were—excellent!” enunciating each word so that he could be heard over the applause. He immediately pointed to the piccolo player to stand for special acknowledgment; then he waved all the band members to their feet to be congratulated.

The next summer, Robert was back for more.

The director of the 1971 Indiana State 4-H Band was William D. Kisinger, also an assistant at Purdue. Affable and easygoing, Mr. “Bill” Kisinger greeted the 111 band members warmly.

With his head held high and his chin up, Mr. Kisinger said, in his characteristic rapid pattern, often nodding. “I want to welcome you to the campus of Purdue University and to say how much I’m looking forward to working with you and to tell you that we are going to be making music! We have charts that are really exciting, and we’re going to be a big hit, and the audience is going to love us!”

With those positive sentiments, Mr. Kisinger began the rehearsal. He often left the baton lying on the stand and conducted with his hands.

Mr. Kisinger was a product of the University of Illinois, which had a tradition of innovation going back to the earliest years of marching band performances at football games. He embodied assurance and confidence.

Mr. Kisinger liked what he heard from the 4-H band, and he would like it even more if the trumpets could keep their bells up. Brass instruments were suddenly lifted higher. If an entire section missed a note, he calmly stepped down from the platform, strode over, picked up the music from one of the stands, pointed at it, and said, “Not your fault! Transcription error! There was supposed to be a flat there, so let’s make it a B flat in bar 77, and does everyone have a pencil—if not, there’s one over here—and now we know it’s a B flat in bar 77, so let’s hear it, beginning with bar 75 and one, two, three, four!” He had hopped back onto the platform by the end of his statement and was counting and conducting. He beamed when he heard the B flat, and he went on without stopping.

Breaks were timed well, and the ratio of instruction to playing was just right.

On a ridiculously hot Monday evening, June 28th in 1971, Mr. Kisinger stepped onto the stage of the Slayter Center, a spacious band shell that looked like Alexander Calder’s answer to Stonehenge supported by an enormous tripod. The stage was only seven years old. Mr. Kisinger was in a short-sleeve shirt and wore a 4-H cap.

Every moment of the concert was fun.

When the band performed a medley of songs from West Side Story, Robert could hardly believe his ears: “Tonight” had such a sumptuous sound, and “America” had such a driving rhythm!

The hill stretching away from the stage was so full of families sitting on blankets that almost none of the green grass was showing. At concert’s end, with one accord, the audience stood to applaud and applaud, until Mr. Kisinger announced an encore number, for which he had planned all along and which the band had rehearsed.

From his two years in the Indiana State 4-H Band, Robert took away the realization that excellence can result from at least two divergent methods: from strict discipline leading to the attainment of a high standard or from amiable collaboration bringing about a joy in a job well done. In the spring of 1972, he auditioned for Mr. Frederick C. Ebbs, director of bands at Indiana University, and was accepted into the renowned Marching Hundred. Robert wondered which pedagogical styles directors Mr. Ebbs, Mr. Ray Cramer, and Mr. Wilbur T. England would evince.     

26. The College Student ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

The August day arrived when the family said goodbye to Charles outside Wright Quadrangle on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington. He was excited, looking forward to his time in college. On the drive home, Joe, Ida, and Robert were not excited. Robert had a lump in his throat. Joe said nothing, and Ida made only the occasional observation about a flower in someone’s yard or a bird on a fencepost. How could the sanctity of a family be broken so nonchalantly? The knowledge that the home would never be the same again weighed heavily on all three.

When the Pontiac pulled into the driveway and everyone went inside the house, the home that had seemed so full of promise only a little over two years earlier now felt vulnerable. A big change had occurred. Spot wondered where Charles was and watched for him for many days, until the terrier gave up watching.

Robert thought he should be especially kind to his parents, now that Charles’ room was quiet and felt empty.

In the mornings, Robert waited for the bus alone.

Joe and Ida hoped for letters from IU, and a few came. Charles was busy, studying up to four hours a night. Ida, meanwhile, wrote and mailed many letters to Bloomington. She could be seen scrawling on a pad of lined paper while taking a moment to sit at the kitchen table with a dusting of flour up to her elbows and pies in the oven.

Ida had been to college; Joe had not. She had knowledge of what Charles was encountering; Joe had none. The move to the new house in 1968 had been one of two of the most traumatizing events in Joe’s life. The second occurred when Charles moved away.

Without either of them sensing the change, the bond between Joe and Robert—already strong—was becoming stronger.

Ida and Robert kept trying to grow a vegetable garden. Their first attempt—in the first spring and summer at the new home—had been made west of the driveway, but the plants did not thrive. Next, Ida had Joe plow the area north of the house where, in Lizzie’s youth, a garden had been located. As before, sprouts were few, mature plants fewer, and the quality of the produce poor at best. No one could understand why corn, soybeans, and wheat crops customarily were spectacular when grown in presumably the same soil in the fields just beyond the hedge apple trees.

Uncharacteristically, Ida gave up. She supplied the family’s table with vegetables from grocery stores. Robert no longer enrolled in the gardening project for the 4-H fair.

“If we don’t plant a garden, I’ll have more time to dust,” Ida said. In the country, the furniture and floors became dusty far faster than they had in town. Up until Joe bought a window air conditioning unit, the windows were kept open through the hot, muggy days, although a heavy green blind might be lowered by pulling on the little ring dangling from the string at the bottom of the shade.

Little by little, levity returned to the farm east of Pine Village.

Ida would turn from the kitchen sink to face Robert while suds rolled down her wrists from her upturned hands, and she would quote Lady Macbeth: “The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?—What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” Robert would laugh until he could hardly catch his breath.

Robert would squeak a pink rat made of rubber and fling it beneath the sofa. Spot would bark and jump up and down, finally resorting to twisting the front half of his body on its side and pushing with his hind legs, until he could reach the rat and pull it out. Then he would shake it, to everyone’s delight! “You get that ol’ rat!” Robert would say.

Naturally, events conspired to dampen Robert’s good spirits. Miss Beegle retired. Robert’s beloved piano teacher recommended that he continue his training with Miss Ruth Jamieson.

Such a huge change! Miss Jamieson had a small apartment above a men’s clothing store near Purdue. Robert trudged up several flights of stairs that snapped as if they would break. In the gloom at the top, a dim light bulb with no shade and yellowed with grime hung at the end of a dirty cord. Robert knocked, and Miss Jamieson swung open the door with what Robert would come to discover was her characteristic impulsiveness. There she stood. Her hair was pulled back tightly in a severe bun. Her very red lipstick was applied in a hasty smear—once across the lips and done! Her stare pierced Robert’s confidence. He looked down awkwardly.

“Well, I suppose you had better come in, don’t you suppose?” she asked, stepping back, so that Robert could enter her tiny, tiny apartment.

Her piano was a reddish upright, nothing like the twin grand pianos that Miss Beegle owned. Miss Jamieson’s reading material lay wherever it fell on the sofa or on the carpet. French paintings in gilded frames hung at odd angles. Strings of beads separated her tiny living room from her kitchen, and, every now and then, she unexpectedly leapt up from her rocking chair, dove through the beads (which tinkled against one another), and returned with a heavily scented hand cream that she rubbed vigorously between her palms.

For the first year of lessons, Miss Jamieson found fault with every facet of Robert’s playing—beginning with the way he clipped his nails. “Cut them much shorter!” she commanded. Quite often, as he stood on a windy street corner waiting for his parents to pick him up after a lesson, he thought about quitting. At the beginning of his training under Miss Jamieson’s sharp tutelage, he could not have predicted that she would eventually occupy the same place in his affections as a dearly loved aunt. Slowly, Miss Jamieson built Robert back up after tearing him down, transforming his playing.

In the beginning of his studies with Miss Jamieson, Robert often stumbled. At his first recital in Duncan Hall, he became lost in a Beethoven Sonata. His fingers flailed around, striking wrong notes in all directions. Instead of feeling horror or shame, Robert smiled. In his mind’s eye, Robert could just see the dramatic Miss Jamieson backstage, groaning, swooning, and falling to the floor.

When Robert walked into the wings, Miss Jamieson rushed up to him. “What happened to you, my boy?” she begged.

“I couldn’t remember where I was.”

“Oh,” she said in a kind of guttural utterance, as if someone had hit her in the stomach. Recovering, she said, “Well, it has happened to the best of performers and is one of the best ways to learn. Recitals may appear to be about winning and losing. Competitions may present the illusion of winners and losers, but, oftentimes, the losers are the winners, my boy! When you discover that making music is not about victory and defeat, you will be a pianist!”

Several weeks later, Miss Jamieson and Robert attended a piano concert by Vladimir Ashkenazy in the Edward C. Elliott Hall of Music at Purdue. Robert knew that he was in the presence of a prodigious talent. He observed Miss Jamieson’s gestures, such as pressing her hand against her heart while her lipstick formed the letter O. Suddenly, he could read her mind, which was not saying “I am in the presence of a prodigious talent.” Her mind was saying “Ah! How beautiful!”  

Miss Jamieson designed separate exercises for each of Robert’s fingers, and she coined fascinating expressions to help him overcome difficult passages in the music. For a rapid run in another Beethoven Sonata, she said, “It’s like small monkeys scurrying up trees in the jungle.” Somehow, that description made it possible for Robert to play the run accurately every time. When she was young, she had studied in France for a lengthy period, and she affected a French manner, calling Robert “Ro-BAIR.”

“Ro-BAIR,” she said one day, “we must begin preparing for your audition at Indiana University, for you will audition there one day. We will surprise the judges by having you adopt a method of performance preferred by some in Beethoven’s age but seldom practiced nowadays. I am alluding to using only the middle three fingers on the black keys. No thumbs, no pinkies!” The last word almost burst from her.

“Further,” she continued, “you will sustain notes by holding the keys down, not by pedaling. Your foot will not come near the pedal.” She chuckled. “The judges won’t know what hit them,” she mused.

“Of course, they will want to hear your range, so we will give them Bach and Chopin. Your Bach will be strict, as if played on a harpsichord, and your Chopin will be unctuously Romantic. We must get started at once!”

For months, Robert was in the piano equivalent of training for the Olympics.

There were moments of joy, when Miss Jamieson flung herself backwards in her rocking chair, clasped her hands over her heart, smiled, and exclaimed, “Formidable!”

There were moments of despair, when Miss Jamieson thrust herself forward, shooed Robert’s hands away from the keys, placed her hands where his had been, and made him watch carefully as she demonstrated what he should be doing. “Voila!”

Each day, each week, un peu de progrès!

Then came the afternoon when Miss Jamieson rocked back and said, “I am pleased to say that you now have a good technique. Technique is essential, but you can have perfect technique and not make music.”

Miss Jamieson seized a chopstick and pointed to a line in the score of the sonata. “Sing the melody!” she ordered.

“Oh, I can’t do that!” Robert said.

“What do you mean?” Miss Jamieson asked, a look of shock on her face.

“My voice is not good for singing,” Robert answered.

“Rubbish!” she exclaimed. “I never heard such utter nonsense!”

“My father is a good singer,” Robert began, “but I didn’t inherit—”

“I didn’t ask your father to sing,” Miss Jamieson interrupted. “I asked you. Now sing!”

Robert sang the melody.

“Now play the same way you sang!”

His mouth open, Robert silently sang while his fingers ran up and down the keys.

Miss Jamieson laughed a deep belly guffaw. “You are making music! You hear the difference! Your technique is the body; the music is the spirit.”

From that day forward, Robert’s mouth remained open whenever he played piano. He was silently singing—sometimes, not so silently.

More importantly, from that hour—no, moment!—onward, his heart was open.

20. The Cereals and the Baked Goods ... THE FARM IN PINE VILLAGE

Robert had an intense dislike for rolled oats, which his mother often served for breakfast. He despised the texture, and he found the taste repulsive. He was forced to choke down many a bowl filled to the brim with the disgusting stuff. Cream of wheat was almost as bad, but he could swallow it with less trouble. During the year when he was in Mrs. Hail’s class, Ida began to give up the fight for rolled oats and occasionally set a Kellogg’s Variety Pack in the center of the table.

Robert felt a huge relief! Even if his brother took the best cereals (Sugar Smacks, Sugar Pops, Raisin Bran, or Rice Krispies), Robert could easily eat Sugar Frosted Flakes or Special K. Robert found Corn Flakes marginally acceptable. OKs were—well—OK!

On the happy mornings when the Variety Pack made its appearance on the breakfast table, Robert emptied the cereal into a china bowl, put two heaping teaspoons of sugar on top, and poured the fresh milk straight from the cow around the mound of sugar. He was fascinated to watch the milk soak into the sugar, transforming it from white granules to gray layers that gradually slipped below the creamy surface. He spooned the cereal carefully, so that, by the end, the bottom of the bowl would have a thick layer of sugar that he could spoon out with the last of the milk. Kellogg’s had been offering variety packs as long as Robert had been alive, but Ida did not yield to their convenience until Robert was in school.

Jell-O was a different story. Ida had fallen fast for the convenience of Jell-O dishes, and she was quick to use all the recipes in the women’s magazines. Jell-O (a mixture of gelatin, fruit flavors, and sugar) was served at almost every dinner and every supper.

Orange Jell-O packed full of shredded carrots and chopped raisins was a popular item on Ida’s menu. Lime Jell-O featuring crunchy chunks of celery was another. Robert greatly preferred fruit in his Jell-O. Black cherry Jell-O harboring large bing cherries was one of Robert’s favorites. Then came lime Jell-O with crushed pineapple and heavy cream mixed together on a bed of crumbled graham crackers and topped with a layer of whipped heavy cream and chopped walnuts. The latter dish became a staple.

On special occasions, Ida made a mold of a fruity Jell-O with mandarin orange slices. A topping of whipped cream was available for most of the Jell-O dishes made with fruit.

Ida bowed to convenience when it came to international cuisine, too. Italian food was Chef Boyardee from cans. Asian food was LaChoy’s Chop Suey Vegetables with chunks of pork added and with the dish poured over LaChoy Chow Mein Noodles. Mexican food was Van Camp’s Tamales with Sauce (also from a can). Ever since the Korean War, Ida had witnessed a time of a burgeoning variety of foods and ever-greater convenience—a convenience that she embraced enthusiastically (sooner or later).

Even though Ida was a skilled baker, she enjoyed buying doughnuts and bread from Graves Bakery on the State Street hill near Purdue University in West Lafayette. Almost every week, she successfully made the turn from State Street, across the oncoming traffic, over the gravelly hump just beyond the sidewalk, and down into the parking lot, where she moved her foot back and forth from the brake to the gas pedal to the brake and to the gas pedal until she felt the car was parked well enough. Once Robert’s nearly carsick vision had cleared, he waited in the Chevrolet Bel Air while Ida gained the sidewalk and hurried out of view toward the front door of the bakery. Robert looked up in fascination at the large billboard on the side of the building.

Regularly, the billboard changed, but it always announced the delights of baked goods from Graves Bakery and it always included a painting, usually a child with rosy cheeks and an endearing smile who was enjoying a jelly-filled doughnut or similar sugary treat. The painting on the huge poster always exhibited a heartwarming realism reminiscent of Norman Rockwell’s work but lacking a complete background so that the words could be prominently displayed against a plain backdrop. Robert studied the colors and the ways the artist fashioned the facial features, the clothing, the hands, the light, and the shadows.

Soon enough, Ida returned with two big bags of doughnuts and sweet rolls.

“They had a sale on cinnamon twists, and I bought extras,” Ida said with evident glee, as she carefully placed the white paper sacks in the back seat.

The bakery items usually were devoured before the next week’s trip to West Lafayette, but, when they were gone, Ida might make cinnamon toast for breakfast.

After many glum mornings staring down a bowl of rolled oats, Robert was ready to dance a jig whenever he awoke to the fragrance of cinnamon toast. Ida mixed butter, sugar, and cinnamon and lightly toasted it on slices of bread that were spread on a cookie sheet and placed in the oven. The satisfying crunch when he bit into the caramelized sugar was only part of the pleasure of eating his mother’s cinnamon toast. The sugar coating would flake slightly to reveal the hot buttery toast beneath. On especially fortunate mornings, Ida served mugs of hot cocoa. Dipping half a slice of plain buttered toast in hot chocolate was a delicious experience, but dipping half a slice of cinnamon toast in cocoa would make anyone over the moon!

Yes, Ida could bake cookies with the best of them, and her persimmon pudding was out of this world. Her forte, though, was pie. Robert could not remember a time when there was no pie cooling beside the meat grinder attached to the enameled counter of the Hoosier. Apple, peach, banana cream, cherry, blackberry, sugar cream, pumpkin, lemon meringue, chocolate, mince (but not made with meat), rhubarb, gooseberry, and even mulberry (on rare occasions) were only a few of the pies that came hot and mouth-watering from Ida’s oven. Almost every dinner was fortified with a generous slice of pie for dessert. It seemed she never missed! Ida’s pies never failed!

In addition to being baked in a pie, rhubarb took several delightful turns toward the dessert side of the dinner plates: rhubarb cobbler (sometimes mixed with strawberries), rhubarb coffee cake, rhubarb sauce (sometimes mixed with cherries) for ice cream, rhubarb crunches, and rhubarb crisps.

Ida’s gooseberry shortcake stole the show.

Quite often, Ida brought her brown cups of custard hot from the oven. Using a rasp, she grated nutmeg on top of each. Sometimes, the custard cups were filled with butterscotch pudding, chocolate pudding, or vanilla pudding.

Cakes were plentiful, too. Ida, Aunt Margaret, and Grandma Rhode all made delectable German chocolate cakes. Robert’s favorite birthday cake was a white layer cake with pink peppermint icing, but black walnut cake was also high on his list.

With the butter and cream that were fresh from Joe’s Holstein cows and with lard that was truly lard and with flour that knew how to behave, the baked goods that flowed from Ida’s oven were delicious beyond anyone’s powers of description. They more than compensated for the rolled oats and the cream of wheat that Robert had to consume at the start of the day now and then.