LITTLE ROCK — I was just a bystander and had nothing to do with it. That much should be made clear from the first. Yes, it was a most improbable occurrence. But I can testify it took place. I was there. And was as awestruck as everybody else.
It wouldn’t have been unusual in Dallas or New York. Or in any of the country’s great metropolitan centers, But this took place some 25 years ago in Pine Bluff, Arkansas-population of about 60,000 back then. A small, old Southern river town that was getting smaller all the time. As small, old Southern river towns will.
It happened on the night of October 10th, 1987. At the Pine Bluff Convention Center. The curtain went up, the musicians were all in their places, the conductor lifted his baton, and the Pine Bluff Symphony Orchestra began its inaugural concert-and its history.
Yes, improbable.
Just as improbable, a quarter of a century later, the music goes on in Pine Bluff.
So on another splendid October night, supporters of the orchestra gathered for a gala dinner to celebrate the orchestra’s silver anniversary.
What a night. It was a combination of home town reunion, celebration of the past, and the beginning of the orchestra’s next some 25 years. It was good to see so many familiar faces. Well, most of them.
There was much talk of absent friends, for time takes its toll. Yet nothing good is ever lost. The light from distant stars continues to shine long after they themselves are gone.
I had been present at the creation of the orchestra, but only by happenstance. I was the husband of one of the founders. And husbands are just bystanders when a group of Southern women determines to do the improbable. And, being Southern women, proceed to do it.
One day a few of them decided that what Pine Bluff, Ark., needed was a symphony orchestra. Because how else would all these promising young musicians in the public schools get to play in a symphony? By now there’s no telling how many college scholarships in music have come out of Pine Bluff’s strings program and the orchestra it led to.
Until I read the history of this orchestra the other day, I had only the sketchiest idea of how it had all come about. All I knew was that one day back in the 1980s I wandered into the back bedroom and found it full of fund-raising letters for, of all things, a symphony orchestra in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
Yes, an improbable idea.
But these ladies made it a reality. Which was just like ’em. What they decided on, they did.
It started with Ellen Nuckolls and couple of other music teachers in the Pine Bluff public schools-Ellen Stutchman and Jane Huffstettler. They in turn broached the idea to Carolyn Greenberg.
They knew their woman.
You’d have to have known Carolyn yourself to understand why she was the perfect choice.
She had this mellifluous voice deep out of the heart of Texas-Waco, to be precise-and this beatific smile.
Culturally, I’d say she was a cross between Patsy Cline and Van Cliburn. She could arm rassle a bass fiddle into the back of her old station wagon for a morning trip with the youth orchestra, return in time to conjugate some Latin verbs, and then prepare a Passover seder that night. All the while reading an English murder mystery, probably one by Dorothy Sayers or maybe Sarah Caudwell. They still line the shelves downstairs in the library she left behind.
It was all in a day’s work for a Pine Bluff matron. And still is. Busy young mothers in small towns everywhere will understand.
When we left Pine Bluff a few years later, somebody-I think it was Jay Bradford-said something that’s stayed with me: “Many of us are going to miss Paul,’’ he said politely. “Everybody’s gonna miss Carolyn.”Most impressive of all, Carolyn thought everybody was just as nice as she was. And when it was she who approached them, they were. Regardless of race, creed, color, national origin or personal temperament.
When it came to raising funds for this unlikely endeavor, Carolyn in turn made a perfect choice of her own. She recruited the ever gracious Diane Ayers, wife of W.E. Ayers, a local banker with Southern manners, good sense and a way of getting good things done without calling attention to himself. I still think of him as Pine Bluff’s own George Bailey. It’s a wonderful life.
The rest was history-and music.
Founding a symphony is quite a feat. Keeping it going is a greater one. The real heroes and heroines of this story are all the folks in Pine Bluff who have supported their own symphony orchestra over the past quarter of a century.
I used to go to Rotary luncheons and listen to visiting speakers who’d left town years ago come back to tell the home folk what all we should do to improve the place so as to bring it up to their standards.
And I resolved never, never to be one of those people.
Instead, the orchestra’s 25th year was the perfect opportunity for Pine Bluff to celebrate itself. As it should.
We don’t celebrate ourselves nearly enough here in Arkansas. Maybe it’s a holdover from our old inferiority complex. But that complex is fading fast. And has good reason to. To realize why, all we have to do is wake up and listen to the music.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial, Pages 20 on 10/26/2011