The other real mentor in my childhood, besides Sister Monica Marie, was the public school music teacher, Laura Mae Briggs -- I remember her name. I just adored her. I was aware that she treated me and respected me as a colleague who had things to learn. I didn't want to get away with anything. I didn't want her to make life easy for me, and she didn't. But I knew there was love there, all the time. As a matter of fact, the last semester of the ninth grade, she left and went to Salt Lake City and played with the symphony which was, as far as I was concerned, you know, in Albania... Then I went on to a marvelous situation.

This was probably pivotal. In the first place, I was recruited on the street, like a football player. The kids from the high school chorus would see me at the bus stop and say, "Which of the high schools are you going to? You really need to come to ours." You know, all those fun things. There were six hundred kids in the school, which is very small, because of the war. They couldn't finish the building. Close to that number, five hundred or so, were in the choral program. It was amazing. The president of the student council, football players, everybody -- they weren't all in the same chorus, but everybody was singing in that school. That was a singing school!

So music was very highly regarded then, at that particular time.

And at that particular school, in particular because of Mrs. Dorothy Pate... Her husband's name was Lawrence -- Mrs. Lawrence Pate. She was one of those people who was gifted. She didn't have any children. She was not a young woman, she was probably in her fifties when I met her.

She started being a teacher in Minnesota. She and her husband met in the public schools, but they couldn't be married officially because one of them would have to give up their job. In those days, women weren't allowed to work when they were married, and certainly not when they were pregnant, and every married woman was imminently going to be pregnant probably. So they hid their marriage from people, and I think they did that for quite a while so they didn't have any children...

...she studied with the Christiansen family who were the choral people in St. Olaf's College in Mankato, Minnesota, which is to this day one of the important schools for choral music... She made me feel that the Christiansens hung the moon, and that they invented goodness and truth and beauty... Their influence was great.

We would arrive at rehearsal, ARRIVE at rehearsal at seven thirty a.m., which meant I had to get up at five thirty or six on those days. If you came in late, the chorus would hoot and howl... I was her main assistant. I had to know all the music parts before the first rehearsal, and I had to anticipate what kind of mistakes they were going to make. Any good teacher can guess that if there are rhythmic complications in these measures, the basses are going to have more trouble. I was trained by her, after Laura Mae Briggs gave me her wonderful training. So, I had two wonderful teachers. Of course you can't make a living at choral accompanying. Adjunctively, playing for singers, learning about voice control, playing for shows. I think one of the most important things that ever happened to me was Laura and Mrs. Pate. [OH-43,44,45]

Photo 46a: Tita on campus with friend at Jefferson School (528 S. Eddy Street, South Bend), 1946.

I came in the mid-semester in my sophomore year -- that's when I started school. I also was able to be in high school one semester less by taking extra courses. So they right away put me into the spring musical. We had a fabulous, truly remarkable theater person which also affected me very strongly. He was the city theater person who would go around to the town schools, and I did some things in the summers with him.

Do you remember his name?

Oh, yes. James [Lewis] Casaday [b. 1907, d. 1990]. I'm pretty sure about that. His first name was James for sure, and something Irish, I think it was Casaday... He was honored by the whole community. They built a community center downtown in the city -- a convention center, and there was a theater that was named in his honor. He had instructed a generation of kids, like Sidney Pollack. (You may not know that name -- he's from "Tootsie". He was the director, and he was in it, and he was around my time.)

In the summers we would get the kids that were excited about the theater together in the basement of the funky central high school. We would do experimental theater -- we'd do things like Lord Dunsany's plays, "Shkuntela"; a play about India -- things that you couldn't do in public school in the winter. They were too controversial -- "The Black Masters of Andreyev". Things by Goldoni, the famous Italian, in commedia dell'arte theater. I used to help with the music, and I was hanging out there all summers. I would stage manage and deal with all machinations of putting a play together because I loved the theater. He would go around to schools during the year and put on a musical for every high school and do some other stuff. He had a review in his own school, and plays -- he was an amazing man.

And you were speaking about Mrs. Pate.

So, Mrs. Pate. Yes, well, Mrs. Pate got James to come. It was our turn for him to do a musical in our school. I remember -- it was by Rudolf Friml. She gave me the chance to put the whole thing together. It was my first semester in high school, and I was working my tail off.

I didn't know much about popular music, non-classical. That was musical comedy music. I didn't have enough powerful sense of rhythm of that kind of pop music -- even for a waltz. I had to play -- it was an enormous task, and I gave my all to it. I learned how to play all the notes, that wasn't the problem. I wanted to do everything right, but it was too demanding for a fifteen year old kid, though I'd been expected to do a lot of things like that.

So three weeks before the show she realized we weren't going to get the show together the way she wanted it if I was going to be the only keyboard player. There was an orchestra that also came in at the end, you know, it was a small orchestra, and the conductor was very strong. So she told me that I would not be able to play the show, and that she had to hire a professional for the last couple of weeks. The only place for me then, of course, was in the back row of the chorus because I hadn't had any role.

That was one of the most important things that ever happened to me because she taught me that the show is more important than my ego, and that the esprit de corps and the love we shared -- she and I and the group -- were what come first. It was like being on a football team and sitting on the bench because there's someone who is a better quarterback than you are at that particular point. I stood at the back of the chorus with some funky costume, and my name wasn't in lights on the front, and that was such an important lesson. It was probably the most important lesson I ever learned.

What was the name of the musical?

It was Katinka! [laughs] It was so stupid. Rudolf Friml's from San Francisco, by the way. He wrote voluminously -- he probably was a German or an Austrian and came to San Francisco. He's dead now, but I since have learned about him somewhat. He was very popular in the forties. We did things like Gilbert and Sullivan, too. We did Oklahoma. We did wonderful things. Katinka was one that we did in 1946. It had a very funny part in it about the European view of America. It wasn't hostile, it was hysterical. He sang a song about always being in a hurry, and he was running around, and his wife was running after him. It was so fun. It wasn't great music, and it was a little bit too funky music for me to be able to get behind it in the stylistic way. That doesn't matter.

I learned more important things. Also I learned that the chorus -- I didn't lose anything, I didn't lose face in the chorus. She created us as a coach would do. I remember people would come to rehearsal and they'd be warming up, and she'd say, "What's the matter with you guys?" It was seven thirty in the morning. "You look like a bunch of wall-eyed pikes!" she'd say. I never knew what a wall-eyed pike was for a long time afterward, which of course it's a kind of fish. She engaged us fully in our whole bodies. It wasn't enough to be competent, you had to be enthusiastic too. So that's why it was the best socialization I ever had. [OH-46,47,48]

Photo 46b: February 1946 -- Tita in front of Mrs. Phillips' house on North St Louis Boulevard.	Photo 46c: February 1946 -- Ann in front of Mrs. Phillips' house on North St Louis Boulevard.

What exactly was the music scene like in South Bend at this time?

St. Mary's, of course, was somewhat higher because of the kind of music -- we usually had concert series and so on. It wasn't like what we have here, it was a small school. I would say that the scene was like most towns in mid America that are near big ones, like Cleveland. A town near Cleveland is going to have a little more culture than a town like Lima, Ohio, which is too far away from Pittsburgh or from Cleveland. The Cleveland Orchestra is one of the great orchestras, so if you're in some little hick town thirty miles from there you're going to hear some of the greatest music in the world. South Bend was ninety miles from Chicago. So we were within the aura of Chicago enough that, for instance, our town orchestra could engage people from Chicago to come and sit in principal seats in our orchestra and raise the level.

Most people don't know that at one point in the recent past, there were more people going to symphony concerts than to baseball games in this country. You know why? It doesn't seem possible, but there are so many itty-bitty orchestras like the one your cousin Harry plays in. There's a Kensington Philharmonic -- I mean, I know some people who make a living just going from one little town to another as good players. That's why that statistic has some possible validity. So it seems to be the most popular involvement for amateurs or people who studied music and gave it up to do something else.

And that was the case in South Bend?

The South Bend Symphony had a series. We had a community concert series. That's where I got my primary concert music experience. It started when I was four and went to six concerts in that series and six chamber concerts -- I went to a minimum of a dozen professional concerts from the age of four until I went off to college, when I left town.

So the audiences, then, were fairly sophisticated.

More so than, say, nearby -- forty miles away from Chicago. I knew more at the age of nine than most of the adults. There were three thousand people who would go to these concerts. So, South Bend was what I would call an average small town, say 150,000 people, near a major metropolitan center.

I was taken at the age of eight by the two librarians in town to hear Schnabel, not the son, Carl Ulrich, it was Arthur Schnabel. I remember he was a very big man, and he made a lot of noise on a very big instrument. He was a Beethoven specialist of course. If I had lived four hundred miles away, those lovely ladies could not have taken me south to Chicago. I would say that there's a cultural aura around every big town, and South Bend was within that aura. It had two good small liberal arts colleges.

We used to say that I saw more concerts than my counterparts in Chicago because I went to every single one, and they had a choice of so many that they might go half a dozen times, and I would be at the door when it opened every single time. That's also true here. We had four plays a year that came from the Chicago touring company. I remember seeing those. My mother would grab onto any culture that happened. So I had a kind of skewed positive experience.

I remember going to a concert at the age of nine and being outraged at the stupidity of the adults behind me who did not appreciate the greatness of the music. Beno Moiseyevich, a great pianist who was not like a household word. You could read about him in books about piano history. He was probably in his fifties when I was ten, and he probably ran away from the Holocaust and was going around and doing a concert tour.

He was playing music so sophisticated. He didn't understand you don't go to South Bend, Indiana, and play late Beethoven sonatas to start the program, and then start getting heavy! So people were giggling behind me because they simply didn't know what was going on. I turned around, and I don't know what I said, but I said something totally derogatory to those people. I also remember the stupidity of the third class Metropolitan Opera people who came and did La Traviata. The acting was so bad that I was giggling. I had heard the Philadelphia Orchestra when I was seven.

That's the wonderful thing about America. There is culture nearby, especially if you have cars. You've got to live in the era of cars. And if there's a passionate mother behind you. I don't mean forcing me, but making me think it was a big event. I remember when she handed me -- I was four years old -- and she said to me, "See, Tita," that was my nickname, "This is your own season ticket to the concerts." You know how parents can make children feel it's something important. I remember that moment. It was such a big deal. I wasn't a great pianist, I could hardly play at all, but she was holding up culture as a model of what people ought to do. The scene was skewed in a very positive way for me. [OH-48,49,50]

Photo 46d: April 1946, Easter Sunday -- Tita standing next to her home at 718 N St. Louis Boulevard, South Bend.

Photo 46e: April 1946, Easter Sunday -- Tita, N 718 St. Louis Boulevard, another view.

How did you feel about yourself personally in high school? When you were twelve, you mentioned something about going through some hard times. Had this improved?

This acceptance. I was important in that school because I was important in the choral program. Everybody knew who I was. I worked my tail off morning, noon and night, in addition to taking other subjects and doing well in them. I had probably the best time, in some ways -- socially -- the best time of my life in high school, which is a time when pretty girls have problems. You know, young men are coming on to them, and they don't know how to respond exactly.

I was never perceived as a pretty girl. I was not perceived as ugly as I thought I was, but because I was overweight -- you know, that's the time of life when young women bloom, and that wasn't the time when I bloomed. But that enabled me to accomplish a great deal and to be approved of. I didn't have dates, but then in those days, that's not so terrible. There's this and that flirting that goes on. I had boyfriends -- I had LOTS of friends.

Did you have any best friends?

Yes. I mean, I didn't ever, in my childhood, have healthy best friends, but in high school, I was part of a group of girls who played bridge together and had slumber parties. Even though some of them had boyfriends, and I didn't, it wasn't expected that we had to have boyfriends. I had male friends -- in other words, this thing that Mrs. Pate did for us was to put us on a more healthy plane. I mean, I was voted the girl most likely to succeed in my senior high school class, which meant a lot more to me -- well, which maybe didn't mean as much to me as most beautiful girl, or the prettiest, or the most popular girl, but it meant a whole lot to me because I was entirely engaged.

I remember when I was sixteen, I entered and won a competition, a big competition, and they lowered the age so I could enter. I wanted to have my rehearsals with the South Bend Symphony for Rachmaninoff's first piano concerto early enough that I wouldn't miss the home basketball games. Basketball, of course, is a disease in Indiana -- you may have seen the movies -- Hoosier hysteria and all that. I was so integrally a part of that. Me and my girlfriends and my boyfriends -- we all went to those games, and we yelled and screamed and had a great time, because of Mrs. Pate, because I happened to have gone to THAT high school, where everybody who was important was in a choral group -- I think otherwise it could have been a disaster.

I never thought about it until you asked me the question. Grade school wasn't the best -- I mean, it wasn't bad because school was always better than home. See, my parents had a new baby, and so they didn't bug me as they might have if they didn't have another child. I loved the baby, and they loved the baby, and that was fine. So I was gone from the crack of dawn until eleven o'clock at night very often with rehearsals and accompanying. I never was doing anything wrong. I would never perceive myself as someone as a person that could have a boyfriend or do anything.

Besides, I think the average girl today, more than fifty percent I'm sure, probably seventy five percent of all girls have had some sexual experience by the time they get out of high school now. You remember when we went to school? I mean I'm a lot older than you, but there might have been one or two out of six hundred. Those weren't people you would have anything to do with. That's not the way it was -- it was very different.

So I got happier and happier as life went on, I mean in a certain kind of way, as childhood went on, because the things that I was good at were being approved of and supported.

You had a place for the music, whereas in schools today we're lucky if music is in the curriculum.

That's right. I won a competition and played the concerto with the symphony, the South Bend Symphony, which had Chicago Symphony members in it, and it was in my high school auditorium because it was the biggest facility available. They had arranged that -- it was like a cheering event. The whole school practically was there, and they were screaming and applauding and jumping up and down. I was like a basketball hero which couldn't happen now. [OH-51,52]

Photo 47a: June 1947 -- Harvey, Joe, Tita.

Were music bands a pretty big thing during those years?

Oh yeah and they still are because of football and everything. Mid-America is a band area. Choruses in certain cities -- choral singing was a big deal in the north central area, that means Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota, where the Scandinavians were, lots of Germans, and certain religions. Catholics aren't big on choruses because in the regular congregations it's not traditional to be participatory. In the Lutheran church -- Martin Luther was the first guy who said, "Everybody, let's all sing." So there was a big, heavy duty choral community which nurtured me tremendously because I became a specialist in choral accompanying.

There's another thing I forgot -- you just reminded me -- that made South Bend stronger musically than it would have been. It was sixteen miles from Elkhart, Indiana, which was the band instrument center of the United States. Conn and Selmer were there. If you were the trumpet player in the Cleveland Orchestra, you wouldn't have a Conn, but if you were in high school -- in every high school in the United States, probably every available trumpet was a Conn, and the French Horn. So Conn did brass instruments and Selmer did clarinets. The best clarinets are from Paris where Selmer now is. My aunt lived sixteen miles away in Elkhart. Also -- what's it called, Alka Seltzer -- Miles Laboratories was also in Elkhart.

We would go visit my aunt, and if I was lucky we went to hear the high school band and the high school orchestra when they came to the special events for the kids. On a Saturday you might hear several hundred kids coming in to play for one another and getting graded, a little competition by the North Central Teachers. Everybody filled the hall when the Elkhart band and orchestra played. You didn't think to compete with them, you just went to admire them. That enhanced the quality of my musical life.

You played piano. What other instruments did you play and when did you take them up?

I noticed that the happiest moments for me were when I was accompanying my music classes. First, the teacher goes around and announces, the band teacher, that anybody can play a band instrument, and they could try out, and if they're qualified, they get some group lessons. Oh, goody!

So, I think I was ten -- it might have been the seventh grade, or the sixth grade. The teacher, of course, knowing that I could read brilliantly, gave me the tuba, but first the melophone which is the poor man's French horn. He would give me the fingering chart and show me where to put my mouth and send me home with the chart and the instrument, and the next day I was in the band. Of course I read music fluently. That's not how to teach somebody, but he needed a melophone player, so I bobbled around with the melophone for a while.

When he saw I could do it, he gave me the tuba. I couldn't take the tuba home, but the fingering chart was just the same. I remember now, I was in the seventh grade. In the eighth grade, I did a little organ because I was in a reformed temple, and I thought what fun that would be, so I took a few organ lessons, but I didn't have time to go and practice, and it wasn't at a level that was challenging. I stopped doing that. I admired the idea, but I didn't like the instrument.

What happened then, in the sixth or seventh grade, I thought it was a good idea to know something about the instruments I was accompanying. I took violin lessons for three months. It was a total disaster. I love the violin, but you know how terrible you sound when you start learning. I'm standing next to the piano trying to find D, the D on the A string, and I'm struggling, sounding terrible, and all I had to do was go over to the piano and play it. Of course I had all those skills on the piano, and I didn't have to create the pitches -- they were there, pre-made for me. I went to the violin teacher -- I wasn't getting enough gratification soon enough. I was so young when I started playing the piano that I didn't remember how long it took until I sounded good. So I quit that.

With the horn, I was with everybody else. I was one of the gang. I wasn't the accompanist. I was one of several people playing the sousaphone, and that made me very happy. I always loved ensemble music because it's partly social. I went from the melophone to the tuba, and then I got braces, puberty and asthma. I decided it didn't fit my image of what a female was. I went to the bandmaster and I said, "I can't do this anymore." [OH-53,54]

Photo 47b: Lillian (Uncle Reuben's wife - b. 1917), Reuben, Uncle Teitz (Grandma Rachel's brother?), Ann, Tita -- in "Lill's yard, 1947".

He was very upset because he wasn't going to be able to find a tuba player that quick. I said I wanted to play the clarinet. The clarinet is like the violin of the band. You've got a big bunch of clarinets like you do with violins. They play a violin part, usually, in band transcriptions. He said, "I don't have any clarinet to give you." I said, "I'll get one myself." So I went to my mother and said I wanted her to please rent me a clarinet, and she said, "That's ridiculous!" Money was tight. Already I was an important piano player. I said, "Well, then I'll take the money out of my allowance" which was maybe three dollars a week or something. I hadn't started making money until that summer. I couldn't work in the winter, I could only work in the summertime in music. I would play sometimes twelve hours a day and get fifty cents an hour.

So I had enough money to rent a clarinet, and the band teacher wouldn't teach me the clarinet because he didn't want me to play the clarinet. He wanted me to play the tuba, right? So I took the fingering chart and went down at lunchtime to the river and practiced the clarinet. It's not the best way to learn to play the clarinet. It took me a while to figure out you were supposed to change the reed periodically. I was totally self-taught, and he couldn't refuse to allow me to be in the band. So he put me in the back, it was probably where I belonged anyway. I was madly in love with this instrument because I could carry it. I was part of a section. A lot of people played better than I did. I played the clarinet for a semester or a year, and it wasn't a very good clarinet either. [OH-55]

Photo 47c: Lillian's kin, (Joe Santow? - Dottie's first husband), Aunt Dottie, Uncle Teitz.

When I went to high school, we had the same band instructor, and we'd already had a long and checkered career together. He said, "I need a bassoonist. If you'll play the bassoon, I'll have you be the soloist in Rhapsody in Blue with the band." Well, I would have played anything to do that!. I played the bassoon, without benefit of instruction, and this time there was a double reed which you only had to change once a year. I doubled the baritone sax in Rhapsody in Blue so it didn't matter too much how bad I played the bassoon. I did like the bassoon, I thought it was a real instrument. I did that for a year, then I quit, because I didn't have time.

So those were the instruments I played. I wasn't good at any of them, and there was a kind of joy about that. I didn't have to be good, I could just have fun being with the other band members. I learned some interesting repertory -- I didn't know about people like Scharwenka. I learned something about bands, and I learned about transposing instruments. It stood me on very good ground. I also took conducting in the summer. Again, this was all in the school system. [OH-56]

Photo 48: Harvey's birthay, 6 July 1948. Nathan, Marilyn (Mano)? and Loren? (children of Morris and Elsie Hoffman), Harvey on his tricycle, Rachel Mary and Tita.

Photo 49a: Nathan & Rachel Mary with Tita after playing with the South Bend Symphony, on a Sunday night in February1949.

Photo 49b: Joe & Ann with Tita after playing with the South Bend Symphony, on a Sunday night in February1949.

Photo 49c: Piano recital Saint Mary's College (note markings on the floor for basketball), 2 May 1949.

Photo 49d: Piano recital Saint Mary's College, 2 May 1949.

Photo 49e: Tita after Graduation from John Adams High School, 1949.

Photo 49f: Tita after Graduation from John Adams High School, 1949.

Photo 49g: Tita and still unidentified friend after High School Graduation, 1949.

Photo 49h: Tita working in her father's retail paint store, South Bend 1949.