DID YOU ALWAYS KNOW WHAT YOU WANTED TO DO?: LESSONS FROM THE KINGSTON TRIO* AND ME.
Growing up for me came in baby steps, with an occasional baby leap. One leap occurred at 13 in 1962, when my parents gave me a transistor radio. At night, with the lights out in a bedroom I shared with a younger brother, I could put the speaker next to my ear and listen to KSTT’s deejay Lou Gutenberger play rock and roll and something he called folk music. The Kingston Trio made folk cool in the late fifties, with help from Lou and 100s of other disc jockeys who loved their first and biggest hit, Tom Dooley. “Hang down your head Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry…,” 60 years later the words come easily to me.
I wonder: how did Dave Guard, Bob Shane and Nick Reynolds become The Kingston Trio? Maybe even more important, to me: how did I become a teacher? What about you? Did you always know what you wanted to do in your life? If you are, ahem, young, do you think you should know what you want to do by now and the exact route to take?
A STRAIGHT LINE THEORY OF LIFE
“The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” Babe Derouin, my high school Geometry teacher and golf coach, taught us this principle on the first day of class. Even geometrically-challenged me, with a low spatial abilities’ IQ, could get this simple idea. Freed by my intellectual limitations from having to think much about geometry, I applied the shortest distance notion to life.
Surely The Kingston guys always wanted to be folk singers, following my straight line theory of life. Here’s how Bob Shane** describes the Trio’s history at a benefit appearance for PBS in 2002 filmed at Carnegie Mellon University.
We started the group after graduating from college in 1956. We started as a Calypso Group and took the name from Kingston, Jamaica. To this day none of us have ever been to Kingston. After a couple of years we thought there are groups playing Calypso that are much better than we are. In 1958 we put together our first album that had a mix of calypso, off-broadway tunes, and a few folk tunes, including one song that dee jays would start playing. Tom Dooley would sell 3 million records and when Capital Records handed us the Dooley bonus check and said ‘you are Folk singers,’ we said ‘you bet your ass we are.’ 1958 was the first year of Grammy Awards and they wanted to give us a Grammy but did not have a Folk category. So they looked around at the music business to see what was dying or needed help and gave the Kingston Trio the first grammy for best Country and Western song. The next year Grammy added a Folk category and Kingston Trio won that for best album at large. Two of us were from Hawaii and so a couple of years later printed teeshirts with the caption THE HAWAIIAN CALYPSO FOLK GROUP THAT SAVED COUNTRY MUSIC.
No straight line line for The Hawaii Calypso Folk Group that Saved Country Music. What about me? I have spent my adult life as a teacher, from my first year in 1972 teaching social studies to 6th graders to last year Zooming with Romanian American Studies graduate students, to this winter co-leading Life Long Learning courses for Luther College. By all appearances, I am a teacher. But I have always thought myself an imposter because I never planned to be a teacher.
Over the years, many of my teacher colleagues talked about how they had always: wanted to be a teacher, loved being a student, enjoyed school, and felt passion for their subject matter. In other words, a straight line from A to B. I felt none of those things growing up. I choose teaching out of desperation, my serendipitous version of The Kingston Trio’s folk choice.
A SERENDIPITOUS THEORY OF LIFE
In 1969 newly elected President Richard Nixon knew America would have to get out of Vietnam. The war was unpopular, with demonstrations routine, across the country. Many of the demonstrators were young men who did not want to go to Vietnam.
Nixon and America’s military leaders decided to move toward an all volunteer army, with the first steps the introduction of a yearly lottery that would assign a number to all American males born between 1944 through 1952. Thousands of young men, including me born in 1949, would now know their chances of being inducted.
Numbers ranged from 1 to 365, with those assigned the lowest numbers given the highest chance of being drafted. Many got lucky and began to plan their lives without the fear of being drafted. Not me. In December 1969, I learned my draft lottery number was 66.
My college deferment, however, would not lapse until I graduated in the spring of 1971, an eternity to a 19 year old. So I didn’t think about the draft until May 1971 when I received an order to present myself for a draft physical at the Fort Des Moines Army base in Des Moines, Iowa.
About 40 of us got on a bus in Davenport for the two hour trip to Des Moines, had our physicals, and returned late evening. My most vivid memory was that I was one of only a handful who had passed. The guy next to me on the bus failed his physical because he was 5 pounds too heavy. He vowed to lose those five pounds so that he could enlist. Me, reality had smacked me up against the head. Soon after I received orders to report in August to Fort Des Moines. What would I do now?
I tried the local national guard unit and it had a long waiting list. I thought about fleeing to Canada. Like most of my buddies, I had marched against the Viet Nam war and believed it to be a mistake. But leave my country, family, and friends, for an unknown life? That was beyond this cautious young man. But somehow I learned of another option.
Although I had graduated and lost my college deferment, there was a provision allowing for an additional deferment year if one was a full time student pursuing another degree. So I signed up to get a teaching degree. That involved a semester of classes and a semester of student teaching. With America’s involvement in the war winding down, that was just enough time to put me out of harms way.
Why did I become a teacher? To stay out of the Vietnam.
WHAT REALLY MATTERS
When young, it makes sense to want life to be a straight line. From roughly my orange transistor year forward, I thought “I just want to get moving on this life adventure.” Being patient, letting things happen, feeling confident one will be able to handle whatever comes along, these skills come later, if at all.
Maybe Dave, Bob, and Nick felt the same way. If someone had told them in 1957 they weren’t very good at Calypso, maybe there would never have been a Kingston Trio folk group. What about me?
Today, I love teaching, learning, and politics. This love came after, and not before, I committed myself to each. In The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield describes what happens after one decides to commit to something, something like Folk music or teaching.
Something mysterious starts to happen…a process is set in motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, …unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.
Pressfield adds something that will help bring this essay to an end.
When we make a start…something wonderful happens.
Looking forward one wants certainty, a straight line from A to B. That’s true for me even today, with less time left than when I was 13 or 19. Looking backward what seemed serendipitous turns out to have been full of possibility. That’s as true at 71 as it was at 19.
Pressfield is right. There is something out there that is on our side. That surrounds us with support once we commit.
_____________________________________________________
*The last surviving member of the original Kingston Trio, Bob Shane, died on January 26, 2020. Dave Guard passed away in 1991 and Nick Reynolds in 2008.
**Bob Shane’s history of the group can be found on the DVD My Music: This Land is Your land, The Folk Years
