Monday Meanderings - 1.1.2018

Let me be among the very first to wish each of you a Happy New Year. That assumes that you were not - like I was not - among the revelers who stayed up to welcome in 2018 a few hours ago. My wish for you is that the new year far surpasses the old year in grace, peace and prosperity.

A bit of nostalgia and looking back - way back - as we get ready to face the new year, if I may.

I am a member of a Facebook group labeled "Remember In Breckenridge" and the posts are most often pictures of long-gone business establishments and now much-older people in my hometown in North central Texas. These postings invoke comments like "I remember that (cafe/service station/grocery store), but wasn't it across from (some other location)?"

A recent post was a link to a very well-done YouTube video made up of photos and recordings from a visit by the Breckenridge Boys' Choir to the White House in 1962.

I was a member of the Breckenridge Boys' Choir at its formation some 10 years earlier (long before they gained the reputation that would get them invited to the White House). Gwen Dean, an accomplished organist and choir director in Breckenridge, was familiar with the popular European concept of a chorus featuring the pure soprano of young boys whose voices had not yet changed with puberty.

Her model was the Vienna Boys' Choir that dated to the middle ages. I'm guessing that that Gwen was a woman of great vision if she held to that model while working with the likes of me and my choir mates in less-than culturally developed Breckenridge, Texas.

The "Remember In Breckenridge" YouTube clip features a montage of photos of the choir during the visit to Washington and of the performance for President and Mrs. Kennedy, as well as the welcome by the President and the entirety of the program they presented. It's a nice video, but I mostly skimmed it - this took place some 8 years after I was a member and apart from Mrs. Dean, I didn't know... Wait! Was that Richard Wood in that photo? Yes, and there's Marjorie!

I quickly checked the roster of performers, and there was Steve Wood, listed as a Tenor (by that time, the group had expanded to a more traditional choir; there was not an endless supply of pre-pubescent boys in Breckenridge, Texas).

Richard and Marjorie, and their children, Steve and Connie, were close family friends; the initial relationship was through the little church we attended and later included vacationing together in camping trips across the western portion of the United States. Connie and Steve were just a few years younger and we had a ball on those trips.

At one camp in Yellowstone, after we had wandered down to the village one evening, Steve ran ahead of us, playfully shouting, "There's a bear in our camp!" Moments later he came zooming back, screaming, "There IS A BEAR in our camp!" Mr. Bear made off with only some lunch meat when Pops and Richard shooed him away. I think Steve and I were up a tree at that point.

Great memories of good friends.