"Hitting All the Right Notes"

Renee Henderson rehearses with a choir class in November 2009.

HITTING ALL THE RIGHT NOTES

NOVEMBER 2009

Renee Henderson was unaccustomed to teachers not getting what they wanted when their requests were in the best interests of their students. That’s not how her father, a rancher in rural South Dakota and the president of the local school board, had told her it was supposed to be.

“His philosophy was: You just work hard, do the best job you can, and then you go ask the people in charge,” recalled Henderson. “And they would rarely turn the teachers down because they weren’t asking anything exorbitant. They were asking legitimate things that they needed or that would make a difference. I didn’t remember them ever not being granted. So that was what I grew up hearing.”

Consequently, her May 1973 meeting with the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District superintendent, Dr. Jack Hayward, became the source of some consternation for her—and the wellspring of new action.

Henderson, the choir director at Kenai Central High School since 1971, went to Hayward because she had an idea, inspired by the talent level of her musical charges: She wanted to take her choir on a tour of Europe, like the one she had enjoyed when she was a music major at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and she was seeking official permission for her idea before she began serious, detailed planning.

But Hayward disapproved of the time frame she had in mind. Henderson, who was 28 at the time, recalled his terse denial. “He said, ‘How many days do you want to be gone?’ ‘Well, I’d like to miss 11 or 12 school days.’ ‘No.’” He suggested that she try trimming the time down to one week.

Henderson gestures to a student-made poster commemorating the
many choir trips she has led abroad.

Henderson told Hayward that she understood about all that lost class time, but travel to Europe was time consuming. She could see, however, that he was unwilling to budge, so she made a secondary request: “ I said, ‘Well, if I can get it down to that, could I take a nurse?’ ‘Absolutely no. There’s no reason to take a nurse.’ And I said, ‘Is there someone higher than you that I can go see?’ And the look on his face! I just wish that I could have had a picture of his face because he was just totally blown away. But he told me no, and then he said, ‘Well, you could go to the school board.’ And I said, ‘Okay, how do I set that up?’ And he’s still just looking at me aghast. He said, ‘Well, it would have to be through my secretary.’ And I said, ‘Okay. Thank you very much. I’ll do that.’”

Henderson, as people who know her will attest, is not one to stand by in idle contemplation. At the next meeting of the school board, she was on the agenda. Dr. Hayward was in attendance to see how she would fare, and Henderson said he told her beforehand that the board always sided with him. He practically guaranteed that she would not get her way.

But Henderson, although “terrified,” was well prepared. And the board responded by approving her general idea for the tour.

“And then they said, ‘Is there anything else?’ And I said, ‘Well, actually, there are two more things.’ First of all, I happened to glance at Dr. Hayward when they approved it, and he gave me a look that was a killer. And then I thought, ‘Well, I’m up here. I might as well ask the other two questions.’

“So I said, ‘I was wondering if I could take the school nurse from Sears Elementary.’ ‘Well, why do you want a nurse?’ I said, ‘I don’t really know why. It’s just a feeling that I have that they would be a very important person. I think if the students get really homesick, there would be a very calming effect. And if they get sick, then we wouldn’t have to go find a doctor. And we would carry along some medicine.’ And they just thought that was great, so they said, ‘That’s a great idea.’ And I looked at him (Hayward), and he gives me this look that’s like, ‘I can’t believe you’re getting these things.’ Then I said, ‘I wanted to talk to you about the number of days.’ And they’re looking at me, and Hayward is just glaring at me. He is not a happy man at this point. I wasn’t doing it to go against him. I just thought it was a great idea. So I said, ‘I wanted to talk to you about the number of days that we’d miss. You really kind of lose at least two days, and then you feel horrible the first day you’re there, anyhow, because you’re so exhausted from the time change. And so I was wondering if we could be excused for 11 days.’

“And there was an audible gasp. And one of them said, ‘What would be your justification for that?’ I said, ‘Well, probably there isn’t any, but would it be okay to miss as many as, say, the basketball team misses in a season?’ And they looked at each other, and they said, ‘Well, sure.’ ‘Well, the last three years it’s been 13.’ Hayward’s face just drained. He was looking at me: ‘I can’t believe you did that.’ ‘Well sure, 11’ll be fine,’ they said.”

 As it turned out, Hayward’s anger quickly dissipated. But Henderson wasted little time wondering about burned bridges. Over the next two weeks, she applied for the 1975 Rome International Choral Festival, and she sent along a reel-to-reel audio tape of her choir. Then she rehearsed and rehearsed, and awaited a reply.

Diane Neymann stands with a young friend in Rome, 1975.

Many months later, a plain white envelope arrived for her. Inside was an acceptance letter to the festival. “I expected not to be accepted,” she said, although she had still planned to tour Europe, regardless. Acceptance to the festival, she said, was an astonishing bonus.

Without telling her choir about the festival letter, she called for a meeting of choir members and their parents who were interested in participating in a European tour.

“I announced it, and you could have heard the response at Carr’s,” she said. “They were blown away. There wasn’t a person in the room that was anticipating anything like that. Oh, my gosh! You could just feel the electricity. It was an incredible moment.”

Once all the fundraising was done and the arrangements were made, the dream of a European tour became a reality, and this choir from a rural, “culturally isolated” high school in Alaska prepared to take a transatlantic flight and sing in the Vatican.

One of the choir members, Herman Moonin, was from Port Graham and had never been farther north than Kenai. On the choir’s return trip, he would fly at an altitude of 30,000 feet straight over the North Pole.

The tour was to be the first of 13 such overseas adventures for choirs from KCHS, and in looking at this string of successful international ventures, it is ironic that Henderson initially had not wanted to come to Kenai—and that when she did, she came to teach music at Sears Elementary, intended to stay only briefly, and certainly had no interest in directing the choir at the high school.

She had been teaching music in Hutchinson, Minnesota, when Dale Sandahl, then principal of Sears, called in 1971 to offer her a job. Henderson had just signed a new contract to continue working in Hutchinson, but the prospect of Alaska intrigued her, so she told Sandahl that she would do some research on Kenai and call him back.

All she could find was a 1950 Census of Alaska, which stated that Kenai had only 321 residents. “So I called him back and told him, ‘No thank you. I’m not interested at all in going to a tiny little village.’ He said, ‘No, no, no. It’s grown. It’s grown a lot. There’s oil here….’” By 1960, the population of Kenai had more than doubled, and by 1971, Kenai had more than 2,500 residents. Sears Elementary, in fact, had 550 students, largely due to the existence of the Air Force base at nearby Wildwood.

Once Sandahl clarified the situation, Henderson was hooked. “You know,” she told him, “I think I’ll take it for one year.” She broke her contract with Hutchinson and moved north.

Shortly after she began at Sears—pushing her piano on dollies from classroom to classroom because the school had no music room— the music teacher at KCHS became too ill to teach. In October, Henderson was informed that she would be using her prep period and lunch break each day to travel to the high school and be the band and choir director.

“That was quite a shock,” she said. “And I told my new superintendent, no, I wasn’t. And he said, ‘You will, or you won’t have any job.’ That gets your attention.” And so, for about the next 10 years, that’s how it was, except that the high school hired a regular band director so Henderson could focus solely on choir.

She still remembers her first day at KCHS: “They combined an elite, select choir of 17 with a music-appreciation class of 24 kids who had signed up to listen to rock-and-roll 45 records. So I walked in with kids screaming at each other. ‘You can’t sing with us! We are superior!’ And the others were saying, ‘We don’t want to sing! We didn’t sign up to sing! Nobody can make us sing!’ I sat down on the piano bench, and I didn’t say a word for the entire hour.” But the next day she was back, and immediately she began the process of fashioning a real choir, one that in March 1975 would board a plane bound for Europe and the Rome International Choral Festival.

European Tour

In St. Peter’s Basilica, the choirs were rehearsing as part of the festival when Henderson, the choir director, noticed something unusual about a man sitting alone.

 “He was sitting there with this box, and he had a power cord going for what seemed like forever because there’s no places to plug in like we have today. And the building is just so, so big.” St. Peter’s Basilica is, in fact, the largest Christian church in the world and is capable of holding 60,000 people at once.

“So I said to him, ‘What is that?’ And he said, ‘It’s called a cassette recorder.’ I said, ‘Oh, really? I’ve never seen one.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m hoping it works.’” Familiar only with reel-to-reel audio tape, she was understandably curious. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll give you my address, and if it does work, would you see if you could sometime have a copy made? I’d love to see what it sounds like.’ And he said, ‘I will.’” About six months later, Henderson received in the mail a standard white envelope containing a single cassette.

Neymann, Sally Fisher and Lori Tinjum pose before an Italian carving.

“It was so incredible! On one song, the person who was conducting the festival cut off the piece before the ending, and the sound carried. It just carried and carried and carried. And the guy didn’t think about it when he hit the STOP on the tape recorder, but it was 16½ seconds in, and the sound was still going. It was incredible. It just gave you tingles up and down your spine.”

Times and technology have changed, but somewhere, she said, Henderson still has that tape, a treasured memento of earlier times. The memories, too, of that first overseas tour for the KCHS choir are still full and rich in her mind.

The seed of the idea for a tour of Europe was planted in Henderson’s fertile imagination when she first eyeballed the freshmen in her choir and realized the depth of talent there. By the time those newbies were seniors, she had fashioned them—and the students in the years that followed—into a polished, accomplished musical unit.

“This is the finest group of musicians I’ve had the privilege of working with since college,” she told The Cheechako News early in the 1974-75 school year. “We have approximately 40 seniors returning who are the ‘backbone’ for the organization.”

Then, on March 24, 1975, after months of practicing, planning, and fundraising, 88 members of the choir, four teacher chaperones, Sears Elementary School nurse Mary Quesnel, about 20 parents, and Henderson boarded a Northwest Orient jetliner to begin their two-week journey overseas.

They all knew that many, many hours and several connecting flights later, they would land in Rome, compete in the Vatican, sing in historic locales in Florence and Milan, and tour castles and perform in cathedrals in Salzburg, Austria, and in Zurich and Neuchatel, Switzerland.

The plane was understandably abuzz with excitement.

“I remember begging my parents to let me go to Europe,” said Diane (Eymann) Feffer, a KCHS junior at the time. “At first they said no. Then they reluctantly agreed but only under the condition that I earn enough money. I ironed clothes for people in Woodland Subdivision as well as babysat for several families. The final kicker was I brought lunch money to school each day but never spent it. Instead, I plowed it back into my savings account.”

Feffer’s best friend, Sally (Fisher) Tachick, had a similar recollection: “I had to raise half, and my parents matched the

Fisher and Neymann with friend and choir mate Alan Bahr in 1974.

rest. The summer prior to the trip I worked five jobs to earn enough and some spending money. I was thrilled to be going on a trip outside of Alaska with my high school friends and without my parents—big stuff!”

Participants in the tour had had to raise nearly $800 apiece in order to go—the equivalent of about $3,100 today. Henderson estimated at the time that 90 percent of the students had earned the money for the trip by working in various jobs.

Students had also been required to complete all of their homework before departure, and they were all packing homemade uniforms—navy blue trousers, white shirts and red vests for the boys; navy blue full-length skirts, white blouses, and red vests for the girls.

In rehearsals leading up to departure, Henderson had employed the linguistic skills of fellow musician Karolee Hansen, KCHS language teacher Keith Tanaka, and Father Robert Wells to help train her choir in the perfect pronunciation of songs in French, Italian, German and Latin.

At the festival, they competed against and sang with choirs from 16 other schools—four from Italy, and 12 others from the American Midwest and East Coast. Despite the relatively small size of their hometown, KCHS traveled with the largest choir in the festival. In the competition, KCHS finished third out of the seven schools with fewer than 1,000 students, and it was one of only six choirs selected to record performances on Vatican City Radio.

But the choir did far more than just sing. Will Jahrig, a senior on that trip, said, “Every day there was an experience. Every day we did something. Every day we traveled.”

One of Jahrig’s favorite memories came from the canals of Venice. “We took gondola rides, side by side, and we started singing. We were there in the Easter time, and there were crowds, huge crowds. All those public boats, and they piled people on by the hundreds.”

Also in Venice, Jahrig recounted the time that he and three of his buddies found a restaurant that served flour-dipped, fried squid. “I loved ’em. They were wonderful. Alan Bahr and I ate another order. We ate like hogs.”

Will Jahrig, Henderson and Bahr ham it up in Italy.

Almost a decade later, he returned with different companions to that same restaurant, found the same maitre-d’, and ordered several more rounds of fried squid.

Dale Sandahl, one of the chaperones, remembered a night at a hotel in Salzburg when—after staying up until nearly 2 a.m. to do a bed check—he encountered a man at the front desk who had been a prisoner in World War II. Even though neither of them spoke much of the other’s language, they talked about the man’s experiences throughout the remainder of the night—until it was time for Sandahl to start his student wake-up duties.

They returned home in the wee hours of April 7, exhausted but excited. For many, it was the trip of a lifetime. For some, it was only the beginning. Feffer, for instance, credits that tour with changing her life.

“That trip opened up my curiosity and interest for seeing the world,” she said. In her 20s she backpacked for three weeks in Europe, and in her 30s she left a well-paying stockbroker job to live in both Mexico and Spain. Later, she went to work for Cinemark International, opening up theaters in nine different countries in Latin America. “I guess you can say I was hooked on exploring new places, and it all started with that first trip to Europe,” Feffer said.

Margaret Simon, who was the KCHS librarian from its opening day in 1964 until she retired in 1995, also served as a chaperone on the 1975 tour—and on five of Henderson 12 subsequent tours—and she praised Henderson for her efforts.

“It was a beautiful gift that Renee gave to start that program,” Simon said. “I mean, just look how many lives and students and adults in the community she’s touched. It’s fantastic!”

One of those lives was that of Louise (Franzmann) Billaud, a sophomore during the 1975 tour who went on to become a concert pianist, a recording artist, and an assistant professor of music at New River Community College in Dublin, Virginia.

“Her influence on successive generations is truly noteworthy,” said Billaud. “I recall with great excitement what that trip meant to me and to many others. She allowed us to see beyond ourselves, to realize that there was more in the world to discover, musically or otherwise.”

Jahrig, too, said that Henderson’s influence has carried throughout his life. “I liked her (from the beginning) because she was positive. She allowed you to be you, but you had to work as a group in the meantime. I’m so glad that Renee was there so I could be part of something like that.”

Interestingly enough, at the end of that school year, Henderson herself didn’t initially imagine such a continually bright future for the KCHS choir. “Here’s the irony,” she said. “I thought, after graduation in ’75, ‘Oh, man, there’s no reason to come back. I’ll never have a choir so good again.’”

But she stayed—partly, she joked, because she was too broke to leave.

“And every choir since then has been better,” she said. “That first choir gave us such a good kick-off that they set the bar, and the others, the next juniors and seniors, reached that same level. And so every tour, it just moved up a step.”

After that first tour, nothing dissuaded Henderson or the people who chose to join her. An avalanche in Moose Pass in 1980 could not stop the Sandahls, who were then living in Seward, from reaching the Kenai Airport and becoming chaperones again. A virus in her vocal chords in 2007 may have forced Henderson to miss 56 days of school, but it could not keep her from accompanying her choir to Europe.

Billaud, like the many choir members who have performed at KCHS over the years, is glad that Henderson stayed around. “She allowed all of us to go beyond our individual capabilities and become part of a greater whole. For that I will be forever grateful.”