I Loved To Teach

In the last few years of my teaching, I began collecting LP’s. They could be picked up for anywhere between ten cents and a dollar at thrift stores and library sales. I used the covers for bulletin board displays above the chalkboard, but as I had a large stereo just behind my desk, I took to playing classical musical softly during any study time at the end of the period, and I played it louder through the passing period. I wrote the composer’s name, the name of the piece and of the performer on the chalkboard. Before long, if I forgot, one of the first to enter the room would say, “Where’s the music?” and suggest one of the masters he’d like to hear.

In Tammy’s early years–well, 13 to 18–she came under the influence of the staff at Butler University in Indianapolis. The ballet department was recognized as a power nationally. Tammy auditioned for the early admission program and drove about eighty miles a day for two years, summers included, to study ballet and gain the dedication that has carried over into everything she does. Somewhere near the "heart" of the program at Butler was a very powerful personage named Peggy Dorsey. I remember how Tammy cried the first time she took one of Mrs. Dorsey’s classes at the special instruction division (SID). The class was too hard! I wanted her to be in a class where others would push her and she would be surrounded by excellence. She wished for a class where she would excel. With advice from other teachers, I enrolled her in an easier class with the same teacher. Soon Tammy adored her.

Peggy Dorsey died of cancer in 1985 at the beginning of Tammy’s senior year in high school. I talked with Mrs. Dorsey on the last day of summer school—I could not have known she would never teach again. She called it a wonderfully intimate summer because the classes had been small. I remember telling her that Tammy was a lucky girl. "How many people do you know who get to do something they love every day?"

When fall classes began, the dancers were told that Mrs. Dorsey was terminally ill and that, although they could write and send cards, no attempt was to be made to contact her. Then, quickly, she was gone. Tammy had sometimes given the grand lady with the cane a ride to her home near the Butler campus, so she knew where she lived. After her death we drove past on the way to a Saturday rehearsal of The Nutcracker and saw that they were having a ‘garage sale.’ They let us go through her house and we bought a few things. I had very little money with me and the sale ended at noon. Tammy has, of all things, a pair of glasses that she cherishes. I have one of Mrs. Dorsey’s canes.

But what I had wished to share was another memory: In class one day Mrs. Dorsey admired something Tammy had done or just how hard she was working. She walked over to her, kissed the tips of her index and middle fingers, and placed them on Tammy’s forehead. To the others she said, "She’s young. You don’t get kisses." And she laughed. She had a delightful sense of humor, and she knew what many teachers never learn–that a student works hardest when she gets praise and affection. How hard Tammy worked, and how happily. She also took classes with Carl Kauffman, and Colette, his wife, before she passed away. I was to become closely associated with the artistry of that talented man with the Lexington Ballet. Not only was he a fine dancer, teacher and choreographer, but he was the finest scenery artist in town, although in my year with the company, he was the costumer who could make anything. He was still recreating costumes by the final performance. Every performance had to get better!

In 1953 when I enrolled at Indiana Central College, now the University of Indianapolis, there were about 300 students who resided in the four small dormitories or commuted from their Indy homes. The cafeteria/dining hall was in the basement of one dorm, and the administration building, which still stands and is, I believe, still in use, housed all classes, contained the library, the bookstore/ campus cupboard (mail and café), and the auditorium as well as all classrooms.  There was a one-story wooden structure called the gym where sporting events, p.e. classes and many social events took place.

My brother Danny, upon graduating from Central was awarded a Danforth Foundation fellowship and headed for Yale, where he went first to the Divinity School for two years before entering the doctoral program.  My situation was very different. I made a mark on their little sloping stage and was offered by President Esch through the dean of students an opportunity to escape, but my parents, conservative religionists, refused to allow it—it was to be the church college or none. After a mild “melt-down”, I dropped out of college for a semester, worked through the Christmas season as the assistant buyer in the toy department of a large department store in South Bend, lived at home and saved money to enroll at Indiana University, bury myself in theater, and not work the two or three jobs that had been necessary at Indiana Central. I was in five shows in that one semester, studied opera and performed in one, and I knew I was out-of-step with the rest of that campus.

I could not afford to enroll for another year, received a draft notice (the Korean War was being fought), and with the quiet guidance of Pres. Esch, was granted an educational deferment and returned to what had become Indiana Central University. I had, while at IU, won the wrath of the dysfunctional new drama professor, Dr. William Teufel, who at tryouts for the first show upon my return interrupted my audition to announce to me publicly that he was casting this show from “people that I know.” I got the role I had aspired to, although that man had assumed I wanted the largest role, and at every rehearsal he found delight in venting his anger upon me, once making me repeat a five-word line more than a hundred times, reducing the actress playing my wife to tears and causing her to beg me to quit.  The play was Our Town by Thornton Wilder.  I had studied the Act III opening soliloquy in an acting class at IU and had memorized it in its entirety.  When he stopped me, I inquired, “Do you want me to finish or not?”

“Suit yourself.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I like to finish what I have begun.”  Then I dropped the playbook from which I had been pretending to read and finished the soliloquy from memory.  Then I left the theater.

Indiana Central didn’t offer a degree in theater, and in fact, to teach theater in nearly any high school during that time, one had to spend the major portion of his day teaching English; so an English major was a must. During the week before our graduation day—Margaret and I were to be married in the afternoon of that day, our last at Central—President Eisenhower announced that the nation needed teachers more than it needed soldiers. I then went to one nearby high school interview and was hired on the spot, and my deferment was again secured.

Perhaps as a soldier, I would have suffered and hardened as four of my older brothers had, probably learned to drink heavily, swear like a sailor, and smoke several packs of cigarettes daily. Instead, I learned to deal with teenagers.

As a graduate student—one had ten years to complete his master’s in those days—nearly every professor with whom I had close contact advised me to aspire to a doctorate and to being a college professor. But the sad truth was that I continued to be trapped in a nearly impossible job which I dearly loved and which required me to slave as few professors had to do to learn my craft. I was trapped in the English department, and I knew that I was in a niche that suited me. I knew many of my students’ parents, their brothers and sisters. I enlisted their aid and “rubbed shoulders” with them. I loved them, and many of them loved me. What professor could say that. Yet he could say that he had the respect that few high school teachers receive, sabbaticals, opportunities to travel, etc. that I would never have, and it would be true.

So I took some rather useless courses like Milton, a fascinating study of folklore, which produced a brilliant paper that my professor never read but gave me an ‘A’ on nevertheless, and I distorted classes to be about drama every way I could. I took a course in poetry that changed my life and outlook significantly, and I wrote a thesis (although it was no longer required) on “Problems for the Scene Designer in Tennessee Williams’ Plays.” That project had begun as “Problems for the Director…”, but it soon became obvious that that should be my doctoral dissertation. However, a doctorate in English would have priced me out of a job at the high school level and forced me to teach in a university where my contact with theater would have been minimal.

When I had been a student at Indiana University, one spring semester after my sophomore year in college, I sang with University Singers and performed with the chorus in Wagner’s Parsifal, an opera which ran so long that it started in the afternoon and had a dinner-break intermission. We also took that show to St. Louis for the national convention of the National Association of Music Teachers in the afternoon and evening and rehearsed for hours in the morning with Dave Garroway in New York by remote TV. In the early afternoon, we performed an eight-minute segment live on Dave Garroway’s Wide, Wide World. The segment ended with a close-up of me, ripping off my headgear, laughing and talking to other knights leaving the stage after performance. As a second-semester transfer student, I only knew a few men in the dorm, so it was a real surprise when we returned to the campus the next day and my dorm mates, one after another, said, “Hey, man, I saw you on TV yesterday!”  In 1956 most locals appearances on TV were on “Cowboy Bob.”

In 1956 all TV was black and white and men’s dormitories had only one TV set—the one in the lounge. Few people knew anyone who had been on even a local TV show. It was a neat experience. Thank you, Ruby, for that opportunity. It, too, was a change factor in my life. After the evening portion of the performance had ended at about 11:00 p.m., those music teachers stood and applauded for twenty minutes while we bowed and bowed as the curtain opened and closed. I thought of Markova and Youskevich and realized that they must have been at the point of exhaustion when she finally relented and their ordeal was over. Incidentally, that St. Louis stage opened in front to the opera hall and in the back to a coliseum in which Liberace had performed to a standing-room-only crowd the night before.

I do not believe that I could be the person I am today and have held the positions I have, however modest they were, or have been the cultural influence that I have been in my community and upon my students if I had not taken that course at that time. I developed a deep love for classical music and the arts because that woman developed a special love for me as a person—I think because she realized how much she had broadened my horizons and deepened my love for the beautiful things that the world of music has to offer which develop one’s soul.

A teacher often fails to realize that she/he is planting many seeds as he teaches and that he just might himself be one who gets to harvest some of them. For example, I could not have imagined in the late 60’s or early 70’s that one day in the late 80’s a snow plow would completely block in my car parked in front of my home on highway 9 (State Street) in Greenfield. Nor could I have imagined that a state patrolman would pull up, ask if I “could use an extra hand,” back around the corner onto Walnut Street, get out and say, “Dennis Hoppes—do you remember me, Mr. Rhoades?” Of course I remembered Dennis, especially the day he got caught after setting off a cherry bomb in the hall just after the hall emptied with everyone in class and had rushed into my room.

I had said, not thinking it could have been he, “Sit down quickly, Dennis, before someone thinks you did that.” It was the last day of school for seniors in his senior year at Charlottesville in the old building, and a janitor had caught a glimpse of a match being struck as he descended the staircase outside my room.  Dennis hadn’t been allowed to go through graduation because his 3-day suspension included that memorable day. “Of course I remember you, Dennis. Thanks for stopping.”

“I bet you never thought I’d be a policeman some day,” he chuckled.

“Well, Dennis, I always thought you’d grow up to be somebody special.” And he helped me push my car through the snowbank into the street—little traffic due to the big snow. Most folks couldn’t get out that day. We shook hands and he walked out of my life again. That’s how it is for all teachers. For example, I sometimes wonder what became of valedictorian Debbie Fitzer who was my first Maria in my first The Sound of Music in 1969. Unexpectedly in 1979 when I directed that show in community theater, I was surprised when another valedictorian, Linda Miller, who had been Liesl in my second Sound of Music and then did a remarkable job as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, which was my final show at Eastern Hancock in 1974, was standing before me, having finished her doctorate by then. I never saw her again either.

I have come to believe that in order for a class to be of real significance to a student it must be a change factor in his/her life. Very few courses produced such changes in my life, but there is one that stands out. The teacher was Ruby Guilliams, the chorus teacher. Her favorite line, sitting at her piano at 7:31a.m., was to address any late comer with, for example, "Good afternoon, Mr. Rhoades." How I detested that ‘humorous’ line when it was aimed at me. But there was great kindness in this seemingly severe woman. Some of the things that I remember about her were that gray was her favorite color, and she had a very rich three-tone gray wool suit that she sometimes wore three days running. Now this was not so far removed in years from the days when I had had only two outfits which I wore on alternate days while the other was being washed. So it was not as noticeable as it would be today. It was not as amusing as Miss Murphy’s five outfits, none of which was stylish, worn in the same sequence every Monday, every Tuesday, etc.

Miss Guilliams’ features were sharply angular and aristocratic. She was tall and thin with a regal carriage and a severe look that could set one straight without the use of words. Everyone said she had a huge crush on Mr. Casaday, and maybe she did. I didn’t care. I too was striving so hard to please him that he was often at the center of my thoughts, but I certainly didn’t delight in his presence! I lived in dread of that tongue clack that clapped like thunder and often stopped us dead in our tracks in mid-line. Miss Guilliams became rather fond of me, and upon discovering that my mom was a waitress in the stylish Robertson’s Department Store tea room, often asked her about me while I was in college.

The course I took that changed my life was music appreciation. I went into the class with an affection for country music and little appreciation for classical art forms. My favorite song lyric, sung with a nasal twang, was “…and if dogs have a heaven, there’s one thing I know—Old Shep has a wonderful home.” Miss Guilliams had pictures of the instruments of the orchestra posted all around the room. I really only recognized the violin because I had had one from school once for a week before my dad ordered it out of his house and the trumpet because my cousin Dale Schraw had wooed us with it often at church.! By the time we had mastered the instruments’ names, we also knew how to recognize their sounds when we heard them on a recording.

We listened to symphonies nearly every day for a portion of the period, and when she pointed to one of us, we said the name of the instrument that was playing the solo part. If I missed one, she would point at me again when the sound returned so I could get it right.  She also posted great opera stars’ pictures with their names and then removed their names and rearranged them for quizzes. I listened to opera on the radio every Saturday for extra credit points. And somewhere in the middle of this, I came to aspire to sing some of those arias myself. Often when I have attended an opera (and Tammy danced in several of them while she studied dance at IU), I have found myself unable to breathe when an aria was particularly well performed.  I remember being somewhat disappointed at the movie, Phantom of the Opera, when the music that had thrilled me in several theaters failed to attain that effect.

Chapter 5

I never blossomed much in high school. Those were mostly dark years for me when my much touted boy soprano days ended and the basso profundo began to emerge. I lost my swagger and was supported on better days by a beautiful and talented girlfriend named Shirley Joseph and a gang of drama kids I have never seen since but cherish anyway—Diane and Billie Pollock, Sally Rosenheimer, Steve Barany, Marc Mangus, Judy Jerald and a host of others. Where did they all go? When Mr. James Lewis Casaday passed away, I placed long-distance calls all over South Bend to find out about services. A lady on the switchboard at the South Bend Tribune read me an article over the telephone which said there would be a memorial service in the Riley High School auditorium on Friday at a certain time.

Although only a week prior to the performances of our next play, I took off at midday on Thursday and set out for South Bend. When I arrived at Riley on Friday, there were no preparations going on. In the office they informed me that it was to be on Friday of the next week. I imagined that Sid Pollack would have taken part, as he had kept in close touch with Mr. Casaday for some years. I missed the only event that would have involved those alumni I cared to see and an opportunity to pay homage to someone I think I owe my life to. What he gave me long before it had a name was tough love, I guess. Those tactics were successful on a teenager who was at the same time overly sensitive and settled into a very hard shell.

During my senior year I served on the drama board. At the end of the year, Mr. Casaday took us by train (the South Shore Line) to a spaghetti dinner at a restaurant under the El tracks and to the ballet in Chicago. This was an occasion I was unable to comprehend at that time. Alicia Markova, in 1953, was retired when Alicia Alonzo, a remarkable ballerina in her own right, opened to acclaim in New York in Giselle, billed as the world’s greatest Giselle. Suddenly, infuriated , the great Markova joined Igor Youskavich to open in Giselle in Chicago to prove that she was still, although in her fifties, incomparable.

This was the ballet that we saw—the six of us and Mr. Casaday. Markova was sensational. Mr. Casaday had flown to New York to see Alonzo and assured us that in his mind Markova had proved her point. However, when she was at her most magnificent, in a scene where she appeared floating as if suspended by wires from stage left, her partner dropped her. He had, no doubt, stopped her momentum and broken her fall, but she descended to the floor and with most remarkable control seemed to float upward until she was again perpendicular to the floor and dancing as if the moment had been choreographed thus. There had been, unmistakably, an audible, unison gasp from the house!

During the curtain call Markova would not appear onstage with Youskavich for some twenty minutes or longer, and that admiring audience would not let her go home until she had admitted that she forgave him publicly—until she had been assured that the audience knew her performance was flawless. The curtain would be held open in tunnel fashion and she would appear. Then she would leave and he would take a bow and leave. Finally, she bowed and gestured for him to join her. Then the ovation, twenty-plus minutes in duration, ended and we were free to leave that theater where, in bold letters above its arched proscenium were the words: “YOU, TOO, MUST BRING FAGOTS TO THIS BURNING.”

Of course, I could not have guessed, as a poor and culturally-deprived lad of seventeen, that some thirty years later my third child, Tammy would dance professionally for a brief time. How could I have imagined that the deep respect I felt that night would give me the strength to guide a young dancer toward excellence or that, after years of watching ballet classes, I would come to know the French names of the movements and would develop an appreciation and understanding of that art form. I retired from teaching in 1995 and in 1996, took the position of technical director of the Lexington Ballet in Kentucky for one year. I loved so much of the job and all of the people, but laying dance floors was far too strenuous at my age. In one week during tour, I laid floors five times and took them up six times. That season, among other things such as Peter and the Wolf, they performed Alice in Wonderland, and Giselle, both somehow connected to my youth. I also designed and constructed a tree for Firebird that was quite workable by renovating an old, once remarkable tree from another show and enlarging it, enriching it with dazzling color that had an oriental look quite in keeping with the costumes that the Louisville Ballet Company had patterned after the Bolshoi production. I was continually aware that my theater background did not prepare me for setting the stage for the ballet. I worked in a W.T. Young warehouse with a tin roof—so hot that I lost twenty-five pounds in a very short time. When the set was moved into the opera house, nearly one-third of the set pieces I had prepared remained offstage, unused. Dancers need about all the space a small stage allows and side lighting cuts down scenery space even more. Lots to learn.  Our final show was Giselle. 

When asked about a contract for the next year, I told them of my many visits to the chiropractor and that I felt it was not a job for a retiree.  “Would it matter if we told you that no one has ever done the job as well as you did it?”  And I had to tell them, “No.”  By this time we had moved our ballet supply store from the little shop around the corner due to a violent robbery that left our principal dancer unable to dance for part of the season, and all the money I had earned with the ballet had gone to pay her doctor bills and continue to pay her weekly.  I don’t think the victim of that crime was ever able to go into Dance Essentials again.  Jennique Wolfe was a lovely girl and a beautiful dancer. Seeing her dance again made me feel that it was worth every minute, and I wouldn’t take anything for the experiences of that year.

I’m digressing today because I awoke at 5:30a.m. with an unusual memory from long ago rolling around as if fresh in my brain.  This experience is one I have often. It’s better than awakening to a nightmare, but there is often a companion to these dreams—an urgency to write them down to keep them fresh. Many parts of the memory are missing, and it is more like becoming aware again than it is like dreaming.  I often wonder if I have been asleep.

Kelly Reed was an unusual child when I first became aware of her. The occasion was auditions for a Hoosier Heartland Repertory Theater production I had been called to direct. If you lived in Greenfield, Indiana, back then and deciding to do The Sound of Music on the little stage at the old high school, by then Lincoln Park Elementary, with it long, tall windows and its steep balcony that had its entrance on the third floor, it would be natural to ask a local director named Jack Rhoades to pull it together. They completely reworked that space into many rooms, but it is no longer a school.

The thing I love about The Sound of Music is that it draws hugely on a community of people who wouldn’t otherwise try out. It gives one a wonderful pool of talent to work with. This version would have an awesome chorus of amazing women who desired to portray singing nuns, and an equally stunning array of talented children from which to cast the seven Von Trapp children.

I also loved that the show allowed me to use my own children in a way that told them exactly what their father was doing when he was away from home. Being integral to the show was different than lying in a “punkin seat” as Danny did when Margaret became the concertmaster for the orchestra when Gordon Wheatley and I did Brigadoon at Eastern Hancock High School, or falling asleep on the cool concrete floor as he did during the rehearsals for this show. John had learned to pull down two of the padded seats at Eastern, curl around the arm that separated them, and sleep in relative comfort. Lori stayed awake and ‘sucked in’ every word and every note.

One of my first musicals had been in the old Charlottesville gym with Lori as Gretl, the youngest child. She was in first grade. Lori was devastated when I hadn’t chosen her to be Maria in this present production and chose not to be a nun, but Tammy was excited to be cast as Brigitta, the mischievous one—she too had been Gretl and knew the show. I recall that Austin Smith, retired band director from Charlottesville (the first person, after my first musical, a horrendously difficult Lady in the Dark, to confide that he thought I was a genius). Austin Smith was currently teaching strings in Indianapolis and was the lead violinist in the orchestra for this Sound of Music. Among the children was a tenor from the Indiana Soldiers and Sailors Children’s School as Friedrich, a tiny explosion of personality named Toby Campbell as Gretl, a boy named Adam Hunt, who auditioned with a song I had studied in college—five pages taped together—and it rocked when he sang it. Liesl was an actress I have since seen in commercials and television named Joyce O’Connor, and Louisa was Kelly Reed. During the final days of that show, I got a call from Greenfield-Central high school to become their new drama man starting in the fall of 1979.

In the years that followed, I watched Kelly grow up singing. Directors are tempted to do shows that make money—S of M—makes big money, and to use actresses who sell tickets—Sherri Ballinger always packed the house, and she was Elsa in this show. Doc Gabrielsen was Uncle Max, and his wife Jeannie was Sister Margaretta, paired with Cheryl Heath, the girl from Evansville college who had just been their nominee for the Irene Ryan award and had done the lead in Carnival for me the year before. She played Sister Berta, and I thought a moment when the wto of them crossed the stage ad libbing was a very special moment in that play.  Jeannie was to do Dolly that same summer under a different director.  Her costumes for that role were brilliant creations which she donated to drama club later, and I thought of her fondly every time I used on of them.

The man who played the Captain, Dr. Christian Gries, was an Eli Lilly man, and the woman who was to do Maria was a walk-in with a wonderful voice. The day after we began to lay out the kissing scenes, she withdrew from the cast, and I was faced with a dilemma—only three weeks till opening. Ultimately, we focused in on my daughter Lori, shy and passed over for everything at Greenfield-Central, but she was the first to know all lines and all songs. She was a natural whose singing voice lacked its later maturity, studied piano instead of voice, but she saved that show. The children fell in love with her, and I wonder if people knew that they wrote her love notes every night during rehearsals and the run of the show.

Oh, I do get off on tangents, don’t I? Anyway, sometime later in life, Kelly asked me to sing at her wedding. I didn’t see her that day, and if there had been a rehearsal, I wasn’t there. I was to meet with the organist, organ professor at nearby Butler University, one-half hour before the wedding guests were to arrive. It was taking place in the Catholic cathedral nearest what was then The Hoosier Dome—St. John’s, I think. The organ was in the balcony, and the chancel was immense. The wedding seemed to be far away and surreal. I had no way of knowing how my echoes would play out among the arches of that vast apse.

The organist hadn’t shown up until it was the moment to begin. I assume he was the cathedral organist, as he was very much at home. No time even for any discussion, the ceremony began, and I knew he would follow me, which he did.

I felt my vocal power had been enormous that day, as the cathedral did its thing with my offering. I don’t know what I sang other than “Ave Maria.” But as he left, the awesome personage at the awesome instrument in the forsaken balcony of that truly awesome place, slid off his bench, glanced at me and said, “You can sing for me anytime.” And I followed him out the escape exit, not seeing any of the wedding party as I slinked to my car and drove home, wondering if Kelly had known or cared that it was I who sang unrehearsed at her lavish wedding.

Actually, one of the most wonderful of the things that I consider Godsends that came my way at Southwestern was that brilliant young sophomore named Mike Yonts, whose themes I wrote about. Mike came on a regular basis to do scenery work after school. At about six a parent picked him up each day. Scenery work took place after school each day and every student was encouraged to attend without invitation or obligation to return. Over the years I have not been left to work alone many evenings, but the Mike Yontses, the Rick Rays, the Susie Davises, the Carol Bartons, the Larry Andricks, the Sam Blanchards, the Rodney Coes, the Andrew Kelleys, Michelle Reddicks, and the unsung ones. Oh, there are far too many to name them all here, but they came every night without fail, and I remember them all.

Anyway, once Mike enlisted I never had to work alone. The stage was, as I’ve said, at the end of the gymnasium, and, as many members of the basketball team were in the plays, they kept close track of the scenery work—even though Coach Marty insisted that I keep the curtains closed. I mostly humored him, although it gave me claustrophobia, but often Mike and I worked closed up in there, and even though he was a really quiet kid that first year, we got to know each other pretty well. When Marty’s attention was called away, the guys would lift the curtain to let me know they knew we were there and dash away, not to get caught shirking.  And remember, they were a superb, winning team.

I can still see Mike walking across the gym floor that September day his junior year as drama club kids sat on the bleachers for a meeting, calling out, “Hey, Mr. Rhoades, when are we gonna start working on scenery for the fall show?”

“Next Monday, Mike. I was thinking you’d probably be trying out for this one.” It was Harvey and he made a wonderful scatterbrained psychiatrist. I can still hear the echoes of lines the way he read them.

Mike left a brief, pregnant pause, then kind of exploded, “I guess I will!”

Mike Yonts lives in the Indianapolis area and makes commercials for television from his studio in Carmel.  He owns fancy equipment we never dreamed of when we hoped for and bought our first spotlight.  You should look him up on Google.  I did.

When I went back to teaching after a brief respite, two and a half months, I began to write poetry almost every day–mostly to express the happiness that welled up in my heart because I was to be allowed to continue the profession I loved. I include here some samples of those poems.

These poems were written In gratitude to the hardest workers after a successful production of Mary Chase’s seldom produced MRS. McTHING in which Mike Yonts played the male lead, a devilish child turned into an angelic “stick” by a witch, and for which Tara Wertz was my student director.

       TO MIKE AFTER THE PLAY

I want to paint in broad, bright strokes
And leave the canvas heavy with textures.
I want bold contrasts that please the eye in daring ways.
I want no wishy-washy pastel shades today!
The vivid brightness must burn into the memory’s screen
Until the viewer need only close his eyes
To scan the scene again.

What I create today has special significance
And grand proportions.
It must have perfect balance,
And, quite unlike the dabblings of some
Who find expressions of the depths in cool and calm colors,
It must convey my joy and lightness
With a pride so commanding that you cannot look away.

It must have awe and generate a sense of goodness.
Then I must spatter it with gratitude and love
To blend the hues together and give the portrait texture
Because it is for YOU,

And "thanks" is such a pale word.

And for the student director who was incredibly loyal and who relieved my
burden of play production a great deal:

        TO TARA AFTER THE PLAY

We take a huge canvas and cover it with colors.
We paint in broad, bright strokes and stretch it
across a lighted stage.
We open a curtain before a seated crowd
And display the efforts of our hands and minds.

We play a scene before it boldly, and at a rapid pace.
We laugh and yell and weep an hour or more.
We strive to do our work so well that when we draw
the curtain closed
These scenes will remain, indelibly, upon the mind’s eye.

We wait until those who were seated there are freshly gone,
And then we clear the stage and put the show to bed,
And we store the dreams for memories.

Why did we do it?
To prove that we could?
Does that make sense?
There must be something more that drives us on–
And even as we shake our heads in wonder at our folly,
Our minds begin to draw the plans for a new piece of canvas.

Is it that we do it together?
That the doing makes a bond of unity that is sometimes pleasant?
Or is it that the memory of those who went before
Drives us to create new memories?

I think it’s this and more,
Because I see what those out there can never see–
Six unrewarded, aching arms
That held, unseen, a valance in its place
That fell just as the curtain should be opening.
The hands that ran the lights,
And those that moved the sets–
They make a team!

And there, beyond them all, I see you,
Working at a labor of love–trusted and determined.
A part of each of us is stenciled there upon those walls
Like big bouquets of ribboned roses.
And on our hearts are spiked
The places where we sat and talked and planned.
And now it’s done.

And for Tara on her birthday–

          HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TARA

May the objects of your heart’s desire
Realize the warmth of human fire
IN THE YEAR THAT LIES AHEAD!

May you find each day’s delight
Brings you comfort every night;
May you make each choice with courage
So that no regrets discourage
IN THE YEAR THAT LIES AHEAD!

May the friendships that you cherish
Grow mature and never perish,
May the love that’s just a spark
Become a candle for the dark,
And may the child’s become a woman’s goals,
Her virtues those mankind extols
So that when the year has passed
With triumphs greater than the last,
Tara will rejoice for what it’s been
IN THE YEARS THAT LIE AHEAD!

Tara was, herself, interested in writing poetry, and I’d like to include here the
delightful response I received from Tara after I had given her that poem.

      TARA’S REPLY

Received September 18, 1977 with cake

Words
Written on paper
Through the pen from the mind,
Read by you to gain understanding.

Thoughts
Spoken outloud
Through the voice from within,
Heard by you to explain the reason.

Feelings
Not written and not spoken, but
Expressed through the eyes from the heart
To you, for I wanted them to be yours.

And thus it was that I discovered that when one ceases to take friends for granted, others begin to respond in kind. Letters of thanks to me from those around me began to include the word "love." One such note that came to me at Christmas during this same period of my life contained these words, "You are among the things for which I give thanks to God every day of my life." That from a fellow teacher. I cherish those lines from Marcia Berner.

On the last night of “Hello, Dolly!” there was a group of people who could not get in due to the sell-out but who wouldn’t leave.  Finally, they were allowed to stand at the back.  Due to an unforeseeable, potentially tragic accident in which one of our close, dear friends from the Zapf family was trapped in their grain bin and in danger of suffocating.  He was being rescued as those dear family members stood by in helpless terror. At intermission, the standees in the audience were allowed to take those empty seats.

A year passed, and when, at the end of the school year, I sought to tender my resignation to go into business, the principal talked me into delaying my decision for a year. (Principals really should advise teachers in such instances to take a year’s leave of absence rather than resign.) He said the school board had told him, "Well, Ed, your job is to talk him out of it!" I’m sure that Leon Wilson had told them my comment from the last time I had left. That was all it took. I postponed my leaving for a year—a very important year in the scheme of my teaching life.

During that year I changed my teaching style. I relaxed. I expressed my feelings of friendship more readily with the kids I worked with after school nearly every day. I took off my toupee when my scalp began to sweat and put it back on in time for play practice. One evening as I was putting it back on, someone said, “Mr. Rhoades, maybe I’m speaking out of turn, but I like the way you look better without that thing.” And I left it off for good. Also, I removed some of the artificial barriers I had erected for self-protection. I was in my mid-thirties by then, and they were no longer necessary. And if I wasn’t going to teach any more, why should I be in fear of a mysterious “somebody” lurking in the shadows to discredit me and cost me my job. Hey, America” Don’t you realize that you require more and more performance from teachers and you are giving them less and less protection as children get more and more street wise? I always knew, and twice in my teaching days I experienced the ramifications of it, that one angry student who sets out to discredit you can soon enlist the aid of his/her parents and their connections. Anyway, I felt I had arrived at a point where I could be more free (not loose—I wouldn’t know how to do that).

Our big show the year before had been Brigadoon with Jeanie Crider and Laura Jarrett playing opposite Jeff Hewson. As we were cleaning up from scenery work and preparing for rehearsal to begin, the stage door opened and Laura, ghostly pale, ran into my arms crying, “Oh, Mr. Rhoades, I had a wreck!” Then she was unconscious as I lifted and I carried her down the long hallway to the sick room where I called for an ambulance and notified her parents. Neighbors told me that they had approached her to offer help, but she screamed hysterically and ran from them as if she thought they intended to harm her. Somehow things like this and the tornado that hit the next year work to draw a teacher more closely into the community.

That was also the year that Jeff Hewson went off to college. He was a handsome kid who had had an operation to correct a club foot pitch when he appeared at his first tryout and pitch problems when I first cast him in a leading role, that of Tommy in Brigadoon. I remember that I would often stand behind him in rehearsals and try to be inconspicuous when I sang along softly to keep him on a truer pitch.  By performance, he was very good, and no one mentioned pitch problems—mostly they said, “Wow, Jack, I never realized Jeff Hewson was so darn good lookin‘!” When he returned the next year, he sang even better because he had begun to sing at weddings and to have other opportunities to use his voice. Jerry Davis and Steve Harding, for example, were so busy with athletics and editing the yearbook, etc., that they didn’t sing from one musical to the next although they had natural gifts. When I was called to the phone at school one day, I was surprised by Jeff’s calling to say that he had “made” the Purdue Glee Club. “I wanted you to be the first to know, because you are the person who taught me to sing.” (Well, I drafted him into it anyway.) That was the first year that the Purdue Glee Club was featured at Radio City Music Hall where they were a sensation for several years. I have lost track of Jeff since he left the QVC shopping network on TV. I used to turn it on every once in a while for a few minutes just to feel as if we had had a visit.

*         *         *

I also should mention Ronnie Breece, who died some years back in an auto accident. Ronnie was small of stature, but he played with enormous heart. He was a champion wrestler in the lightest weight class, senior class president, and working so many hours a day that he fell asleep on the carpeted aisle between his scenes when he played the role of Scrooge in the first musical on the new stage. In addition to Pappy Yokum, which we brought him from the junior high to do because Danny Cupp was hospitalized, he was a wonderful Artful Dodger in the production on the small stage at the end of an old gym where Darlene Speer, Steve Harding (as Bill Sikes), Jerry and Ronnie got our first standing response.

Once when we were preparing To Kill a Mockingbird and Ronnie was playing the villain, Mr. Ewell, I invited Penny Riddle, an African-American friend with a theater background to a rehearsal to advise me on sensitive racial matters. Ronnie could hardly get out the vile epithets with her there, and I told her that. She said, “I LOVE that kid. When I first saw him as Scrooge, I thought, ‘Am I supposed to scale down my thinking to that degree?’ But by the time he began to leap and cavort, I had completely forgotten his size. He just mesmerizes you.”

One of the things a director treasures about an actor is having his/her complete trust. During Mr. Scrooge a young teacher offered to help out and began to attend rehearsals. Scrooge had a line in a song that referred to himself, once he had been transformed into a dancing dervish, as “the fairy on top of the tree.” Suzanne took me aside and informed me that we just had to change that lyric. “How about “the angel on top of the tree?” I stopped the song and relayed the message to Scrooge himself. “Well, Mr. Rhoades, what do you think? It doesn’t bother me.” And as I found it rather more delightful, we left it in. I loved his willingness to do that for me.

This might be as good a place as any to include a poem I wrote that mentions all of my children. The occasion for it, a policeman shot down in the line of duty, is described in the poem.  Our home in Bowman Acres in Greenfield, the one we brought Tammy and Danny home to when they were born, was beside a creek that ran along the side and back of the yard.  On the other side of that creek was a much larger house, home to the hospital administrator and his family, the Morrises.  Barry Morris was the director of A Delicate Balance, in which I played Tobias, the main character.  This event followed closely upon the death of my father, Earl McKinley Rhoades of South Bend, Indiana, at the age of eighty-five.

           BED CHECK

The day is done.
Each task is set in its place–
   Completed
      To be done tomorrow
           Put off–
And I can take my rest.

I climb the stairs and know that all is well
But, just the same, out of habit,
I check each bed to see that my little world is quite secure:
Tammy looks serene but takes her mask of seriousness
To her land of dreams.
Lori leaves it all behind and seems to sing.
John looks pale–he wasn’t well today.
(He’s hardly ever ill, but this new flu is relentless.}
Danny sleeps untroubled
As if remembering that tomorrow he’ll be master of a new cat–
His only birthday wish since ‘Shakesbeard’ went to sleep a week ago.

Margaret waits up for me, and she shuts out the light.
As she drifts off to sleep, I sift through troubled thoughts.
I tiptoe into the baby’s room
To look at tiny Lori, first and only then–
My first "bed check" upon awakening in the night
And wanting reassurance.
She seemed a miracle, breathing all alone
Her faultless motor never missed a beat.
Knowing all was well and full of pride and joy,
I went to bed again. Soon I slept.

But tonight, though everything is right here,
I can’t escape my thoughts.
I see Jerry and Barry’s father but a few years past
Checking the beds in the house next door,
And I snap to wakefulness!
His children are grown and have lives of their own;
Yet one bed must be forever empty, a hero’s bed.
How dare anyone murder the boy next door!
(Though we have moved, he will forever be the boy next door.)
This villainy haunts my bed-check hour!

I scarcely know I’ve slept, but somehow in the magic of slumber,
I am a boy again, in a house long since torn down,
And I awake and am afraid at night.
I slip to the floor to run to the safety of another bed nearby
And stop and see I am a man, at home now, standing,
All the glory of my day set aside, grieving
For I cannot, even in my dream
Run off to my daddy’s bed. He’s gone!
His bed forbids me come to it.

What was it about my father?
He was there! That’s what it was!
He was always there: like Tammy, too serious; like Lori, serene;
Like John, rarely sick; and like Danny, the master of his world.

O grieving Earth,
What loneliness wells up in you at bedtime!
O divine kingdom,
What treasures we give up to you
O Thou merciful God,
Refresh me now and let me sleep,
And Mama too, and Barry, and all those
Who, in the freshness of parting,
Cannot sleep at bedtime.

*         *         *

Probably the most successful play in the new auditorium at Eastern Hancock was Hello, Dolly! Shortly after the sold-out run of that musical, I attended a school board meeting for the first and only time during those thirty-seven teaching years. I suppose if I had not happened in, I might never have known their feelings. What item of business they were discussing when I entered, I will never know, because when the president realized that I had taken a seat among the visitors, he said, "Gentlemen, Mr. Rhoades is here." Whereupon they all rose and passed me around their conference table to congratulate me upon a spectacular performance. The architect, I think of him as Gloria and Mary Camplin’s father, had once told me that he regretted that he had not been able to give me a "working stage."

My reply had been, "I hope you’ll come to Hello, Dolly! to see how we make that ‘non-working’ stage work." Students had helped me hang pulleys to I-beams and build wagons to make the show move the way it was designed to.  My counterweight, as I recall, was a paint can full of cement, of which I had read in a stagecraft book.  I wouldn’t advise that!

I should not move on from there without remembering Susie Davis. She was Dolly. She was the reason the show was sold out. As a freshman she had tried out for the children’s play, The Sleeping Beauty. She had talent; I could see that. After the others left, she asked me if maybe there could be a part for a fat fairy. I didn’t react, but I thought there was. Her older brother, Jerry, a bright kid who could sing and act and was soon to be Fagin in Oliver, was a senior. I asked him what he thought about Susie’s idea. He said, “Why not? If she’s up to it.”

I told him that I thought that anyone who was acting all the time really ought to have some training. What I meant was that Susie was a natural comic and people liked her. She threw the shot put too. So she became the yellow fairy (the most unbecoming color for a large person). Once she began to lose weight in preparation for Dolly (her determination, not mine) during her senior year, I brought out and showed her that fairy costume to inspire her. It really was very large. Anyway, as each fairy arrived, she was announced by a page at the top of a “cake” staircase that I had had the students carpet. As music played, each fairy did a graceful turn and then floated (fluttered?) down the staircase, flitting as a fairy might. When the yellow fairy appeared, she did an awkward, bumbling turn and fell down the staircase as all the fairies, now posed on the steps, caught her to let her seem to bump each step of the way.

On Saturday night she told the other fairies, “Don’t catch me. It’ll be funnier if I am not supported.” It was certainly hilarious, really proved her sense of comic timing and began a career of endearing clowning that gave her terrific audience reactions to something as simple as a lifted eyebrow. What she hadn’t taken into account, and what I certainly didn’t dream was a possibility, was that in the center of that staircase, hidden in the fabric that covered it, one side of a long staple was waiting to dig into her leg. It left a scar about fourteen inches long. It was the worst accident I ever experienced during one of my plays, and I learned to look for every possible accident before it could happen. Anyway, Susie was also an artist, and she and Rick Ray led the after-school scenery group in a delightful romp that brought a rough vision of beauty and color to the stage.