Influence 103

We stayed in Santa Paula and I attended East School through third grade, walking to school most of the time, as was common in those more innocent days. School, for the most part, was pretty good in those years, and I spent a lot of time playing with other kids on Stanford Street... the Pitts brothers across the street and a girl my age who lived down the street whose name I can't remember right now.

The summer of 1959 we moved to a new house in south Oxnard located in a tract of homes that had been a lemon orchard just a year before. Hueneme High School was around the corner to the south, and E.O. Green Jr High was built a year or so later just to the north of us. However, that first year I rode the school bus for the first time and attended Ansgar Larsen School, a K-6 school not too far from our house, but across a major road... hence the bus.

My 4th grade teacher was Mrs Schneider, and she's the lady who really introduced me to music. We sang in her class everyday... and we sang a lot. I still remember some verses to some of the songs we sang. She taught all us boys that it was OK... expected actually... to sing in our "little boy" voices. So, sing we did... with enthusiasm... lots of fun. We had the "boy's choir" sound that's so cool, and it was "OK" for all the guys to sing... athletes, bullies, everybody. The girls sang too, but Mrs Schneider really liked all us boys.

She prepared us so well that we even got invited to sing for things like PTA or teacher gatherings. We must have impressed someone because the next school year the district folks pulled all of us back together (some, including me, were even at other schools) to go sing with Mrs Schneider at the Ventura County Fair. I even had a solo... along with my best friend, Russell.

I may have grown a love for music anyway, but I gotta thank Mrs Schneider for planting that seed.