Memories of George C. Hildebrant

I attended a 90th birthday party today, for George C. Hildebrant, the man who directed my high school choir, then called the Napa High School - Junior College Choir.  We should all do this well when we're 90.  He uses a walker, but he stood up and conducted us in singing several pieces.  Most of the people who came had sung under "Uncle Hildy" during his tenure as choral director at Napa High, which began in 1947 and ended in 1966. 

The most amazing and charming event of the afternoon was the appearance of the current Napa High School Chamber Choir.  My friends who organized this told me that the current choral director, Travis Rogers, called them and asked if the kids could come and perform!  And they're a Really Good a capella chorus - beautifully blended, singing as with one voice, everything memorized.  (Some of you who read this will have heard the choirs from Mt. Eden High School, at the Paramount in Oakland; the Napa kids are their equal.)  I looked at their web site, Napa High Choral Boosters, and they're supported by what looks like a pretty standard 501(c)(3) - because, of course, music is a "frill," which we can't afford to support in our schools!  I Googled them,  and they've won international competitions.  They sang a Durufle piece; their director told us they had performed it in Paris, at Notre Dame - a by-invitation trip they took over spring break this year.  They performed two pieces accompanied by a young man with a hand drum; apparently they travel with their own percussionist.

With the current Napa High chorus, we had over sixty years of high school choral tradition represented in that room.  Everybody was crying.  Everybody's life was changed by it.  I can still sing the Hallelujah Chorus from memory (soprano anyway) because of him; we memorized everything.  And we were good - we won choral competitions too.  I still remember the one at UOP in Stockton, with massed choruses walking down the stairs after the final performance, all singing the seven-fold Amen from The Lord Bless You and Keep You, echoing in the roof.

And it all began with George C. Hildebrant.  Roughly a hundred people (not counting the high school singers!) came to this event, from Montana, from Ohio, from New York City, and from all over California, to pay respects to this man who flew bombers over Germany in World War II, and came back from a POW camp to teach generations of people how to sing together.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Hildy.  And as many more as you can make.

Children's Libraries

Joyce Carol Oates' reminiscences of her childhood in upstate New York contained many memories of the library in the neighboring county, where she had a library card courtesy of her grandmother.  I remember a library like that when I was a child, with the children's room downstairs, and the adult library, up the stone staircase, accessible only with written permission from one's parents.  This was the Goodman Library, now the home of the Napa County Historical Society.  The Goodman Library and the Lockport Public Library had one thing in common:  neither was a Carnegie.  The Lockport Library was built by the WPA, and the Goodman was designed by a local architect in 1901.

The photo on the web site was taken on a bright sunny day, but if you look at the architecture of the Goodman Library, you'll realize why my memory word for this building is "dark."  The photo is carefully cropped, but there were buildings right next to the library on either side, and the windows in the front faced more north than anything else, so direct sunlight in the building was rare.  Ms. Oates mentions the smell of her library, but I don't remember the Goodman smelling of anything but dust and old paper.  I worked as a librarian for 17 years, and I don't recall ever using "library paste"!

When I was between 7 and 12 years old, I shuttled back and forth to the Goodman on my gearless Schwinn bicycle every 2 weeks, the number of books I checked out limited by the capacity of the bicycle basket between the handlebars.  The 1950 Census data shows that the city of Napa in 1950 had 13,579 residents, 98% of them "in households."  Traffic on the city streets wasn't heavy, and stop lights were few, even on Jefferson, then as now the main north-south route through town, although then there was no freeway alternative a few blocks to the west.  My route this time was up E Street to York Street, right to A Street, right again on Jefferson and across the creek.  From there I had a choice of routes, but I usually crossed Jefferson onto Calistoga, Polk, or Clay and then cut across to the library, rather than going all the way down to 1st Street; even then I preferred back routes, and I still do.

Looking at Google Maps for downtown Napa, I see the "Napa Old World Inn Bed and Breakfast," right in the bend of Jefferson Street, across from Calistoga.  In fact, there's quite a collection of B&B's in that area.  What I remember from that area is the basement apartment where my grandmother lived, right on the bend.  This was what we now call a "soft story" house, a three story stick Victorian with a garage on the first floor, next to a wooden staircase climbing a full story to the porch and front door.  Sometime in the early 1950s (Grandma Ivy died in 1957, when I was 11), my parents decided that a house containing them and 2 children under 10 was too small also to contain two grandmothers - one somewhat deaf, the other annoyed by loud noises.  So they arranged for the grandmothers to move to small, separate, apartments elsewhere in town; and Grandma Ivy moved into the converted garage, after MUCH persuasion from Dad.  She fussed and fumed that she was being "kicked out" - and then she discovered that she was alone for probably the first time in her entire life, and she loved it!  I remember the concrete floor, from my visits - our house had a wooden floor, so a concrete floor was very unusual.  And cold.

But I digress - I was talking about libraries.  I don't really remember the children's library at the Goodman very well, though I know I used it; because as soon as I could persuade Mother, I got permission to climb the stairs and use the adult collection.  Those were daunting stairs (the place had at least 10 foot ceilings) for a 9 year old kid to climb.  The psychological barrier of putting the adult collection upstairs was immense (in addition to giving the librarians a choke point to control access!).  But I climbed them, and discovered Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Alexander Dumas and all sorts of other fascinating authors.  This was before libraries put plastic covers on books, so the covers of the books in my bicycle basket were always a little scuffed; I rarely read new books, and I still rarely read new books.  If a bestseller is still considered "interesting" ten years after publication, I may consider it.

Oddly, this dislike of new books is why I rarely go to libraries any more, although I always vote for library funding.  Libraries have to carry the new books and they only have so much room; so if you like older authors, as I do, you have to collect them yourself.  My collection of early-to-mid 20th century detective stories is better than any library's I've seen in recent years.  Also, of course, libraries now can barely keep their doors open.  We are cutting our own throats, as a democracy, if we restrict access to public libraries.  I wish I thought we would wake up and realize this.

Childhood Solitude

The latest edition of Smithsonian magazine has a fascinating article by Joyce Carol Oates, entitled Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again, in which she reminisces about her childhood in upstate New York, next to the Erie Canal.  I read it with increasing interest as I realized how much my own childhood had in common with hers.  She's eight years older than I am, so her childhood was in the 1940s while mine was in the 1950s, but our experience was very similar, although she grew up on a working farm in New York state and I grew up in a small California town, Napa.  It's a fascinating article and I won't try to quote it in depth - go read it yourself, it's worth your time.  But something struck me that I want to talk about.

She spoke of all the time she was able to be alone, to explore the woods and fields near her home, and of walking alone to school.  For some years she actually rode a Greyhound bus seven miles to school in a nearby town, standing alone by the highway to wait for it. 

I too remember walking alone to school, even to elementary school:  up the long block of E Street, past York Street to the short blocks of Georgia and Spencer Streets, across Jefferson (a major street, I was to be very careful and look both ways as there was no stop sign), up long kitty-cornered Legion Avenue, then left on Brown Street, past the winery warehouse, and over to Lincoln School.  No one thought anything of a ten year old child walking to school alone in 1956, a point Ms. Oates also makes.  The only time I had to take a bus to school (NOT a Greyhound!) was to junior high; I attended two different junior highs, both too far across town to walk to.  I don't remember why I had to change junior high schools.  But the high school, again, was within walking distance, six blocks down York Street.

I'm sure some parents now allow their children time to go out alone and discover who they are and what they can do; but the children attending the elementary school in my neighborhood are only rarely alone.  Usually they have Mom or Dad or both; often the entire family.  And many of them don't walk; the cars clog my neighborhood streets as parents drop children off or pick them up, and the parking spaces fill up with SUVs and minivans. 

I always liked to go out and walk along the railroad track, looking at the unbuilt world, more than I liked walking on the sidewalks.  I walked on the sidewalks to get places; I walked on the railroad track to think.  I spent as much time as I could around "the creek," another good place to think - I learned much later that it was Napa Creek, a major tributary of the Napa River.  It's built up now, and the railroad track is a 4 lane street, but the area I lived in, south of the old High School, was semi-rural then; I remember before the sidewalks went in, when the entire area was bisected by an active railroad, that ran freight cars past our house; the tracks crossed the creek on a wooden trestle, massive wooden supports dripping congealed black tar.  Of course we put pennies on the tracks to see them mashed flat, but after a few pennies it loses its fascination. 

The creek was across an alley and a field; in the first 10 years or so of my life there, the field was actually farmed by a man called Mr. Massa (or Massey?), who plowed it with a horse, a big black mare (if I remember right) with a white blaze.  The horse lived in a pen next to a big fig tree, and we used to go and feed it figs, although we weren't supposed to go on Mr. Massa's property.  I don't know if feeding the horse convinced me that figs weren't "people food" or if I subconsciously thought that figs belonged to Mr. Massa, but it was forty years before I tasted them and realized that I love figs! 

Behind Mr. Massa's field was the creek, which my dad pronounced "crick."  The creek fascinated me because it was wild.  No houses faced on it where I lived.  It was screened by a row of trees and blackberry bushes, and when you scrambled down into its 20 foot deep bed, you were alone.  Of course we weren't supposed to go there, especially alone.  It was the resort, we were told, of "tramps," although I never saw anyone but an occasional neighborhood kid.  There was a rope swing on one of the big old trees, over the only really deep pool.  The later in the year, the lower ran the creek, until September or October when it was down to a few stagnant, scummy pools.  In a rainy winter, those 20 foot banks ran brimful of muddy, fast-moving water, and it was dangerous; we didn't go there in winter.  Farther downstream, people had built houses next to the creek, and winter storms undercut some of them badly - I don't recall if one ever actually washed away, but I've seen some that had to be abandoned or moved.

I envy Ms. Oates her Erie Canal.  I would have loved to have an actual canal to look at, with real boats on it, when I was a child.  But I made do with "the creek."  Unlike Ms. Oates, I didn't explore the town, but I had my own little patch of wild at the creek, to go and be alone in.  I wonder how a child can grow up today with no chance to spend time alone, thinking.