2. Growing Up
I came into a family that already had children. My sister Mary Lee
had arrived ten years before I did, and Jo had come four years
after her.
I was happy having older sisters. They read me Pogo from the
funny papers and Madeline from the public library. They told me
jokes, even if I did not always understand them right away. Mary Lee
told me a knock-knock joke when I was six that I did not
understand
until I was thirty-six. The chronology is astonishing, but
right: I was
six, because Eisenhower was president, and I was thirty-six
because both my children had been born.
Both of my sisters went away to college at
Birmingham-Southern. In the case of Mary Lee, this did not help
me at all, for I was too young to follow. But when Jo went, I
was old enough to ride the bus down to see her. I liked this
very much. It felt collegiate to see an avant-garde play
on campus, and to go into Smith and Hardwick Book Store, and to
eat barbecue and lemon pie at Ollie’s.
When my turn came to go to college, I went to Indiana University to study music. My parents
drove me up there in the car. I remember their parting advice as
they left me in the dormitory. My father said, “Now, Steve, some people think that Sunday is
their only day to sleep late. But Sunday is their only day to go
to church.” Then my mother said, “Now, Steve, I want you to get up every
morning and eat a good breakfast and stay regular.”
I loved my music studies, but being in the
Midwest
bothered me. It seemed to me like being on another planet.
Everyone talked with an accent, and they were always in a big
hurry about everything.
Then I went to the University of Alabama
and studied music some more. I think at both
Indiana
and Alabama
I got really good teaching.
One of my teachers at
Alabama, David Cohen, took me to his
house one time. His study had newspapers glued to the wall like
wallpaper. He showed me his electric eraser. In those days,
notation was all done by hand, and we had all kinds of tricks
for correcting mistakes.
Dr. Cohen gave me a pen nib which I still have, the
old-fashioned kind that you put in a pen holder and dip into an
ink well. It is a special kind of pen and was designed by a man
named George W. Hughes. His name is stamped right onto the nib.
It is made especially for writing music notes. You can turn the
pen one way and make the note-heads, and then turn it the other
way and make the stems. It is very fast, using this pen. I once
used it to copy, in a short time, a music manuscript for another
professor, and he paid me enough money to buy a new plaid coat
from J. C. Penney.
After four years of this sort of thing, I graduated with a
bachelor of music degree with a major in composition.
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