". . . ICE ENCRUSTED LITTLE CITY . . ."

Howard Cosell's

"…ice encrusted little city on the shores of Lake Michigan"

By

Dr. Robert E. Plucker

     When I took the teaching job in Winona, Minnesota back in l952, I was not where I thought I wanted to be in the teaching profession.  I was in a junior high school instead of a senior high, I was to teach English as my main job, not history, and music was to be a sideline.  I was passed over for the newly opened senior high music position, and after I had been pressed into teaching general science plus remedial reading, I'd had enough.  I resigned and got what I thought might be a dream job in Green Bay, teaching choral music, grades nine through twelve.

            In Green Bay there were the usual adjustments to a new teacher; the band man who had formerly handled the mixed chorus "didn't do it that way", the choir kids claimed "of course we always ate our lunch during choir class", the usual difficult kids who got put into choir because even the shop teachers wouldn't take them, and so on.  The experienced choir teacher expects all this and deals with it.  But one quirk about music teaching in Green Bay was totally unforeseen by me.

            I had come to the job at the beginning of the school year, September, and was told early on, that I would be expected to have the choir ready to perform in a Christmas concert at the Brown County Arena, which would be on live television, on a Sunday afternoon in December.  It was a Big Deal, as the two high schools in Green Bay were to perform as well as several other smaller high schools in Brown County.  I worked as hard as I could getting my people all ready to sing the four variations of the chorale "Jesu Priceless Treasure" from that same motet by J. S. Bach.  The kids were truly dubious at the start, about their willingness and ability to sing the music of Herr Bach, a capella, but by the day of the concert they were ready.  I was ready.  More than ready because I wanted to show that West High School choirs could sing genuine choral literature, and were not confined to "Jingle Bell Rock" or "Rudolph the Red-nosed".  Because the show was to be televised live (they still did local live television on WBAY in 1960), I was sure that everything would be timed to the second.

            The choirs assembled in their assigned places, there was some warming up of voices, the Arena clock showed 2:00 pm and I figured we would start.  I was wrong; nobody said "go", nobody said anything.  Why were we there??  2:30 pm, half-an-hour late.  What in the world were we waiting for?  Finally somebody realized that I DIDN'T KNOW that we had to wait for the Packer football game to finish.  I had to have been the only person in Green Bay who didn't know that of course you wait for the end of the game, no matter if it is a home game or away.  Up to that point I was only barely aware that the National Football League existed, but now I had been hit over the head with it.  Yes, the big concert did take place, about an hour late, and West High did sing Bach's music quite well.

            As the year went on, and as I became much more acquainted with my football fan neighbors, and found that several of the Packer players including Bart Starr attended my church, I began to see the light.  Yes, even Johann Sebastian Bach would have to wait, in Green Bay, for the game to finish.  I became an avid Packer fan; I even found a guy who had enough influence to get me a season ticket.  Back then, you couldn't buy a season ticket unless you had some kind of an "in".  By my second year in Green Bay I would have been horrified to have had a Packer game cut short on TV by a mere Christmas show featuring all the high school choirs in the state.  I am still a Packer fan even though I left Green Bay for good in 1965.