Tuesday Voice: Growing up in America

Two years at Shaw High

By Rolf Dumke

I often reflect on my first years in the United States after my family immigrated from bombed-out Germany in the early 50s. There were those wonderful first years in a middle-class neighborhood and school, after living in the rough Hugh District of Cleveland until the late 50s. Instead of returning to Germany, my parents used their hard-earned savings to buy a suburban house in East Cleveland, which allowed me two good years at Shaw High School.
    My growing up in America was in different locations and with different experiences. They were like the layers of a club sandwich made up by the stressful years in a Cleveland slum; two years in East Cleveland at Shaw High; and the years thereafter at Yale and graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, with rising challenges and achievements. Subsequently, I would change yet more addresses and add more layers to my club sandwich vita.

Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein

    The Shaw years were my introduction into the open, friendly, and supportive life of America, years that seemed almost endless, getting to know new friends, with many new activities. In these years my personal identity was developed, fusing with particulars of the place where I lived and where I went to school. Gertrude Stein wrote of the creation of identity in Everybody’s Autobiography (Random House, 1937) that you adopt the characteristics of the places where you have lived, or what you remember of those places: You are your address, or, your address is you, as long as you remember it.
    But in contrast to Stein, who later, from the viewpoint of Paris, dismissingly spoke of her home town Oakland as, in her words, there is no there there, I view East Cleveland and Shaw High, from Rosenheim, Bavaria, with appreciation and fondness, and say, there was a there, there. And it remains clear in my memory.

    Someone in the city of Oakland recently placed a sculpture, the tall word THERE, in a small park – an ironic and futile reminder of its significance?

Three of my most impressive experiences at Shaw were in the great music environment established by our music teacher, Mr. Fraser.
    From among the Shaw High music students Mr. Fraser chose the best to form the Rhythm Teens, a small orchestra and choir that performed for old age home audiences, infirmaries, insane asylums, and jails. It seemed appalling and deceptive to me that our young and attractive group, nicely attired in red-checked tuxedos, sang and played love songs and happy-is-life songs to dying, decrepit, insane, or incarcerated audiences. We were booked often and immensely appreciated by all of our audiences. Our performance was true community service and hard work.

    I recall two remarkable episodes. The first was in a men's jail playing for a large hall of unruly men. When the lights were dimmed, we started our sassy theme song, by George Gershwin, sung by the prettiest girls from our high school:

I got rhythm,
I got music,
I've got my man.
Who could ask for anything more?

The response to the question was immediate and clear from cat-calls proposing indecent activity by the men in the dark below the podium. That was the first and last time we performed for men's jails.
    A second, more haunting experience was performing for a women's insane asylum, where the initial response to us was guarded silence. But as we progressed in our program of well-known and popular songs, one or the other song rang a bell in the memory of a half-dozen comatose women, seated in different sections of the auditorium. Depending on the particular song and the different deep impressions the songs had made on them while growing up and loving somebody, the women rose slowly to “their” song, swaying like fairies in the half-lit hall. Some even danced in the aisles, bewitched by the music, awoken from their torpor for a few minutes, only to fall back at the end of the song. Even the tough women guards, who had demanded strict order and admonished, “Stay in your seat!” relented to the charm and allowed their inmates their temporary awakenings and elf-like dances.
    The Rhythm Teens had waved a magic wand over this hall, creating a scene of harmony and beauty. We had actually done something good, not dishonest. This scene, I recalled later, has an uncanny resemblance to the psychological dramas danced by Pina Bausch's contemporary dance ensemble, Tanztheater Wuppertal. (You can view a wonderful short dance by her group on Sadler's Wells website.)

I remember my first week in September 1958 on the basketball court where Tom Woehrmann was on a podium at one end playing the French horn fanfare from Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel. I was struck by the energy and beauty of his tones, which were like a gust of wind through dark clouds up to the blue sky and the blinding sun above. It was a view of heaven. Unforgettable! I still remember that moment today.
    This horn fanfare is a top “lick,” an outstanding and difficult musical phrase, which major orchestras require when auditioning hornists. The phrase came from Tom, who also played trombone for top jazz bands playing in Cleveland’s black bars. He returned with tales of the exciting adult life in these bars and of new great jazz musicians, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown. I cherish my first jazz records by Coltrane and Brown, bought on Tom’s advice. Yet more eye-opening was seeing Miles Davis playing in a small black club in 1958. Sometimes Tom would jazz-up a solo in a Rhythm Teens performance and light-up the eyes of Mr. Fraser as well as enchanting the rest of us. Tom’s solos were the highlights of our life in the Rhythm Teens. He opened the world of great jazz to his friends.

[The first piece on the album can be heard on Youtube]

    A few weeks later I experienced a riveting, spontaneous pantomime of Franz Schubert’s Der Erlkoenig by Ralph Lockwood, pounding on the new grand piano in the Music Building in time to the father’s night-time galloping on a horse with his feverish boy, riding home through a storm in the night.
    This echoes the clear galloping meter in the beginning lines of Goethe's poem, Erlkoenig, which is source of the story:

Wer reitet so spaet durch Nacht und Wind,
(Who’s riding so late through night and wind)
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind....
(It is the father with his own child)

    Tom Woehrmann and Don Fisher acted out the story, galloping around the piano, gesturing wildly. Woehrmann was throttling Fisher, like the Erlkoenig “das Kind.” Although threatened by the Erlkoenig, the feverish boy refused to enter the King’s fantasy-land and live with his enticing daughters. When the father finally arrived home at the break of day, the boy was dead.

Moritz von Schwind

    A great performance of a troubling story, also due to the fact that both Don and Tom died at an early age.
    The German Wikipedia entry on Schubert’s Erlkoenig discusses its relation to Goethe’s ballad and points to Ludwig van Beethoven’s earlier attempt. Wikipedia gives an unusually benign Freudian explanation for the meaning of the ballad: The Erlkoenig and his beautiful daughters provide new sexual enticements for the young boy, entering adolescence. This means separation from his childhood innocence as well as a separation from the father, in other words, a death of sorts.
    When the father arrives home, his innocent child is “dead,” but he has a new child, a more knowing adolescent boy, instead.
    The theme of dangerous seduction and death, and of a disturbed father’s travel with a sick child over long distances, delaying to meet the mother has been taken up by numerous novelists, like Robert Pirsig, in his philosophical novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974.

Astoundingly good were Shaw High’s productions of two Broadway plays, Wonderful Town and Oklahoma!. Male and female students blossomed into star performers, and others, like Bill Benz, painted wonderful backdrops and did excellent staging. I played violin in the orchestra and saw the plays evolve over many months – a great experience.
    Wonderful Town has a key song called "Ohio":

Why, oh why, oh why, oh –
Why did I ever leave Ohio?
Why did I wander to find what lies yonder?
....
Why did I roam ...
Maybe I’d better go home.

(Youtube has a good schmalzy rendition by Doris Day.)
    The co-author of the song, Betty Comden, flew in from New York to hear it, with great applause by the Shaw audience. But Comden didn’t come home; she left after the performance.
    Why did I leave Ohio? I had a full scholarship from Wittenberg College, a Lutheran institution in Ohio, and first wanted to attend college there, opposed by my mother who wanted me to stay home and attend Western Reserve in Cleveland. The fat letter from Yale College presented a completely new opportunity. I took it, and never came back. But my voting address for US elections is still in Ohio.
    Don Ditillio played the part of a threatening, monstrous Jud Fry in Oklahoma!, which, in Act I, already includes the ironic but foreboding song, “Pore Jud is Daid.” This was perfect casting, since, in real life, Ditillio liked to bully classmates with his brooding intelligence. He was asked to play the menacing country simpleton in the play. But instead Don created an ambiguously brooding, threatening figure, which gave the play a true duality of good and evil, and lifted the relevance of its conflicts up from the level of mere country fair scurries.
    The plays initiated my long-run interest in the theatre, including the highlights: Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, directed by Peter Brooks in the Stratford, Ontario summer festival 1974 as my favorite, and Amadeus, in London 1994, a close second.

I want to remember two teachers who enhanced my writing skills and initiated my historical curiosity. This was not an aha experience in high school, but an intellectual debt which I only understood later in college and in graduate school.
    One was a student teacher from Western Reserve University who assisted our bone-dry history teacher a year before his retirement. He had been simply repeating the history text, and that was all. We got a humorless, patriotic 1950s view of American history, made by brave and decent men.
    The new assistant had a more perky approach, stating that history was a lot different from what we found in the text. Strangely, the old history teacher was sitting up front and seemed to condone this sacrilege. He might have had a spark of hidden curiosity, after all. But why was it hidden? Simple energy conservation after 35 years of teaching?
    The teaching assistant asked questions about the historical period we were studying and wanted answers in class, a startling proposition, as history class had been a somnolent early event of the day, during which the last two rows of students usually slept.
    We were discussing America’s industrialization and what great men like Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, and Rockefeller actually did for this country. The text said they were captains of industry. Our young teacher said, Check this out. What did they do? How did they get rich? He told volunteers to write an essay on one of the captains and then present the results to the class for discussion.

J.P. Morgan by Edward Steichen

    My essay was on J.P. Morgan, the financier who reorganized the US steel industry at the turn of the century, turning it into a huge oligopoly. I read in the Western Reserve Library that Morgan got his financial start in the Civil War by a clever “investment,” buying rejected rifles from one arm of the Union Army (they backfired and shot off the thumb of the rifleman) and selling them as good rifles to another part of the Army. Morgan also paid for a substitute to serve for him in the Army during the Civil War. Was this the career start of a brave and decent captain of American industry?

I have forgotten my second English teacher’s name – unfortunate because I owe him a lot. He was a strict man, demanding a tedious task. Our assignment was to outline the main speeches of America’s founding fathers that had been collected in an official volume. I was surprised: far from being patriotic homilies, they were well written and well argued by knowledgeable, intelligent men, transmitting their knowledge of the Scottish Enlightenment to America, as I later learned. Their arguments were clear: starting from a general theme, with variations and individual arguments played out point after point, they came to a logical conclusion. Each paragraph was organized in sentences referring to a particular thought.

Rembrandt Peale's portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1800)

    The speeches were so well-honed, I wondered if they all had superior editorial help. But there were so many natural talents among the founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson or Patrick Henry, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, that it is possible that their language excellence was par for the course. America, thus, had an unusually intelligent, learned, and literate group of men who founded this country. In today’s American political environment this is an incredible beginning.
    In retrospect, I can say I learned a lot from the founding fathers. From them, I learned to write. (See Wikipedia’s article, “Founding Fathers of the United States.”)

David Presser, the winner of the annual tri-state chess opening in 1960, later Harvard student and math professor, and Don Ditillio were the top two on our five-board undefeated Shaw chess team. I was mere number three, but undefeated in the Greater Cleveland Area. In the spring of 1960 we went to a student cafe at Western Reserve University, where serious chess playing supposedly took place in a smoky hall. It was a scene of bearded, “intellectual” young men bending over their chess boards with their watching, adoring girlfriends.
    Ditillio and Presser immediately saw that it was a charade. They asked me to play somebody and I beat my opponent easily, settling the question of local chess competence. Ditillio stood up and shouted, “Chess for money, for 20 dollars, rook odds." (See Wikipedia on chess handicaps.) The band stopped. The best local player, a cool, bearded guitarist, stepped off the stage and came to play, surrounded by cheering admirers.

    With that challenge, Ditillio offered to play without one of the strongest chess figures, the Queen’s side castle, against anybody in the house, for real money! In effect, Ditillio, this bespectacled, fat, arrogant high school kid was saying, You college schmucks can’t play chess! This was clear only to the chess players who understood the great rook odds being offered. Their girlfriends did not understand the magnitude of a possible loss under such circumstances. (See famous rook-odds game of Grandmaster Paul Morphy.)
    Here we had another example of Ditillio’s typical grandezza while ‘dissing’ a big crowd, taking care not to completely destroy his opponents.
    Ditillio won, took his 20 bucks and we scooted out fast, before being beaten up by a horde of pseudo-intellectuals who had been shown up in front of their girlfriends and were about to disregard Ditillio’s grandezza.
    We found out early: intellectual pretense is everywhere around.

My last great Shaw experience was in Mrs. Loftus’s English course, when she played an old record of a British poet reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the old medieval English, which still included strong elements of German from Saxon times. Mrs. Loftus asked me to memorize and recite the introduction tomorrow. Your German background should help in pronunciation. She was right. And so, the next day I recited the introduction, a celebration of spring, which has stuck to my memory ever since:

Whan that Aprille, with his shoures soote,
the drought of March has perced to the roote,
and bathed every vein in switch liquor
of which vertu engendred is the flour....

What a wonderfully flowing poem, funny and frivolous, always insightful. This raised my strong interest in poetry. (See a good modern interlinear translation of Chaucer’s poem.)

Recently I enjoyed learning Shakespeare’s beautiful sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to recite to my wife on Valentine’s day. “A lovely gift,” she responded with a smile. “Forget the chocolate.”
    The poem compares the lasting beauty of the admired with the unsteady summer in England, which is often too stormy, too short, too hot, or too rainy. It also compares normal beauty, which declines “by chance or nature’s changing course, untrimmed,” to the eternal fairness of the beloved person. Her beauty will exist even after death,

so long as men can breathe [and recite this poem],
and eyes can see [to read this poem],
so long lives this [poem], and this gives life to thee.

Wonderful!
    I penned part of these reflections originally as my entry into the recent Shaw High Class of 1960 Updates and concluded: Isn’t this what such reports should do – provide commentaries that will be read and re-read and thereby become eternal, in Shakespeare’s sense?
_______________
I want to thank Sheila Loftus, the editor of the Shaw High Class of 1960 Updates, for her suggestion that I write up my experiences as “Growing Up in America,” as well as for the good title. This is my first installment on Moristotle & Co.

Copyright © 2014 by Rolf Dumke Rolf Dumke is an economic historian, PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin, lives in Rosenheim, near the Bavarian Alps, with his wife, who is from Pittsburgh. They have three children. Their daughter, Sibylla Dumke, is an artist in Berlin and exhibits at Cruise & Callas gallery.