This article originally appeared in different form in Ford Times magazine, May 1978. Ford Times ceased publication in 1993. “Don’t shoot the piano player” is a saying dating to the American Wild West. It often appeared on signs in saloons of the era.

“Don’t Shoot the Piano Player. He’s doing his best.” reads the sign in our local “ole-tyme” pizza parlor. Presumably the sign was hung there for its ole-tyme amusement value, but in me it arouses a feeling of kinship for the poor devil who inspired the saying in the first place.

Countless times in my brief career of piano accompanist have I taken my place at the bench, cowering under an imagined barrage of rotten eggs. Well, you can duck but you can’t hide, sitting up there at the front of the room. The best you can hope for is a power outage to sabotage the concert and send everyone home in a hurry.

No one, least of all me, expected any kind of public life to result from the music lessons I began taking in third grade. Although I enjoyed piano study, early on I formed an intense dislike for recitals and any other kind of command performance.

Left alone, I played like an angel, but the presence of an audience froze my stubby 8-year-old fingers and set even my pigtails aquiver. Clearly, I was destined for a one-to-one relationship with my baby grand, and that was fine with me.

Then came high school. In my junior year I was admitted to the a cappella choir: an unqualified Big Deal because the choir director, Miss Replogle, was highly selective. She could afford to be. One of those legendary figures found in seemingly every tradition-bound community, Esther Replogle had been with the Webster Groves, Missouri school system nearly 40 years. Feared and adored by several generations of students and school officials, she made the choir a memorable experience for every kid lucky enough to be included.

Miss Rep was generous with praise, unsubtle with criticism. “Lousy!” she’d bellow after a weak opening chord, padding across the room in her stocking feet.  And we’d try again--two times, a dozen times--until we got it right.

One day at the close of the hour, Miss Rep said, “Can anyone play piano by ear?” I raised my hand--or rather some poltergeist grabbed it and yanked it into the air. I tried to retrieve it but two late: Miss Rep had spotted me and directed me to report immediately.

What she told me, when I gathered the courage to sidle up to her desk, was destined to reorder my entire high school existence.

Our choir had been asked to perform at the forthcoming Turkey Day pep breakfast. Miss Rep wanted to do a medley of college football songs, which were all in different keys. So all she needed, she explained in the casual tones of one asking to borrow a pencil, was someone to take the music, learn the songs, write a series of musical bridges so the key changes would come off smoothly...and play the whole thing as a piano accompaniment.

“Can you do that?” she asked. And of course I agreed, not because I thought I really could, but because nobody ever said “no” to Esther Replogle without a good reason.

She would have brushed aside my reasons but they seemed perfectly acceptable to me. There was my longstanding shyness about playing in public, and the prospect of 98 voices plus this formidable woman depending me to hit the right notes escalated shyness to terror.

There was another reason. That year my self-confidence was at lower ebb than usual. I was a bizarre stage of orthodontic treatment in which my front teeth had all been pushed forward for proper alignment before being moved back into place. I was scrawny because my teeth often hurt too much to eat. And I was a bookworm, not a football fan. I wasn’t even going to the Turkey Day game.

Pep breakfast  --  NOT

All I wanted that year was to keep a low profile, which was difficult enough with a profile like Bugs Bunny’s. How ludicrous that I should instead have to sit in front of my peers--especially the seniors--whomping out an oompah accompaniment to On Wisconsin!

But I did, and came through it unscathed. I suspect that Miss Replogle, an experienced observer of adolescent angst, had me figured out. She treated me gently and, to my surprise, asked me to learn more songs after the pep breakfast performance.

Slowly during that year, my confidence grew and even though I never overcame an initial rush of panic at the keyboard, I came to enjoy the teamwork with Miss Rep. She brought me a long way. It also helped that I got my braces off that spring.

In my years as choir accompanist, I learned two basic rules.

Never trust your memory. It will fail at the most inopportune moments. During my senior year, I played the accompaniment to This is a Great Country, one of those oompah arrangements for which I was now famous. I had learned the accompaniment by heart and had probably played it 100 times without glancing at the music. On the 101st, my mind went blank during a crucial piano interlude. There was a ghastly silence before Miss Rep and the choir began to guffaw. So did the camera crew who happened to be filming us for a TV special [the infamous “16 in Webster Groves]. After that I continued to memorize but always made sure I had the sheet music handy.

Never trust a strange piano. Old pianos never die, they just get donated to charitable organizations. Miss Rep’s choirs performed for many such groups, and during our busy Christmas season I often encountered as many as five venerable clunkers a week. Esther Replogle’s rules of professionalism prevented me from being seen before a performance checking out the piano, so I never knew what lay ahead until I squared off against my instrument, usually an ancient upright, for the moment of truth. That moment was rarely pleasant. I had arpeggios sabotaged by stuck keys. Suffered near-tendinitis from stomping on balky pedals. I ran amok on mushy keyboards and fairly flogged the sound out of their stiffer sisters. Inevitably on rollers, these old grandes dames would edge farther and farther away so that by the end of a number I’d be playing at arm’s length, which eloquently demonstrated my feelings, anyway.

                                                    ***

Since those years, the life-changes that occur in our twenties--career, marriage, parenthood--have put me back on a one-to-one basis with my piano. I am fortunate to have in my home the same baby grand I grew up with, and except for an occasional “musicale” with friends, I play strictly for my own pleasure.

The day may come, however, when the baby grand submits to the efforts of another budding performer. Last year, I gave birth to our first child, whose generously proportioned features were a source of wonderment to all who came to see him.

“Look at the spread on those hands!” his Auntie Nan exclaimed. “He’s going to be a great piano player.”

Better learn to duck, Charlie. It's a reflex that no piano player can live without.

                                              ****

[Note: young Charlie grew up to be not a piano player, but a stand-up comic. As such, he has raised the technique of artful dodging to a level his mother never dreamed of.]

Thanks to Carolyn [Braun] McIntire for permission to reproduce the illustrations.

The following entry was posted in October 2015. I'm rerunning it here to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the airing of "16 in Webster Groves," on February 25, 1966. 
 ~  csp 2/19/2016



"16" BEHIND THE SCENE ~
How a community was leveled in sixty minutes

Fifty years ago during the autumn of 1965, CBS News sent a team to Webster Groves High School, where I was a senior, to begin filming a documentary titled “16 in Webster Groves.” 

Webster Groves High School

Our 16-year-olds, mostly juniors, had been chosen, they told us, to represent typical, upper middle class suburban teenagers; CBS wanted to explore the zeitgeist (they didn’t use that word) of the community and its teenagers, during what even a yurt-bound isolationist could see was a turning point in our nation’s history.

The result wasn’t pretty. Did they find, as they expected, unrest? Questioning?  Insurrection?  Mass demonstrations on behalf of civil rights?  A desire to overturn the comfy status quo and run Back to the Earth?  No. The students were portrayed, largely, as status-conscious, complacent, shallow, blinkered, casually racist and materialistic airheads, aside from a few awakening souls featured at the film’s conclusion. If the students looked pathetic, their parents looked appalling: dismissive, blowhard fathers, cipher mothers -- except for the one at the dinner table -- oblivious to any possibility of idealism, hopes, dreams, or aspirations, such as they were, on the part of their offspring.

The ensuing roar echoed from Webster Groves to CBS offices in New York City.  Unfair! Biased! Shameless manipulation! Willful omission of anything or anyone suggesting intellect, kindness, social awareness or embrace of a wider world view. 

Fully expecting this response, the CBS crew came back to Webster Groves during the night that “16 in Webster Groves” aired nationally -- February 25, 1966 -- to film Websterites watching the program, and to record their reactions in a follow-up, “Webster Groves Revisited.” The second show aired about a month later.                     .

16  in Webster Groves, CBS News, 1966. Arthur Barron, producer. Charles Kuralt, narrator.

Webster Groves still talks about “16.” It has had unfortunate staying power. Nationally, the film was a staple in sociology curriculum for decades. It is still shown in documentary and filmmaking college courses. I got my own early indicator of its ubiquity six months after the airing, as I sat in a freshman orientation session at my college, some 300 miles from St. Louis. We were asked, one by one, to state the name of our high school. When I gave my answer, Tom H of Louisville, Kentucky, said “Webster Groves? That place in the TV show? Bleccchhh! ”

No use countering that I wasn’t even in the demographic: 17 at the time of filming, and a resident of Rock Hill, a considerably more modest adjoining suburb.  Clearly there would be no escaping the stigma.

I thought about all this last night while making notes for my next blog post, “Don’t Shoot the Piano Player.” It will include an oblique mention of the “16“ debacle, and the weird way in which I played a tiny part. But I had never Googled the film. What would I find?

First I found the film itself, unavailable for years, but now online with its companion piece, “Webster Groves Revisited,” in blurry print. 


To see it, click here.    
 
I then found some information on the filmmaker, Arthur Barron, and a little about cinema history. I’m passing it along now for the diversion of such followers who lived through “16“ right along with me, as well as for others who might have some time on their hands and want to see how a community could be laid waste in just 60 minutes (including commercials). 

Who was Arthur Barron?

Arthur S. Barron, Columbia Daily Spectator, February 1968

Arthur Barron, Ph.D., (1929-2000) was born in Boston. He held bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tulane University, and a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University. As a filmmaker, he would produce varied documentaries: a look at factory workers and their managers, portraits of Johnny Cash and Rita Hayworth, children’s programming for ABC and NET (one of these won him an Emmy). He made a noted cinema verite film called “Birth and Death." He ventured into feature films, and his “Jeremy" (1973, starring Robby Benson) took the award for Best First Work at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1968 he left CBS, formed his own company, Verite Productions, and simultaneously became director of the Columbia University film department.

In 1965, Barron was an employee of CBS News. He was not, however, a journalist, and was disinclined to follow one of the profession’s basic tenets: present a fair and balanced picture, giving voice to all sides of an issue. Hence CBS occasionally ordered him to change or delete program segments they deemed unjournalistic.  Earlier in 1965, he had been severely censored by his superiors when they saw the first cut of his film ”The Berkeley Rebels.”

“For networks the truth has to be recorded, not shaped,” Barron later said in an interview with author Alan Rosenthal (The New Documentary in Action, University of California Press,1972) . “The newsman is a kind of unfeeling, objective, analytic recorder and capturer of reality; he’s not a person who shapes and intensifies reality to evoke a particular response." But to shape and intensify is exactly what Barron wanted to do.

Ron Simon, a curator for the Paley Center for Media, knew Barron in his later life. In a 2011 interview with Thom Powers, artistic director for Stranger Than Fiction, a weekly documentary film series held at IFC Center in Greenwich Village  Simon recalled: “ [Barron] wanted to bring a new sensibility to the documentary. He saw himself as part novelist, a little bit of a poet, and was trying to make a statement in this film....He wanted to give his own viewpoint of what was happening in American society.” (To read the interview, see 16 In Webster-Groves)
 
That’s where Barron was when CBS assigned him a piece about teenagers, which would eventually evolve into “16." But if Barron wanted to avoid being muzzled after the Berkeley Rebels disappointment, he had to base his presentation on fact. So he approached the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and worked with them to develop a 36-page questionnaire, which was then administered to 16-year-olds at Webster Groves High School. Their anonymous answers yielded statistics, which in the eyes of network brass constituted facts...which meant Barron was good to go under the banner of CBS News. “The MacGuffin in this film,” says Simon, “is that sociological questionnaire.”

Barron claims to have been surprised by the results. He took them to the National Opinion Research Center. "They were amazed and horrified,” Barron tells Rosenthal. “[They saw] robotized children, dupes of the values which produced their parents and an American capitalist, middle class, bureaucratic society. Children who were perfectly designed replacement parts for suburban, placid America.”

Well before the study was conducted, Barron had approached the Webster Groves principal and school board for permission to make the film. He tells Rosenthal that he sold school officials on the idea by explaining that mass media had not so far portrayed teenagers accurately, and that CBS wanted to correct that. Barron admits he “wasn’t totally honest” when approaching the school board. “There was, as in so many films, a certain amount of conning and manipulating involved....I agree that I never said to the community or CBS that what we would find was a highly materialistic community whose individuality was crushed, and whose values were absolutely deplorable, but then those were things I didn’t know myself at the time.”

Why didn’t he seek out a broader cross-section of interviewees? “It’s not my job as a filmmaker to be an encyclopedia. I’m not omniscient. “ He goes on to say that he was out to capture the essential truth about a community, “and I wanted to do that in the strongest, most cinematic, most devastating way possible. I feel that the parents (shown) are the perfect embodiment of the dominant value system of that society, and that was my justification.”

Ron Simon told his interviewer that while manipulation was involved, Barron was honest about it. It appears, though, that Barron’s “honesty” came out only when the program was aired. Though Barron told CBS about the survey results early on, it does not appear that he revealed them or his filmmaking intentions to anyone in Webster Groves.

“Webster Groves Revisited” is the sequel to “16," released about one month after “16“ hit the airwaves. It’s commonly said that the sequel was filmed because of the uproar generated by “16.” Produced and aired out of a sense of fair play, to give Websterites a chance to vent. Charles Kuralt implies it in his narration. Barron says so in his interview with Alan Rosenthal, claiming it was not his idea but CBS forced him to make the sequel. 

I don’t see how that could be the case. I believe Barron planned all along to “revisit”, knowing that his first program would provoke an outcry (“a howl of rage,” as he later described it). Otherwise, why would his crew have been on hand to record the subjects of the film watching themselves?  The Ron Simon interview suggests that doing so pushes the two films into the realm of cinema verite, as we see the camera that records it all, and the (unseen) director watching the interviewees watch themselves.

Fool me once...

As I mentioned earlier, I had a tiny role in the production. One day during that autumn of 1965, Barron and his associates visited our a cappella choir rehearsal to get an idea of what they might want to film. We pulled out every blockbuster in our repertoire, plus a lightweight little Broadway show ditty, “This Is a Great Country” (Irving Berlin, Mr. President, 1962). To my surprise, this is the number they chose to film. As it happened, I was piano accompanist for “Great Country."

"Our land is great, our land is great, our land is great, our land is great"

So there are my fingers, or chords, if you will, providing sound track for “16 in Webster Groves.” And if you watch “16,” you can see how our earnest choral offering was employed--talk about dupes of someone's values--to drive home one of the sociologist’s most cynical film statements.

Starting at 29:30 you see our choir director leading the group. Then the camera briefly pans the singers. But as the musical audio continues, the video switches from the choir to a montage of scenes. First we see a roast turkey, borne aloft straight from the oven by triumphant home ec students. Next, they’re baking pies. (Not apple, surprisingly.) Sprinklers play across a huge residential lawn. A girl practices her golf swing. Same girl, now part of a golf foursome strolling the country club grounds. Close-ups: lawn jockey, whiteface; lawn jockey, blackface. Gracious white two-story house, tasteful front entrance flanked by in-scale pillars. And the finale: a close-up of the rose window atop a local church door, before the camera pulls back to show the congregation spilling forth onto the streets of Webster Groves.  Open the doors, see all the people, song ends, cut to commercial.

Thus is “Great Country” rewritten, Barron style, as a hymn to the Middle Class American dream.

I’m not sure at what point I saw Barron’s intention in that sequence. But even in 1966, five years shy of my journalism degree, I knew something was off in his film. I felt that Barron had got a few things right (years later I would write an essay titled "I Was a Teenage Normie"), but via dishonest tactics. I’ve come to feel that the film is like a kaleidoscope: you can look inside, searching for a definitive stance, the one right way to assess Barron’s work -- fair, foul, truth, sham? -- but you never come to an end. The images and your opinions shift with every twist of the barrel.

My 50th high school reunion takes place next year, along with the 50th anniversary of “16 in Webster Groves.” If it’s like previous anniversary years, oceans of ink, forests of paper and billions of bytes will reconstruct yet again every nuance of Arthur Barron’s oeuvre. It could be interesting to invite Ron Simon of the Paley Center to speak to the community, share insights into Barron and his approach to “16,” moderate a panel discussion with audience feedback.

Oh, wait. Film criticism? Cinema verite? That might be a tad too intellectual for insular, myopic Webster Groves. No.... we’d rather just forget the whole thing.

As if we ever could, or would.

    #######

Next:  Don’t Shoot the Piano Player

    ######

This is a great country, a great country
So let's shout it clear and loud
Take a look in your history book
And you'll see why we should be proud.
Hats off to America
The home of the free and the brave
If this is flag waving, flag waving
Do you know of a better flag to wave?

Irving Berlin, 1962, Mr. President