Thought you might be interested in this letter to my dad when he was 19 years old. He had attended BYU the previous year and got diptheria and had to go home. Family legend has it that Leroy Robertson visited him in the hospital and brought ice cream and treats to cheer him. As you can see, he greatly valued Dad's musical talent and hoped to continue to mentor him. (According to Mom, he was first chair on string bass his freshman year.) At some point Dad was offered a position with the Utah Symphony but he declined in favor of his interest the popular music of the time. 
4 comments:
So that's where some of the amazing musical talent of the Heaton clan stems from!! :)
i enjoyed the letter!
He also told me that he didn't want to join the Utah Symphony because he didn't want t work with the "long hairs." Not really sure what that meant...old people with comb-overs?
It's likely there wasn't a shortage of comb-overs in the group, but "longhairs" is slang for classical music lovers, especially musicians... Dad always did use that term to tell this story. In looking this up I found that the term began in the 1920s when wild women cut their hair into short bobs, blurring the look between men & women (per "Thoroughly Modern Milie"). The men's hairstyle became short & neat (heaven forbid a woman's hair be shorter than the man's), but presumably some male classical musicians didn't a hoot about any of this and wore their hair any way they felt like it. It was fun to check that out!SH
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