Interview with Christopher Moore

CONTENTS

Introduction

WTH = W. Thomas Huyck
CM = Christopher Moore

9 - The Singers

WTH: I think the one general question that should be asked is...Here you have this children's choir here in a middle class community...originally sort of centered around the church...and then you bring in this new blood...these kids from quite deprived backgrounds, many of them...was there... how difficult or how easy was this cultural adjustment that had to take place between the kids from Urban Gateways schools and the kids from the neighborhood?

CM: There was amazingly little adjustment for a couple of reasons. The scheme of bringing in groups of kids from any location rather than one or two kids gave most of the kids coming in some sense of community. They at least knew each other coming in. And our most effective promotions process was on this group basis rather than isolated individuals coming in alone, not knowing anybody. The other thing here is that, you see, that our kids were not typically middle class. They had middle class opportunities, middle class economic opportunities, but they didn't have some of the attitudes that go with this. That was partly the influence of the Unitarian Church in particular, and partly some of the influences of Hyde Park as a community. And corresponding to that and matching it nicely, you had kids coming in who were not middle class because of their economic circumstances, but we only occasionally drew on kids who had grown up in poverty with no parental expectation that they would break out. And we were gearing up this program at a time of rising Black expectancy and militancy, and this had the useful concomitant that numbers of Black families were anchored in part by the feeling that if they dug in and worked for it in certain ways, the kids were going to have a different experience than they'd had. And this led to a certain openness, especially since the kids that came in who were Black found Black kids already here.

We had far more difficulty when we tried to bring Latinos into the program because they did not have as many buddies already on the scene, and there were family and cultural patterns of sticking together and not mixing on the one hand, and some tension on the part of Blacks towards the Hispanics, and perhaps Hispanics towards Blacks that made the mix a little more difficult. But for the Black inner city kids who were coming in, they may have been poor in many cases, but they were not turned off, and the ones who came in here were kids who had already responded to the initial experiences in their school and neighborhood setting, so they were already turned on in some way and prepared to learn and grow. The kids who weren't we might give some time to see if we could get them going, but they weren't kids who we brought in here until they'd already begun to respond. There was already a series of steps in the talent development process that suggested the capacity of the individual to use opportunity, which acted as a natural screening and there were very few cultural problems because of the openness of the kids that were already here, their recognition that the first thing was the ability of teammates which would make it more fun for everybody, and they weren't much worried about background, and they found other human beings like them....well, both groups of kids found other human beings like themselves.

There was very, very low parental anxiety about all of this on the Hyde Park end, and increasingly low anxiety on the Lawndale, 35th Street, Woodlawn end. And parents, yes in the Vienna Parties and various other things that occurred along the way in the first club, some of the inner city parents did help and did join Hyde Park families in doing things, and some families did get acquainted. And some kids did stay over in Hyde Park on certain occasions with their friends. It built rather solidly.

I recall one instance that's an interesting illustration of this business of differences. It was somewhere in the mid-late 60's with the second or third round of promotions in Lawndale that one little boy came over here for his first time and his buddy as an alto (was a boy named Frank George). It was quite obvious that the Lawndale kid never saw a young oriental boy his own age. Never. It was quite obvious throughout the whole morning that part of what he wanted to do was reach over and touch. It was a new experience. It was something that we became particularly aware of when we made the European trip in 1970 in the reaction of European youngsters, particularly some of the Danish children out in the country, to our Blacks and our Orientals where they had never seen -- whatever pictures they might have seen of people who were different -- they had never seen kids their own age who were different. And they kept wanting to touch the Black kids, and we had to explain to our youngsters to help them understand what was going on, to help them realize that this was nothing unfriendly. It was just a novelty of experience. And our kids sort of grouchily relaxed and were able to cope with it.

But it was that same kind of experience and it had shown up years before in our own group. And somebody from the West Side who had been in an all-Black situation -- he'd seen some white kids -- but what he hadn't seen was peers who were noticeably Oriental, and it was just, you know, a mind-boggling experience. But we had very little problems in bringing our kids together.

I remember one other colorful scene in circa 1970, we had a girl in the group who was Black from this part of town. Her mother was very much concerned that our 35th Street young men who at that point were sophomores, juniors and seniors in high school, that our 35th Street young men weren't exactly the kind of young men that she wanted her daughter associating with. Our 35th Street young men got a good look at the slick characters who were constantly coming at the end of rehearsal to pick up this girl, and they were both insulted and amused because we were all relieved when this particular young girl pulled up stakes and left the program because the young men of more appropriate background, more appropriate circumstance, were probably a heck of a lot more likely to take advantage of this girl or to assist her in advantage being taken --whatever phraseology we want to use -- than our 35th Street guys, who felt this young lady spelled trouble, and they weren't about to get into the trouble that it might invite.

They were a heck of a lot more alert, both to not damaging their standing in relation to the program, not going against the program standards, not taking on the trouble. They were a heck of a lot better protection, though the mother didn't see it that way, than the rather fast crowd of supposedly more acceptable background that were gathering around this gal. But my suggestion was never picked up on that a singing group of these 35th Street guys call themselves the "Bad Influence."

I can remember one other kind of vignette. I don't think we have it on the tapes. This came out of the school concerts. The school concerts have always been a little less popular than tours, but occasionally there has been a remarkable esprit shown in informal moments on a school concert day. The day that I'm thinking about was at a point when Jody Kruskal was still in grade school, because he was one of the protagonists. We were in Glencoe, Winnetka -- that general area. We'd done a couple of morning concerts and I think we had come to a school for lunch at which we would sing in the afternoon. But we had layover time, and our kids ate their sack lunches and some of the boys headed out to a playing field where there were some kids playing. And what they ran into was a response to their "Hey, can we join your game?"... "Well, YOU could, but not your niggers."

And the comment devastated not only our black kids, but it devastated the white kids. Their first reaction was we're gonna whip the bejesus out of them. But as Jody later reported to his parents, "We thought about, you know, putting up our fists and having it out, but we somehow thought that Chris wouldn't approve of that. We were on public display and that wasn't the way to go about it. So we hung around the edges and waited for an opportunity to make a move, and when the ball got away, we got it and we just simply changed the rules and said, 'O.K. the ball is ours now. Anybody can play who wants to as long as they agree that anybody can play.' " And they simply took over.

I knew something had happened that lunch hour. I could feel it in the group afterwards, but I did not see the incident. I knew nothing about it. And I got home -- we got back here and I had whatever to do in the aftermath that afternoon. I got home around suppertime and my phone began to ring. It was the parents calling in -- we suspect you don't know about this story. We think it is priceless. We think you should know about it. And that's when I began to get the feeling of what the kids had done and told their parents. I knew that something had happened and that overall it was a triumph.

We'd had some years before -- on one of our first trips that took us to Cincinnati and Nashville...We had one instance where we ate in a restaurant in Covington, Kentucky right across the river from Cincinnati. We'd sung the night before. We had spent some time that morning with the City elementary chorus group and lunch was in an inexpensive restaurant across the way. The person who had arranged for the lunch at the restaurant had feelings about ... and there wasn't anything, but there were just vibes, that the kids felt and I became explicitly aware of in the course of this little lunch. Then the next stop was Mammoth Caves, and we went in thinking to take a cave tour. We went in the old cave -- the dry cave tour and the tour groups for that are however many hundred people, so we were maybe a quarter of the group.

Our army of 200 on this tour obviously included some people who were used to segregation and liked it. At one point, an old woman on the tour hissed at Rachel Moore, who was maybe 12-14 years old, a stunning blonde, a spectacular beauty queen type of person in her bearing, even in a sweatshirt and jeans. She hissed at Rachel Moore "Nigger lover." And Rachel thought about this. She cried about it. She was angry and she wanted to do something, and she waited her moment as the tour progressed until the whole group on that walking tour gathered around in a large, better lit than some moments, place. She picked one of the really black handsome young men in our group, and went over to wind herself around him and gave him one hell of a kiss.

Both of those responses, I think, were rather creative. They would have been, some years earlier, dangerous. But they represented standing for the integrity of what we were about, and handling racism in a unique way on their own level, and one of the common threads was you can get angry, you can cry, you can find some way of making a response and asserting another point of view. Those were the two priceless stories.