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The glee club, on the bus back from Worcester, England, to London, held a meeting, and they decided to go to California the next year. And so happily, upon returning to WPI, we asked the women from Wheelock College if they’d like to join us. The men said, "Women on tour?" The women said, "Men on tour?" - the answer was, "wonderful!" - the plans began, and then the controversy began. Little did I know that there had been a meeting while I was in Europe at Oxford, between the officers of the club and the president of the college, George Hazzard - apparently, at that meeting, the officers had promised to not go on another tour for a few years if they were allowed to go to England. YOU CAN SEE THIS WAS GOING TO CREATE A PROBLEM. President Hazzard called me and told me this had happened, and here we were planning on going to California. I called in the officers of the club and the president of the club assured me that no such promise had been given. A dilemma. Two different stories. So, I saw the president of the college; neither he nor the officers of the club had told me about this meeting, so the promise to the club and the arrangements went forward.

After all the delays and arguments, we solved the problem of money and the fact of going, at the last minute. How did we do that? It so happened that our lead baritone was a tall, skinny fellow named Craig Skinner. His father was the vice president of operations for United Airlines, one of the largest air carriers in the nation. He procured for us a charter plane that was making a shuttle from New York to Los Angeles, and was going to be empty - SO - he filled it with us and sent it out of Boston. We got to Logan on a stormy day, and there was nothing but grumbling out of the men. They were not in a good psyche. Sure enough, the plane was there, we got on, and we left, arriving in California in the late morning. As we got on buses to our hotel in Anaheim, the bitching did not stop: "Look at the smog!" "What are we doing here?" But there were a few happy remarks: "Palm trees!" "No snow!" "Green grass!" When we got to the hotel, I laid down the law: "We have a concert this evening at M.I.T. with just the men. I want you all to take a nap; it’s been a long day. There will be a nap between 2 and 3 in the afternoon." We registered, and I dutifully took a nap, only to be awakened by yells and screams of pure delight. In my skimpy bathrobe, I went out to the second floor balcony and took a look at the outside pool, which was jammed with men and women of both clubs, frolicking, jumping, cavorting with great glee (not the glee of the glee club) in the swimming pool. I yelled, "What happened to the afternoon nap?!" only to be met by waves and cheers from the men, who completely ignored me. So much for "grumpy" and "look at the smog!"

The concert at M.I.T. was for the faculty after their annual banquet in their faculty club. My counterpart at M.I.T., Olaf Frodsham, had arranged for us to sing for them, and had arranged the large dining room with a stage at the end just for us. Now, mind you, this was not a competition between the Caltech Glee Club and the WPI Glee Club, but this beautiful room had carpets that were three inches deep, all the windows were hung in thick, velvet drapery, and the acoustics didn't exist. I said, "Olaf, how do you sing in this room?" to which with a grin he replied, "We don't." He set us up! But the concert went forward and with much applause from the Caltech faculty.

Two incidents on this tour I can't keep to myself. We were to perform a Sunday afternoon concert at the Episcopal Cathedral which held the then-largest organ in California. We were singing the Te Deum of Peeters with the brass choir who was with us, timpani, and Minasian at the organ. Everything went very well, until the last chord of the Te Deum - the triple forte chord - at which point Minasian lost his balance at the organ console, slipped, and fell all over the keyboards and the pedals, with the instrument at full organ. The sound was enormous. Such a wonderful dissonance could only have been done by such a very large person. Further in the saga of Minasian, we went to Disneyland. Thirty of us. Having gotten there, Minasian spotted Donald Duck and said, while pointing over Donald's head, "Look! Donald Duck!!" Donald Duck happened to be with Mickey Mouse at that point, and Manasian kept on shouting, "Look! Donald Duck!!" at which point Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse disappeared around a corner, with Minasian in hot pursuit. There was a pause, and Minasian came back with a puzzled look on his face, and said, "Do you know what Donald Duck just said to me?" At which point thirty people said, "No, tell us!" "Donald Duck just told me to go fuck off." Much to the delight of everybody.

The return home from Los Angeles is memorable in the Glee Club annals. First, the whole ensemble - men from WPI, women from Wheelock - in a waiting moment for the plane (recall that we had our own plane!), spontaneously burst into "Saints Bound for Glory" by themselves, and what with the splendid acoustics of that terminal, they stopped the entire passenger traffic. It fell dead until they finished, at which point there was a wonderful round of applause. We got onto the plane, where cocktails awaited us. (Remember, the drinking age was 18) By the time we got over Arizona, something went wrong: an engine stopped. It was night, and the pilot got on the phone and said, "We are going to make an emergency landing at St. Louis." Sure enough, as we touched down into St. Louis, all the emergency vehicles were waiting for us, and the runway was foamed. I still remember when the doors opened, there was the manager of the whole Central American district of United Airlines, waiting for us in his bedroom slippers and bathrobe, shouting, "Get off! Get off! There's another plane waiting for you!" Remember, the son of the vice president was onboard.

The years progressed, and the men became very involved with exchange concerts with Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Regis, etc. However, we were grounded. Before we traveled again, we had to assure the administration that we had enough money, and that touring was an admirable thing to do for the college. (What a change from then to today, when we are global in every aspect!) Regis College invited us to go on a tour with them to Germany - and Austria. For me, it was back to Germany where I had spent two WONDERFUL years in the Army. We began in my old haunts of Munich, and then into Austria for a concert in Salzburg, the home of Mozart. The highlight of this tour, however, was the concert in Vienna, where a large suburb Church hosted us. The organ was out of tune. Two hours before the concert, there was Andreas von Heune (one of the basses) and I, tuning the organ. After the concert was over, and during a lovely reception, the choirmaster asked me how we were able to sing these "American spirituals." I said, "We just do them!" He said. "They're the rage of Vienna, but every time we do them, they come out sounding like a Strauss waltz."

Speaking of that - the whole crowd, about ninety men and women, went to a Strauss ball, where everyone danced - if you could call it that. The dance floor was so crowded that you could have picked up your feet and still turned to the waltz rhythm. We sang a Bavarian folk song in German at the request of the orchestra, and after it, one Viennese couple said, "We can't get our young people to sing these beautiful folk songs, and the Americans come over here and sing them to us!"

On another tour to Belgium/France, the whole brass choir went with us with Dr. Weeks conducting. The opening concert was at Radio Television, Brussells. It was the first time, and perhaps the only time, that I have ever been in a large concert hall totally equipped for video-radio broadcast, with enough room for a full symphony orchestra, a 140-voice chorale, a pipe organ, and the best Bussendorfer concert grand piano on which I've ever played. The acoustics were not only warm, but everybody could hear everybody else and the sound was full with at least a second-and-a-half acoustic reverberation plus an audience. From there, on to France.

At Caen in Normandy, we were the featured ensemble for the Franco-American Society. The Pope had just come out with a decree that no secular music was to be had in churches. Therefore, the Abbie d'Hormmes (the huge, old abbey church) was forbidden us. However, leave it to the French: they got around this easily! They put us in the new chapel of the hospital, which was twice the size of Alden Hall and in marble. The chapel lacked only one thing - HEAT. The concert went extremely well: people were standing in the aisles, and they invited to a wonderful Franco-American dinner afterwards where there was much heat - in the room and in us! They called it a reception. So about 250 people sat down to this "reception" of an eight-course meal (of French cooking) with about eight different wines. This was their commemoration and thanks for the Battle of Normandy. We couldn't thank them enough because after the peach brandy (made two miles away) which was God knows how many glasses of various wines later, no one in his right mind would have recognized our seventh singing of our National Anthem, nor the French National Anthem (it was at least one glass of wine per National Anthem). At 2:30 in the morning, we were taken on a tour of the old sections of Caen, and to bed by three. Getting up at 6:30 was so easy to do - believe that, and I'll tell you another one. We had to hunt people down. The following concert in Orleans was held in the Church of the Martyrs. The cathedral was closed, and very cold. However, the concert itself went very well, and was sponsored by the same organization - Franco/American - in Orleans. It was during this concert that Jean-Pierre Trevisini (a junior) told me that, "Do you want me to sing like Pavarotti? I can sing like Pavarotti," which I firmly disbelieved and said, "Prove it." During intermission, we went into the rehearsal room, I got to the piano and said, "Sing like Pavarotti." When he did!! I almost fell off my chair. Up to that point in time, he was just another tenor whose main occupation was trying to "serenade" the female French horn player, who was rather pretty. When he sang, I said, "Where the hell has that voice been?" He said, "I didn't know you wanted me to sing like that... I can do that." Years later, he is presently a tenor in the Opera of Paris.

After this concert, the reception was again splendid, but in the town hall, where all the gentry in town were in their finest, and again the many toasts, in French and in English, went back and forth amidst a splendid buffet. The highlight of this tour was High Mass in Notre Dame Cathedral that Sunday. I had heard the choir of Notre Dame, which wasn't terribly great, but while getting into academic gowns and such in the old treasury (now a chapel) of the cathedral, I received a messenger who said, "Come quick! There's a big argument between Dr. Weeks and the cathedral director of music." So there I ran, through the labyrinth of Notre Dame, to the sacristy, where yes! There was an argument between Dr. Weeks and Precentor. One didn't understand English, and the other didn't understand French. Thank God I knew French. It seemed that the cardinal archbishop had forbidden brass music during Lent, and it was Lent. So, everything we had rehearsed the day before which had seemed all right was NOT all right; the brass could not play, and they played so well. That left the Glee Club with two pieces which were for men and brass that we could not sing; however, we did a shrewdy! One motet was for trombones and men, and we hummed the trombone parts and just sang the hell out of it. At the end, when we sang "In That Great Gettin' Up Morning" by Fenno Heath, which the Precentor had chosen, it ends (in eight parts) with the first tenors on high B-flat, the sound rang through Notre Dame and was almost equal in volume to the Great Organ. The whole congregation, about 2000 people, burst into applause.