Street Gang (31 page)

And so, with hummingbirds darting overhead, Loretta would head up to the stand and belt out show tunes. “I used to be out there singing ‘Another Opening, Another Show,’ and the people passing by would say, ‘Oh, look at that little colored girl singing. Let’s stop and see what she’s selling.’ ”

She was, in many ways, hard to ignore. “The Moores were one of only three black families in Paw Paw,” said town historian Susan Erion. “The races didn’t mix much here back in the early 1950s, sad to say.”

While other children spent their free time fishing for walleye and perch at Maple Lake, Loretta went to the library. One summer, she read a set of encyclopedias, A to Z. “Nobody ever had to say get on the school bus,” she said. “I was the first one in line.” As a teen, Loretta worked summers as a mother’s helper, babysitter, and day camp counselor. The harvest couldn’t come soon enough. “I liked the fall because that meant everything that grew up out of the ground we had already sold, put out in a basket or jar, peeled or fed to the hogs,” she said.

Though Loretta demonstrated ample talent in dance during tryouts for cheerleading at Paw Paw High, she was never chosen. Once, when she auditioned for drum majorette, a judge told her she lacked a sense of rhythm. It was, she said, a preposterous decision, and to this day, she ruefully recalls the adjudicator’s response when she questioned his eye for talent. “Next,” he said.

After graduation from Western Michigan University with an education degree, Loretta gave herself six months to make it in New York City. Half a year would pass, and then another. “It seemed like every time it was just about time to go back to Michigan, something would happen to encourage me enough to stay for six more months.” By day, she was substitute teaching at junior high schools in Harlem and the South Bronx, tough duty for a young teacher with little experience. “Junior high sub jobs were always available,” she said. “The kids tend to burn out subs pretty fast.” Loretta used her skills as an entertainer to tame unruly teens. Her classroom was always the noisiest, but it was filled with positive energy and excitement. “I was always an actor-singer who happened to be teaching,” she said. “We had a lot of screaming teachers around, but I was not about to leave my high notes up in the classroom. I saved them for the audition at 4:15. I didn’t have a last-period class, so I would sneak out at 1:30 as some of the kids were sneaking out.”

Loretta married Pete Long, the landmark Apollo Theatre’s assistant manager. She may be one of the few actresses ever to admit turning down a Broadway musical directed by Bob Fosse to sing in a supermarket. “I got chosen for a role in the chorus of
Sweet Charity
,” she recalled, “and it was a hard audition because Fosse was as tough on his singers as he was on his dancers. You had to be able to sing and move. He wanted somebody to replace a singer and needed me to start in two days. But I had already been rehearsing for a lead role in a Roundabout Theatre production,” a 1930s-vintage revue called
Pins and Needles
. Back then the Roundabout was housed in the ground floor of the Chelsea Consumers Co-Op Supermarket on West Twenty-sixth Street.
Pins and Needles
was the amateur company’s fourth production, and patrons entered through the same electric-eye door as grocery shoppers. Tickets were priced at two fifty for the two-act musical.

Loretta had a dilemma. “These are the career decisions you sometimes have to make as an actor,” she said. “Do I take a part in the chorus on Broadway or a leading role off-Broadway?” She chose the latter. “When I walked away from
Sweet Charity
, Fosse couldn’t believe it,” Loretta said, dismissing her with “Good luck in the basement of the supermarket.”

But in a shining review of
Pins and Needles
in the
New York Times
, reviewer Dan Sullivan wrote, “Miss Long enjoys being alive so much that an evening with her is a spring tonic.”

Loretta may have missed
Sweet Charity
, but that ink in the
Times
was sweet redemption.

 

Loretta Mae Long, that resourceful farm girl from Paw Paw, arrived at the auditions for “Susan” ready to belt out a show tune or two. By 1969, the singer-actress had a great gig as cohost of
Soul!
, a weekly variety showcase on WNET that provided television exposure to top talent appearing at the Apollo, in Harlem.
²

During a lull one day while taping, Loretta noticed that
Soul’
s set designer, Charles Rosen, had brought in to work a scale model of another project he had undertaken. The mock-up was a miniaturization of an inner-city block, with brownstones, a playground, and little stores. “Charles had twin three-year-old boys at the time, and I thought he was making them a present,” Long said. Rosen explained that Jon Stone, a classmate at Yale’s drama school and a colleague on
Hey, Cinderella
, had enlisted him to build the set for an experimental children’s show.

“You’re a teacher, right?” Rosen said to Long. “This show is going to be about teaching preschoolers. You need to know about it.”

Long shook her head.

“Why are you taking that attitude?” Rosen asked.

Long explained that she abhorred television targeted at younger children, especially
Romper Room
. “Let’s all be good do-bees,” she said, singsong style. “That ain’t me.”

“That ain’t us either. Don’t worry, it’s not going to be like that,” Rosen said, sharing some of what Stone had described. “There are going to be four human hosts that will be like educational guides for the children. You should audition.”

Long had good reason to trust Rosen, who had collaborated with her husband on a number of projects and was considered a family friend. When Rosen was single, he and Pete Long would frequent the city’s jazz clubs. “All right,” she said. “I’ll look into it.”

On the day of her audition, Loretta Long gazed at the other women up for a role on
Sesame Street.
Everywhere the eye could see were white folksingers with long straight hair and Gibson six-strings strapped across their shoulders. “This was 1969, and here I was with my big hair, my flaming red fingernails, my short skirt, and my show tunes,” Long said. “I looked like Angela Davis, I did
not
look like Joan Baez.”

Checking a clipboard, a production coordinator approached Long. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“I’m here to audition,” Long said.

“But where’s your guitar?”

Long said, “Oh, I don’t play guitar.”

The coordinator pointed toward the back of the room. “Stand over there, please.”

One after the other, the folksingers strummed. After each performance, Jon Stone, a folk-music aficiando, said, “We’ll be in touch. Thank you.”

Long took it all in, noticing that many of the performers did not know enough to look straight into the television lens as they sang, connecting with an unseen viewer who would be watching later on videotape. A few of the folkies allowed their head to actually sink while they sang, a faceless mop of hair filling the viewfinder.

The crew was about ready to call it a day when a voice shouted out that there was one more woman left to audition.

“Everyone was getting ready to leave and I said, ‘Wait a minute! I sneaked off from my teaching job in the Bronx to sing for you.’ I was going to put a cross-body check on anyone who got in my way.”

“Aw, jeez,” a cameraman said to no one in particular.

Long walked forward with sheet music and asked, “May I talk to the piano player?”

“We didn’t hire one,” the production coordinator said. “Everybody plays guitar but you.”

“But I came to sing,” she said.

Then, in a less than encouraging way, he said, “Okay, sing.”

The cameraman framed Long in the viewfinder and said, “Oh, gawd.”

“And so,” Long recalled, “I laid my little show tunes down and I started clapping my hands, in the best Baptist tradition.”

Long began to sing. “I’m a little teapot short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout.” The cameraman mocked her by placing a crooked arm on his hip and wagging his backside.

She said, “Come on, kids! Everybody sing! Tip me over and pour me out.”

Drawing on her babysitting and camp-counselor experience, Teapot Lady exuded confidence, ebullience, and instant likability. When Ed Palmer tested the performance before an audience of preschoolers, the kids clapped along.

 

Robert Emmett McGrath was five years old in 1937, when his mother taught him the lyrics and melody to “In the Good Old Summertime,” a sheet-music serenade favorite of parlor pianists since its Broadway debut in 1902. Self-taught pianist Flora McGrath was no exception. She roamed the keys of a bulky upright piano that had once belonged to her mother, and it dominated a room in the farmhouse where young Bobby was raised with his two brothers and two sisters.

Because Flora’s husband, Edmund, couldn’t carry a tune, he was pleased beyond measure when he came in from the fields for lunch that afternoon to hear his son Bobby singing on key, with his mother providing accompaniment. It was the first recital for a cheerful Irish tenor who followed his musical muse all the way to
Sesame Street
.

Bobby, later known to countless millions as Bob, was born on a farm that straddled the north-central Illinois towns of Ottawa and Grand Ridge, deep in the bosom of corn, oats, and soybean country, near the confluence of the Fox and Illinois rivers. The McGrath farm was without electricity until around the time Bobby entered first grade. He attended a one-room schoolhouse with his older brother Edmund. “We went to school in a horse and buggy,” McGrath said. “When I tell this to my grandchildren now, it sounds like
Little House on the Prairie
. They can’t believe it.”

When the rural school was shuttered by the time Bobby was ready for third grade, he enrolled at St. Columba school in Ottawa, the town made historic by staging the first of the Lincoln-Douglass debates of 1858. Word quickly spread around Ottawa about the McGrath boy’s talent, and by the age of seven—with private training—Bobby was winning singing competitions in Chicago. By the time he reached high school, the farm kid now known as Bob had his own half-hour radio show on a small downstate station and was winning singing competitions in other states. As the time neared for college, he was considering engineering at the University of Illinois, following the path of brother Edmund. “Out of the blue, a local music club gave me a three-week scholarship to a music camp outside Chicago,” McGrath said. While there, faculty members encouraged him to rethink his college plans. “I did an about-face,” McGrath said, “and ended up going to the University of Michigan as a voice major.” He excelled in his studies, joined the glee club, dabbled in barbershop quartet, and soaked up the classical song literature of the Italian, French, and German repertoire. He blossomed vocally and drank in all that was Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the early 1950s.

To stay afloat financially, he and a fraternity brother worked dinner duty at the Alpha Phi sorority house on Hill Street, mere steps away from the Phi Gamma Delta house where the boys lived.

Bob McGrath washed dishes; Dave Connell waited tables.

 

After graduation from Michigan in 1954 and basic training in Arkansas, Pvt. Bob McGrath prepared to be shipped overseas. “Half the class went to Korea, the other half to Germany.” he said. “I got lucky and went to Germany.”

“I was trained to be a clerk-typist, but I was squirming to get myself attached to the Seventh Army Symphony in Stuttgart, begging on my knees with the guy interviewing me. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘we don’t have permanent slots for vocalists. Instrumentalists, yes.’ ”

McGrath sighed.

But then the corporal looked up from the young private’s service records. “So you went to the University of Michigan, huh? I met a girl in Rome last year from Michigan.” You wouldn’t know Cynthia Boyes, would you?” the corporal asked.

McGrath half smiled, recalling his sorority-house dishwashing duty. “As a matter of fact, I do,” he said. “She pledged Alpha Phi. Nice girl.”

The corporal raised one eyebrow and rummaged through McGrath’s orders. “Now, where did you say you wanted to go?”

McGrath all but broke into a chorus of “The Victors.”

His revised, oxymoronic orders placed him on “permanent temporary duty” at Seventh Army headquarters in Stuttgart, where he led a local church choir and sang in an army quartet that toured France.

After a two-year army stint, McGrath decided to pursue a master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music. “I had a wonderful first day in New York,” McGrath recalled. A chaplain friend had given him the name and phone number of a former roommate, with instructions to look him up and ask for a drink. “I knocked on his door and he said, ‘So what are you up to?’ I explained that I’d come to New York to go back to school, but I needed a place to live and a job. He sent me across the street to St. Thomas More Catholic church on East Eighty-ninth Street, where Bishop Philip J. Furlong gave me a job in a quartet that sang at Sunday services. He thought I looked pathetic, like I didn’t know where my next meal would come from. The bishop said, ‘I’ll pay you double what I’m paying the other lads.’

“I said, ‘I’m looking for a place to stay, Bishop. Do you know anyone in the parish who might have an empty room?’

“The bishop said, ‘St. David’s Boys’ School is just a half block away. I think the Latin teacher there just got married, and he had lived on the top floor of the school.’ ”

McGrath recalled, “I walked over and sort of stumbled through an interview with the headmaster, David Hume. He listened, then finally said, in a get-to-the-point kind of way, ‘What you’re looking for is a free sack, right?’

“I said, ‘Well . . . something like that.’

“So we made an arrangement,” McGrath said. “I taught there for a couple of years, leading the choir and teaching music appreciation and theory. I ate lunch in the faculty dining area, and David Hume suggested that if I sweet-talked the cook, I’d get all I could eat later in the day. She used to set aside something for me every night for dinner.