It was June of 1959. I was a 17-year-old tuba player. My father and I rode together in our 1952 Dodge, with him at the wheel. I had passed Driver’s Education the year before, using the new 1958 Chevy with automatic transmission leased to my high school east of Los Angeles. I didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission car, and my Dad wasn’t about to let me learn on the (one and only) family car. Not that he could afford to pay the increased insurance – I would have had to pay it out of my paper route income, I guess now with hindsight, but the subject never came up. It was out of the question, and I would eventually learn to drive standard transmission jeeps and trucks in Alaska while working for my Uncle (Sam, that is, in the Army). But that is getting ahead of the story.
My Dad drove me from blue-collar San Gabriel to rich Santa Barbara. There was about 100 miles in distance between the two old Franciscan mission towns, but it was a world away. The tuba I borrowed from my high school was in the trunk. We had made that trip a few months earlier, when I had performed with the California All-State High School Symphony. At that time, I had auditioned for and received a full scholarship to attend and be the tuba player in the orchestra of the Music Academy of the West.
The Music Academy was primarily a school for vocal students of operatic music year-round, run by the aging German diva soprano Lotte Lehmann. In the summer, it expanded to include high school and college instrumental students and attracted top level instructors with the enticement of free luxury housing on the beach in Santa Barbara. The summer school was the closest thing on the West Coast to the summer music schools in Tanglewood, Massachusetts and Interlochen, Michigan, with the added enticement of summer at a first class beach resort.
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