Tonight we kick off Episode 11 of the weekly Guest Post series: Medium Cool with BGinCHI.
In case you missed the introduction to the series: Culture as a Hedge Against this Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We’re Living In
You can find the whole series here: Medium Cool with BGinCHI
Tonight’s Topic: Who Taught You to Appreciate Culture?
With the school year truncated, lots of people are finding it easy to appreciate the work teachers do, day/week/year in and out. Since this is a weekly space devoted to culture and our appreciation of the meaningful artistic works in our lives, it’s time to acknowledge that we likely learned about these things (or how to think about, or locate them) from someone else. That person might have been an actual teacher, but he/she might also have been a teacher in another role (parent, friend, therapist). It could even be a pet.
Share with us an example of a teacher (or “teacher”) who changed your life, or made something possible, or just pointed you in the right direction.
*****
Update on 5/4: the upload took longer than expected, so the play was late starting, and we missed the window for discussing the on Medium Cool yesterday. The play will be the topic for Medium Cool, just a week later, on 5/10.
Click play below to watch the play!
BGinCHI
Wanted to use the video for Van Halen’s song “Hot For Teacher” for this post, but WaterGirl wouldn’t let me.
BGinCHI
OK, seriously.
Because my parents were very young (19 & 20 when I was born), and it was the 70s when I was in grade school, I needed teachers. They weren’t all good, but my 2nd & 5th grade teachers changed my life by paying attention to me, seeing something in me, and encouraging me.
I was lucky to have great professors as an undergrad as well. I think about these people almost every day. Always trying to pay it forward.
Chetan Murthy
Until grad school I read exclusively science fiction and fantasy. The few times I’d tried real “literature” I was repelled, b/c too boring. at age 23, my grad school classmate D. told me I needed to try real literature, and strongly suggested I read some Milan Kundera. He lent me _The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_. It worked, and I ended up spending the next 20+yr voraciously devouring all sorts of literature from all over, both older and contemporary. I’ve started reading SF&F again, but still read literature.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Bitch.
Baud
@BGinCHI:
But I brought my pencil.
WaterGirl
@BGinCHI: Actually, I realized we hadn’t picked an image yet, so I added that. :-)
schrodingers_cat
My parents, especially my father. He taught me to appreciate art, whether it be books, plays, movies or dance. He would read to every night when I was little. My parents and also my extended family bought me books for my birthday and other milestones. My parents would take me to plays and other theater performances.
Living in South Mumbai ( the cultural heart of Mumbai) had its perks. Only when I met husband kitteh who grew up in Mumbai’s Eastern suburbs did I realize the charmed existence I had led.
And my school too played an important part, and there were many teachers who nurtured our artistic instincts.
BGinCHI
@WaterGirl: YES.
I love a benevolent deity.
HinTN
I was a slow learner with regard to life and culture. I think my visits to New Orleans opened my eyes to a reality of living beyond what my relatively well-off, white-bread upbringing had shown me. Not that I didn’t march against the Vietnam war as a late teenager, but that experience was still somehow … limited in the scope of people to whom I was exposed. The Jazz and Heritage Festival changed all that.
BGinCHI
@schrodingers_cat: My dad was a reader, but we never talked about books. Mostly because we hardly ever talked.
germy
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) – Florida deputies arrested a man who had been living out his quarantine on a shuttered Disney World island, telling authorities it felt like a “tropical paradise.”
Orange County Sheriff’s deputies found Richard McGuire on Disney’s Discovery Island on Thursday. He said he’d been there since Monday or Tuesday and had planned to camp there for a week, according to an arrest report.
The 42-year-old said he didn’t hear numerous deputies searching the private island for him on foot, by boat and by air because he was asleep in a building. He told the deputy he didn’t know it was a restricted area, despite there being numerous “no trespassing” signs.
“Richard stated that he was unaware of that and that it looked like a tropical paradise,” according to the arrest report.
https://wnyt.com/news/man-arrested-trying-to-quarantine-on-private-disney-island/5717555/?cat=657
HinTN
@BGinCHI:
I know how that works.
Omnes Omnibus
In a way, this is a weird question for me. It is sort of like a college application essay question that I had where the question was “what made you decide to go to college?”; my answer was that it had always been a given, the only question was where. When I was a little kid, my dad was still in school and my parents’ friends were academics and artists. Book, art, and music were always around. If I have to pick someone, it would be my middle school violin teacher/orchestra conductor, Bernice Friedman. She got me into the Bridgeport Symphony Youth Orchestra and the Fairfield County Festival of Strings. Yeah, let’s go with her.
schrodingers_cat
@BGinCHI: My father is a great story teller.
RSA
@Chetan Murthy: You’ve just recounted my life story in literature, with small variations of timing and authors.
rikyrah
Culture?
I guess my parents. Whatever I came home with a trip slip, they signed it. I think that we went on more field trips as kids. I just remember always going places. They never turned me down. Any odd program that was offered by the school, I signed up for it, and they made sure that I got there.
Of course, I had to take music lessons, and ballet lessons.
raven
I was a shitload of trouble from 7th grade on. In high school I was a total mess, enough that they schools and the courts gave me the choice between the Army and juvy on my 17th birthday. I did have one teacher/coach who was very supportive and wrote a nice thing about him being available if I ever needed help. For years I wondered about him and, when the internet popped up, I started looking for him. He ended up a varsity high school coach and then went on to coach on the Team USA Staff and at Iowa State under Johnny Orr. When I figured all that out I got in touch with another high school coach of mine and asked what ever happened to him. It turned out that Orr didn’t take him to Michigan with him and the dude ended up descending into bitterness and alcoholism. It was such a fucking bummer to find that out and I still try to make sense of it.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Me too. I always think two things that really made a difference for me was getting fired from the post office and breaking my back in a car wreck. If I hadn’t gotten bounced from the PO I might have ended up like a couple of other buddies who made it a career. If I hadn’t broken my back and gone back to school I might have worked construction on that nuke plant at Clinton, IL and who knows?
Yutsano
To be cliché: my high school band director. He encouraged me to look into everything, including genres of music we weren’t necessarily exploring at that time. Without that creative outlet I would have never survived high school. He opened up the world of jazz to me (and what an expansive world that was!) and let me sample new instruments although he preferred I stay on my tuba marching horn. He’s definitely the person who inspired me to get a degree in music. And that has inspired my cultural outlook to this day.
raven
As usual, I don’t answer the question
I got no class
I got no principles. . .
MattF
Early on, my sister played a big role. She’s seven years older than I am– and would drag me off to museums, like the Met, when I was a kid, and demand that I look at the art. And in high school– I went to Bronx Science, and the best teachers there were the English teachers. They made us think, and work, and write.
raven
@Chetan Murthy: Back in the day my wife thought that was one of my self-help books.
WaterGirl
I think it was popular culture that got me to appreciate popular culture. West Side Story! Bye Bye Birdie! etc.
Though as I write this, I realize that my mom would take us to downtown Chicago, and we saw Swan Lake in the park, and we would go to museums, etc. So probably my mom, though it wasn’t my first thought
To this day I still love West Side Story. We would dance to West Side Story, reenacting the scenes on our rooftop. I have a photo somewhere of me doing exactly that. If I stumble across it at some point, i’ll post it.
BGinCHI
@schrodingers_cat: My dad had stories, and could tell them, but he was a big drinker, and didn’t really get along with kids, and was angry, and worked a lot.
He died young, of frustration, among other things.
SiubhanDuinne
We lived with my maternal grandparents when I was little (this was in the 1940s), and they were both great readers-aloud. Kipling, Lewis Carroll, A. A. Milne, P. L. Travers, Louisa May Alcott, tons of poetry, all were part of the soundtrack to my childhood.
Additionally, I grew up in a bookstore — quite literally, my grandfather founded it and it was the core of our family for decades — so I was always surrounded by books at home and at the store Nothing was off-limits, and my granther taught me to read almost before I was toilet-trained, so I was quite an avid reader by age 2
And my mother was a singer and my father a cellist/composer/conductor. One of my earliest memories is going to the Lyric Opera in Chicago at about 3 or 4 for a performance of Hansel and Gretel. My dad was in the pit orchestra and I remember running down during intermission to lean over the pit rail and listen to the musicians tuning up. To this day, the sound of an orchestra tuning up pre-performance is one of my favourite, most evocative sounds.
So, the quick answer to your question is: Family.
BGinCHI
I remember so vividly, as an undergrad, knowing so clearly what I did NOT want to do (sell things, work for a corporation, wear a suit, have a boss). I’d had dozens of jobs since I was 12, and each one was trading time and labor for money. Period. I knew I did not want to live my life like that.
One of my great professors dragged this out of me (I was always pretty scared to talk to them as people), and just said, bluntly, “You love to learn. Why don’t you go to grad school.” And it was like someone switching on a light in a dark room. I could see. And it worked beautifully for me, and I was very lucky. Yes, I worked hard, but I was also helped by many people and had good fortune.
Paying it forward every day as hard as I can.
BGinCHI
@SiubhanDuinne: This sounds like a terrific Irish novel.
Yutsano
@SiubhanDuinne: I want to be reincarnated as you. Seriously. :)
SiubhanDuinne
@Yutsano: LOL
RSA
My appreciation for literature began in high school. I’ll peg it to a specific memory, though it will be an over-simplification. I’m in an English class in an all-boys Catholic high school, taught by Brother Johnson. We’re reading “The Dead”—still my favorite short story, bar none—and Brother Johnson asks us to think about shifting points of view in the narration.
Who sees Gabriel from this point of view? Anyway, it’s something I remember that got me interested in understanding how writing could be put together in different ways. Other aspects of culture came later.
prostratedragon
FIrst, my parents and the family culture, in which books were sacred objects and libraries their temple. There was plenty of reading aloud, and when I began navigating the city on my own, libraries were the earliest destinations. There also was music in various forms, including a varied repertory of church music, so I grew up thinking of cultural activities as something everyone could do. My mother introduced me to more adult films, starting with her favorite, All About Eve; it was only much later that I realized my father had a taste for “art” films, and loved the Italians and Kurosawa. And in addition to the standard field trips, there were concerts of all types, including some great names like Marian Anderson, Montoya, Segovia, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
I also had several teachers and band instructors along the way who showed me a range of literature and music, so all in all I’ve been fortunate in having an opportunity to think that life maybe is not a mere wasteland.
SiubhanDuinne
@BGinCHI: I didn’t even mention the Chicago recital where my mother was singing the soprano in Bach’s “Coffee Cantata,” and there’s a bit where her father cruelly locks her in her room until she vows to give up coffee. I rushed the stage, stamped my tiny foot, and loudly chewed out the baritone for being mean to my mother.
True story.
geg6
As far as culture, my parents taught me to appreciate music, literature, art, history, dance, film…well, you get the picture. They had six kids, my dad was a steelworker, mom was a homemaker until her father died and she took the little bit of money she inherited and bought us kids a private pool membership and herself a college education through night school. We didn’t have a lot but we had books of any kind, we had family dinner every night where politics and history were discussed, we went to museums and trips to Erie and Gettysburg and local historical sites like Underground Railroad sites, Legionville where the first Army of the United States was formed, Old Economy which was where the Harmonists lived and which was preserved and, of course, Fort Pitt. We were taken to movies and watched them on Sunday Night Movies as a family. We listened to our parents’ 78s of swing music from the 40s. They exposed us to everything they could and never censored or forbid anything. I am very grateful to them for how they managed this under the circumstances.
I’d also like to point to someone who changed my attitude and made me believe in myself: the assistant principal at my high school, Stanley Yukica, who passed away last week at 87. I hated high school, mainly because I hated all the games and because I was bored stiff. Because of that, I was pretty much a wild child as a teen and always skipping classes or getting tossed out of class because of my smart mouth. Consequently, I spent a lot of time in Mr. Yukica’s office. He never punished me much (though he had to sometimes when I went too far), but he would just talk to me and listen to me. He always seemed to understand how I felt about high school and always appreciated my intellect and told me so. When I graduated from college summa cum laude, he sent me the most wonderful letter, basically saying he’d told me so. When I got my MEd, I got another. And when I was hired and promoted by my current institution, he wrote me another. He always believed in me and that belief rubbed off on me and I will never forget him.
WereBear
I took Cultural Appreciation in high school with a delightful older man. Carmina Burana, the Michael Tilson Thomas version. Schools of art. Dada. It was a base that let me start exploring.
BGinCHI
@RSA: Cue the “Brother Johnson” jokes.
OK, sorry.
Emma from FL
My great-uncle, who taught me to read when I was around two and a half, just to stop me from nagging. He did not like children’s books, so my readers were the Iliad and the Odyssey.
My father, who never said no when I wanted to read one of his books, even if it was the Satyricon.
My mother because she hated having only a 4th grade education, and pushed both her daughters to learn, and to dive headfirst into all sorts of culture(s).
BGinCHI
@prostratedragon: Film did this for me too: like with books, I just wanted to go to other worlds, other times, have different experiences.
BGinCHI
@SiubhanDuinne: Yeats would have fallen for you tout suite.
zhena gogolia
My older brother. And he’s still at it.
BGinCHI
@geg6: Amazing family.
And it’s great someone in HS just let you be you. What good would punishment have done?
scav
Mostly I guess that I as just a reader and I don’t remember anyone ever really limiting what chose to read (including the woman at the bookmobile). And there were other people as likely to drag a very short thing to a play by Shakespeare as anything animated. It wasn’t special, it was just one of the options. Not set aside as educational or mentally nutritious. If only they had treated broccoli or spinach the same way; I might have ended up with a better — or at least a less potato-idealized — diet.
gene108
@Chetan Murthy:
I’ve moved in the opposite direction. When I was in high school, and into my early twenties, I read literature, from Dostoyevsky to Goethe to philosophy books.
I like sci-fi and fantasy, but was looking for something and trying to find it in literature and philosophy.
From my mid-twenties to now, my fiction reading has been almost exclusively sci-fi and fantasy, with a regular reading of non-fiction.
Josie
My mother was a child of the Depression and could not take the piano lessons that she desperately wanted. As a result, my brothers and I were exposed to every kind of music lesson imaginable. I took piano, violin, organ, voice, and even learned to play the string bass because the band director thought it would add class to his concert band. She had a huge record collection and played classical music all the time in the house when no one was practicing their lessons. Her only regret was that I learned to enjoy rock and roll in my teens.
Omnes Omnibus
Yes. Except sometimes we went to the fucking arboretum and if it didn’t feature a side trip to Cantigny, I saw it as a waste of a day. A fucking tree museum?
Mary G
My 4th grade teacher let me stay in the classroom to eat my lunch (the school was adobe construction from the 1920s; the cafeteria/auditorium building was condemned as unsafe for earthquakes and kids ate outside). I would wolf down my lunch and write a little play for the puppet theater made out of a refrigerator box, teach it to a couple of other kids and then we performed it for the rest of the class after the rest came back. She would give me grown-up books to read because I was so advanced from being sick all the time and not allowed to watch TV. It was a horrible shock the next year to get an authoritarian teacher who told me I was “not special” and would learn what she taught or nothing.
Delk
Every gay man I met from age 16.
SiubhanDuinne
@BGinCHI:
Fair is fair. I fell for Yeats a long time ago.
schrodingers_cat
@BGinCHI: That sounds rough. My dad was great when I was a child, we locked horns later.
dexwood
My high school drop out Mom instilled a love of reading in me, teaching me how to before kindergarten kicked off. She bought books of all sorts for me, discussed them with me, put a bookcase in my room for my collection. My Uncle Mole influenced my love of paintings, drawing, lithography, and etchings with his stamp collection. I was fascinated with the art and he always took the time to show me his stamps and talk about the images. I own his collection now, no idea what it might be worth. Priceless to me. Can’t forget my wife of 45 years, a painter and clay artist, who let me into her world of ideas and technique.
schrodingers_cat
My uncle (father’s younger brother) was an actor and a model in his younger years. Some of his theater colleagues hit the big leagues, one even made it big in the Hindi movies. He had interesting friends. He was the life of the party types and I was his favorite niece. Whenever he would get a new gig, he would buy me books and fire crackers for Diwali. I didn’t appreciate then but now I realize what a big deal it was because a steady stream of money is uncertain for a struggling actor.
SiubhanDuinne
@geg6: He sounds like an exceptional man. I’m sorry he died recently, but rejoice that he was such a cheerleader for you. What fine memories you must have.
Brachiator
Hmm. My mother, who at various times was a Math and English teacher. But she encouraged me to read whatever I wanted. At some point when I was a pre-teen, she got my library card stamped so that i could check out mature books.
She liked mysteries and was a big fan of the Perry Mason TV show and novels. I also developed a taste for mysteries, but never read any of the books my mother preferred.
After my family moved to California, three big influences.
I had an English teacher in junior high school who thought I must be a yokel because my family had moved to California from Texas. She also very specifically called me out for liking comic books, insisting that they were not worth reading. She was a great negative influence. This helped instill in me a realization that some teachers were middle brow hacks, who wanted to insist that some culture was “good,” but were really shitty teachers regurgitating what they had been told was acceptable.
Later, in college, one of my professors emphasized that culture and canon is not static, that any artist has to make a case that he or she is worth reading or listening to. And in studying the history of literature and music, it became clear that even an acknowledged great such as Shakespeare was at times viewed as a bad writer, or one who needed improvement to be acceptable.
I also had to fight fools who insisted that nonwhite or women writers were not worth reading, but that is a whole ‘nuther discussion.
Second, also after we had moved to California, for some weird reason, a local TV station was fighting to retain its broadcast license and decided to air, uncut, some classic foreign films, including the films of Ingmar Bergman. And even though I did not fully understand them, I was struck by the visual story telling, the clearly unfettered adult themes, and bold acting. This spurred me to check out library books about the art of cinema.
Third, my Uncle R (actually a cousin, but we referred to him as Uncle out of respect). He had run away from an abusive home at age 11, had lived a tough life, and was one of the most cultured men I ever knew. He was a great cook, and his wife happily let him take over the kitchen. But I owe him my love and appreciation of jazz. Sometimes discussion, sometimes listening to him talk to his friends. He was a master class for me. He also taught me how to be a critic, how to listen to and talk about music.
Not too long ago, I learned that I had partly paid some of this forward. My youngest brother ran into a friend of his who used to live a couple of doors down from us. The friend mentioned that he was a musician (as is my brother) and noted that he had got into jazz because I had once lent him an album and would encourage his interests even though his parents and friends dismissed his attempts to get into the music. I had no idea that I had helped him in this, and felt proud and humbled.
BGinCHI
Wanted to say thanks for all the great life stories here. Really amazing families and teachers. A good reminder for me to reflect on this more often.
SiubhanDuinne
@prostratedragon:
I think I’m a bit older than you, but I also saw every one of those performers at Orchestra Hall. Chicagoland is such a great place to grow up!
SiubhanDuinne
@BGinCHI: It was a great question you posed!
BGinCHI
@Brachiator: Great example of the negative teacher/example.
I had several of those as well, and they gave me a very clear sense of who I never wanted to be. As a teacher, now, I think I use that more than I do positive role models.
SiubhanDuinne
@BGinCHI:
Talk about your Irish novels!
dexwood
@BGinCHI: Well, all week long a firehose of lies and shit is aimed at us from the Whitehouse and his supporters. It overwhelms. Let me thank you and Watergirl for giving us a post I truly look forward to each Sunday. Cleansing the palate so to speak.
BGinCHI
@dexwood: Really pleased to hear that.
Culture keeps us going. Plus friends, those we love (sometimes that’s family, sometimes not), pets, exercise, food. We’re missing out on things now, but it’s a good time for reflection as well.
I was really heartened to read that op-ed by Biden and Warren earlier today. I so want grown-ups back in the WH.
Ruckus
The library was a great place to find things outside the neighborhood. But if you are asking about someone, I’d guess it was the guy that lived down the street. I was 6 or so when I met him. He’d lost a leg in WWII and had an aftermarket one and he was a clown. Real live honest to goodness clown. Omnes will hate this but he was a good guy. He told the neighborhood kids that there was a huge whole life out side the neighborhood and we should always look for it. I did and I found it. And have looked for it everywhere I’ve been since. Europe, Caribbean, 46 of the 50 states, professional sports, my bicycle shop, libraries, the Navy, all have given me exposure to people from around the world, shown me that there are good people everywhere, right along side the assholes, that culture is everywhere, some good, some amazing and some that you should learn from, what not to do or be.
divF
In my junior year of high school (1967) I had an English teacher who would occasionally replace a standard classroom session with a movie. I have an incredibly vivid memory of his talking over the crop duster scene in North by Northwest, pointing out to us what Hitchcock was doing visually.
Omnes Omnibus
Also, although I never met him, I also want to credit Nathan Pusey. He was president of my undergrad before moving on to the presidency of Harvard. While at my joint, he started a program called Freshman Studies; everyone took it, all the professors cycled through teaching it, and, as a result, everyone on the campus had a common set of cultural touchstones to which we could all refer.
divF
@divF: A second major esthetic experience from high school was not only discovering the Lord of the Rings at the public library one summer, but then finding out that public radio was running a program called (I think) “Reading Aloud” that was working it’s way through the trilogy. It was just one person doing the reading, but he was superb at putting characterization into his reading of the dialogue.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus: You just never found the bodies in his basement.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: If he survived growing up in America with that name, he had to be tough.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: I think you might be mispronouncing it a bit.
Mike J
When I was about 12 I started hanging out at the local community radio station. I was the only kid there, but everybody who did a show tried to educate me about the music they loved. I wound up filling in for all of them. Banjo Bill taught me bluegrass. My first exposure to the Ramones was on a Saturday morning learning how to run the board. When I got my own regular show I did blues, mentored by three or four other people running shows.
One day the president of Alligator records was in town from Chicago, heard blues on the radio, and drove over to our studio. I let him in, and he went through our record library with a copy of his catalog and a week later sent us everything we were missing.
When I went to high school, I was music director of the school’s radio station. I told them the top 40 we were playing was fine, but Memphis was a music city and we were going to play a local band at least once an hour. For the entire school year, every band I called eagerly showed up, brought their records, chatted live on the air, and snuck me into venues I wasn’t old enough to get into. It felt like the whole music community was helping me.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
New houses built after WWII. My mom came home to a new house when she left the hospital with me. NO basements. Did have a small back yard though……
BGinCHI
@Mike J: That right there is an education, folks.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
Mrs. Vera Bej, 10-12th grade she blew my mind. Originally from Ukraine, she spoke 6 languages fluently and could somewhat converse in many more. She taught modern history and social studies with some very real personal knowledge. Her life story would have made a fantastic book and it’s a shame she never wrote about it. She was always dressed to the nines and handled very difficult subjects with grace and good humor. But you never wanted to get on her bad side because she did not play. After I graduated in ’88, I’m pretty sure she was awarded Teacher of the Year for PA.
Uncle Cosmo
My father. He’d grown up in the teeth of the Depression & had a shot at an athletic scholarship to WVU (the attic room where he lived in the house of his older sister & BiL while going to HS in Morgantown looked down into the old Mountaineer Stadium) but family politics prevented that. He wanted to be a teacher but ended up running a machine for thirty-odd years. But he never stopped reading – he kept a subscription to US News & World Report for decades & he bought us a set of World Books when I was 9.
He started a college trust fund for me the day I was born. He taught me to read when I was 3. Every Sunday we’d go for a drive in our old tan Plymouth – our big outing for the week – & he stood me up on the middle of the front seat =8^0 & read me the billboards and the street signs & have me read them back. Then he sicced me onto the newspapers. I don’t remember the reading test i had to take before entering first grade – just the teacher’s face after she graded it: White as a sheet. Perfect score in half the allotted time. Well of course – I was reading newspapers!
Whenever I saw a toy I wanted in a store he would very patiently talk me out of it, even as young as age 5 (to the astonishment of the sales clerks) – but he never said no to a reasonably priced book. Tom Swift Jr. and the Winston SF series were my meat. And then the World Books.
And my elementary-school principal for grades 1-3. Mr DiStefano would call me out of class to his office once a week. The other kids were terrified; I was excited. He’d ask me about all the books I’d read the week before; then he’d take me up to the storeroom where they kept all the books to stock the school library they were going to build.** Take as many as you want, he said – but you have to read every one of them by next week! I’d leave with 5 or 6 under my arm. And next week before we went back to the storeroom he’d question me about each one of them. And I’d tell him – because of course I’d read them all in a couple of nights! – and we’d go back to the storeroom for the next haul.
We never had a record player till I was 16. We had a small-screen console TV when I was small but no color till I was in college. But by then it didn’t much matter: Books could tell me anything I needed to know & take me anywhere I wanted to go. Even unto the stars. (Even if, over half a century later, those stars are in many ways not as we thought we knew them back then.)
** I actually hated it when over the summer between grades 3 and 4 they knocked out the walls between two classrooms to make that library. I only got to go there with my class, once a week,& check out the same number of books (two, which of course I finished that night). And by then Mr DiStefano had moved on & his replacement, Mr Viti, was, let us say, not so eager to encourage Italian-American elementary school prodigies. (That was when I first learned that to the privileged, equality feels like oppression! :^D)
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
Pretty much the same in my family. All the cultural stuff was just around all the time. My mother was more of a driver than my father because she was around more, but it was the both of them, plus older brothers and a sister.
It helped that I grew up in a time & place where things were affordable or free.
dexwood
@Mike J: 2nd try. My 1st comment was chewed up and swallowed. Mighta been me, though. Fuck yeah! What a great experience. When our son was twelve, he listened to a local rock station faithfully. At seven every evening they played their Song of the Day and asked listeners to call in and comment. He would call in, give a fake British Royals name, fake a terrible British accent, and rate the song. Shortly, he was asked to call in every night for his review. Sometimes, with my permission, he went to the station to record a review in advance. He was fired up. That experience gave a shy, only child so much self-confidence. No cash exchanged hands, but he ended up with a hell of a lot of CDs.
satby
That was, and is so true! Even for the children of young working class parents with only a high school education, which I and almost all my childhood friends were. For a long time museums were free, libraries and bookmobiles brought not just books but workshops on art, the parks system had both sports, craft, art and dance classes, and schools and day camps had world class options to keep us busy and entertained. We were surrounded by culture, even to the WPA murals in many of the old public schools.
Both my parents influenced me in slightly different ways. Both were readers, both loved music, but my dad was the explorer who loved going to the ethnic neighborhoods to visit, eat and introducing us to all kinds of people. My mom was the one who on a trip downtown would pause to point out sculptures, or an inscription on a wall, a beautiful building or stained glass window; she taught us to notice and smell the roses. She signed us up for everything, ballet and pottery at the park district, field trips at school, special workshops at the library. Maybe it was because they were Depression babies, but both my parents worked hard to give my sisters and me more exposure to art and music than they probably had been given.
Drdavechemist
Music came from my parents. Dad was a junior high music teacher and choir director in Shaker Heights and tenor soloist at a big Episcopal church in Cleveland Heights. Mom stayed at home to raise me and my younger brother, but she was a cellist who would have friends over to play string quartets in our living room and later joined the Lake County civic orchestra. It was a given that I would be in school band, school chorus, and youth choir at church.
Music was reinforced by a series of great music teachers throughout my school years and on into college where I got to play in the music majors’ band under the baton of the professor who taught conducting. Between him and my dad I picked up enough conducting technique that I’m the go-to substitute in any of my choirs when there isn’t a “real” conductor.
Theatre (and especially Shakespeare) came from an English teacher in 10th and 12th grade. I could never thank her enough for having us read Hamlet followed immediately by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. And As You Like It is probably still my favorite comedy thanks to her pointing out all the bawdy jokes to a bunch of impressionable adolescents.
Visual art was also 10th grade in a world history class co-taught by the librarian. He showed us how visual art revealed the prevailing point of view in cultures from ancient Egypt up to the modern day and took us on several field trips to the Cleveland Art Museum.
Finally, my Ph.D. mentor taught me an appreciation for the finer things in life-good coffee and good booze in particular, but also quality writing implements and technology that was reliable rather than faddish, even if it cost a little more in the short term. He was a great scientist, but also a good person and remains a friend to this day, even if we only see him once every couple of years.
Now back to read some more of everyone else’s stories…
debbie
My drawing teacher in art school. He was the first to get me to “really see” the human figure and to tell me I was good.
Omnes Omnibus
Then, of course, there is Monty Python. Proof that intellectualism and culture can, even must, coexist with silliness. Example.
BGinCHI
@Uncle Cosmo: This is so, so great.
Not all heroes wear capes, indeed.
BGinCHI
@dexwood: OMG, I wish I’d had the balls to do that.
I did grow up obsessively listening to comedy records, of all stripes. Everything from Newhart to Cosby, Pryor and Carlin, Cheech & Chong, Firesign, Redd Foxx, and many more. I listened constantly, repetitively, and memorized many, many routines (I can do Carlin’s Class Clown to this day). It made me smarter, faster of mind, but also kind of a smartarse, for which I got in trouble at school.
BGinCHI
@Drdavechemist: Damn, your HS was miles ahead of mine (IN, rural). We had excellent math and science, but everything else was pretty meh, and looked down upon for guys in the culture I grew up in.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: This is correct.
I learned this from Zappa, too.
John Revolta
First one would be Mrs. Young, my 5th and 6th grade music teacher. She ran the shows we had every year in the gym/auditorium. She would have everyone in the class get up and sing whatever she had us sing; if she thought you could cut it, you were in the show, like it or not. I liked it. I got to see the world from backstage for the first time, and I was a goner.
I remember one day she came in to class with a terrific case of laryngitis. She couldn’t talk so she wrote everything on the blackboard (sic) and then put on a record (sic) of some classical piece. We got about 4 or 5 minutes into it and suddenly she JUMPED UP and started YELLING!!- “This is all wrong, the tempo, the soloist, yaddayadda!!” I don’t actually remember what it WAS she didn’t like but it was obvious she felt very strongly about it. It left a major impression.
BGinCHI
@John Revolta: Amazing how teachers like that stick in your head.
susanna
So many musicians from the 50s, mostly 60s instilled curiosity, then passions that opened a new, very different perspective and appetite for things artistic that continues. Coming from a town in a conservative state, and having nothing else to do in the 50s, one night we went roller skating. Only it was closed for a performance by Little Richard, and that was a rousing lesson.
MoxieM
Hahahaha. I was sent in on Saturdays to the Met to be encultured appropriately. Not sure if it took or not. Partly, I’d say. And yeah, teachers were nearly always better than the other kids.
prostratedragon
@SiubhanDuinne: (If you’re still around) Wow! We might have been at some of the same concerts. These would have mostly been in the early to mid 60s. Also saw Vienna Choir Boys and Robert Shaw with a group doing <em>Messiah</em> there, first time I saw a countertenor, the great Russell Oberlin.
Ruckus
@BGinCHI:
I learned smart ass at 12 yrs old, working in dad’s machine shop, weekends and summers. I ended up owning the place and longer than he did. He did 15 yrs, I did 18. But back to the story, machinists are/were a lot like guys in the military, some in fact had been back then. If you didn’t learn smart ass you weren’t going to ever be accepted. Also learned to swear there, the navy was just more practice.
Msb
My parents read to me as far back as I remember. My mom played show tunes on the piano and started me singing. Parents and grandparents always gave me books at Christmas and birthdays. And my English teachers, starting with Mrs Hobbs in seventh grade, sent me to the library when I finished class work.