Changing from History to Music as a Teaching Career

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

     

     When I was a little kid of maybe five or six, living on the farm in southeastern South Dakota, there was a family named Johnson somehow mixed in with all the Pluckers, DeVries's, Rippentrops, Tellinghuisens, Hoogestraats and others with German or Dutch names.  This Johnson family was related to us Pluckers by virtue of a Plucker woman having married a Johnson. 

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     As it happened, three of their sons were interested in singing in a quartet.  What they lacked was a low bass, so my dad was recruited into singing with them, and thus became an honorary Johnson, a member of the "Johnson Quartet".  After all he was a first cousin.   These four formed a rather good amateur group; they had good voices, good ears, and all had a smattering of music note reading.  When they rehearsed at each other's houses the wives came along, but my sister and I were the only children.  So we came along too, and had a marvelous time with the Johnson wives who were childless, but they always had goodies for us and fussed over us while the men were busy singing.

     The singing could be heard all over the house, and I was enraptured by it, even as young as I was.  This quartet was a most unusual group, as South Dakota farmers as a rule did not sing, other than a bit of growling through the church hymns.  So not only was the music live, spirited, and quite good, it was totally different from any other kind of music we might hear.  Any music at all was hard to come by, as not many people had a battery powered radio; there were a few old-fashioned wind-up phonographs, but nothing that sounded at all life-like.  Music sung in church could not compete with the tunes the quartet sang, "Juanita", "I been Working on the Railroad", "Old MacDonald", "Standin' in the Need of Prayer".  I loved the sound of these men and my idea of heaven at that time was to sing in a similar quartet of men.

     The instrumental music program at Lennox High School had been dropped because of World War II, and so the music consisted of boys, girls, and mixed singing groups.  Our wonderful young lady English-and-music teacher picked four of us guys out of the choir, and we were to be a quartet.  She was able to get us to sing together well enough to be "in demand", and we sang out of town several times.  Once we sang at the State Hospital for the Insane at Yankton and once at the State Penitentiary at Sioux Falls where I lagged too far behind, missed the timing on the time lock at the main gate and spent about ten minutes locked up in the South Dakota State Penitentiary. 

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     But people graduate, and scatter as did our high school quartet.  The next quartet was an improvising quartet in the ASTRP at Brookings (mentioned before in one of these papers)where we had fun singing both respectable and bawdy songs.  Following that, in the Korean war, I luckily landed in a Special Service troop entertainment company, spending some of my time singing in a barbershop quartet.  The troops that we sang for were polite and gave us applause, but I know they wished we had been girls.

     So all these quartet experiences were great fun and I hoped to be able to dabble in music like that for the rest of my life.  But the quartet experience that was to change me from a mere dabbler in music was caused by a seating arrangement.  Virtually every student at South Dakota State College (now University) was required to take "Development of Civilization", History 1a and 1b, taught by Dr. Parker.  These classes were large and Dr. Parker had an elaborate system of taking roll that was dependent on each student being seated alphabetically and occupying that seat for the entire quarter.  It turned out that for both Dev Civ 1a and 1b, Palmer was seated next to Plucker.  Dwight Palmer was the best first tenor on the campus.  Yes, he was interested in quartet singing, and he was a competent pianist.  He knew a fine bass singer, Vernyl Pederson, and Vernyl knew a good second tenor, Don Eng.  We did a good bit of singing both on and off campus at banquets and other gatherings, and ultimately got the title of The Statesmen quartet.  After graduation we got together several times through the years until the deaths of Dwight and Vernyl.

     The insignificant event was the alphabetical seating in Dr. Parker's class, which had the effect of putting the Statesmen together.  My major, which had been history, eventually changed to music and a life devoted to teaching music.  The event of overwhelming significance was that there were no Johnson low basses, and my dad was able complete the Johnson Quartet.