Weitzel, Winfield: Oral History, November 14, 1989
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The following oral history of Winfield Weitzel, was done November 14, 1989 by G. David Anderson for The George Washington Oral History Program:
ANDERSON: This is an interview with Winfield Weitzel, alumnus of George Washington University and a member of the men’s Glee Club. It is November 14, 1989. The interviewer is David Anderson. First of all, I’d like to thank you for agreeing to have an oral interview concerning the Glee Club, because not only will it help in writing the history that we’re currently working on, but the tape will be stored in our vault and will be used by researchers in connection with the history of George Washington University. Could you give us briefly a background before you came to the George Washington University?
WEITZEL: High school, you mean, and that sort of thing?
ANDERSON: Sure, your family, high school . . . .
WEITZEL: Well, I was one of six children and the only one that wasn’t particularly interested at that time in going to college. I wanted to get into business. The other five all attended Western High School, which was right up the street from us in Georgetown, where I grew up. I elected to go to business high school, because that was the only high school in those days that taught business subjects. If you wanted accounting, secretarial work and that sort of thing, Eastern and Central and Western didn’t teach it. So I went to business high school. Then I went out and got a job and decided that I should have a university education. My mother had been a graduate of the old Wilson Normal School, which later became Wilson Teacher’s College, and had been a school teacher. My father had attended the George Washington University law school, graduated I think in 1906. My older brother Frank won a scholarship to George Washington and went through here, was I think at the top of his class and went to law school and was number two in the law school. I decided I needed the education, so I came down to register. I found that I didn’t have a couple of the courses that I needed, went to Emerson Institute, which I think is still in existence and got enough credits to qualify for admission, and entered G.W.
ANDERSON: So G.W. was a natural choice as far as schools were concerned?
WEITZEL: Well, at that time, my parents could not afford the tuition, and the only way I could go was by working my way through and attending the evening classes which I think probably was the majority of the student body in those days, a very large part of it anyway. I took, I was going to take the, at that time a two year undergraduate study led to three years of law and you could get a combination A.B. and L.L.B for five years work. At the end of the two years, I went into law school and at that time I was working for the Ford Motor Company. They went on a strike in ’32 and shut down, so I shut down my education for the time being. And when I went back and things got straightened out a little, I came back and went to National Law School, which is now part of George Washington University. But the job that I had was with Chessie, Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, and the only reason that they had an office here in Washington was because of the vice president in charge of public relations, who discovered Chessie. Incidentally, the cat died and they moved us all to Cleveland. So my education was again interrupted. I returned to Washington later and a good many years later, I came back and finished up and got my A.B. degree. I never did get back to law school.
ANDERSON: What were your impressions of the university in 1928 when you entered as a freshman?
WEITZEL: I was very happy with it. I thought that most of the teachers were excellent. The courses that I took I found a great deal of interest. Willard Hayes Yeager, who was a public speaking instructor, later went on to Ohio State with a speaking chair out there. Samuel Flag Bemus, who was the American History teacher, went to Harvard, is a chair there. They were both very good teachers. Lowry Gatz, who taught European history, was an excellent teacher. Of course Elmer Louis Kayser was a great teacher of ancient history. I was very pleased with all of the courses. I became active in fraternity life, joined Phi Sigma Kappa and the fraternities of course all pushed you to get into activities, so I joined the Glee Club, went out for the Hatchet, went out for the Troubadours. I don’t know how I found the time to do all those things and work a job and study too, but I did. But I thoroughly enjoyed it. In those days they also had a football team, which one year either beat or tied Alabama. They beat Tulsa. They had to play their games up at the old Central High School stadium. But they had a good team. Pixly came here from the Midwest, Jim Pixlee, and brought some of his players from there, and they had a great team. But I think it’s just as well that they abandoned it.
ANDERSON: How did you first become aware of the Glee Club? Through word of mouth or through Hatchet advertisements?
WEITZEL: I was interested in singing and I had known two or three of the members of the Glee Club, George Washington Irving Cleveland, a big bass fellow, and he told me I should be interested in it, I saw a clip in the Hatchet that they were looking for voices, so I came down and applied, and Doc Harmon gave me an audition, and stuck me in the baritone section of the club.
ANDERSON: What were your first impressions of rehearsals with the Glee Club, when it was first forming?
WEITZEL: Very good! I thought that Harmon was a good teacher. Of course you didn’t come for vocal lessons. You were supposed to be able to sing and to read music. I felt that he was very good. I enjoyed it. I didn’t want to ever miss a rehearsal.
ANDERSON: What about Dr. Harmon and his wife?
WEITZEL: Grace Ruble Harmon was a joy and I don’t think that they could have, that Bob could have succeeded as well as he did without her. She was always there and she was very helpful in getting your, the proper tones and so on. In some ways she was more help than Bob was, I felt. They were an excellent team.
ANDERSON: Were you aware of other Glee Club activities at the university at the time, or did they intermingle at all, such as the girl’s Glee Club?
WEITZEL: I do not remember that the girl’s Glee Club was there that year. I remember them being organized later. We did not have joint concerts to my recollection. We never had a joint concert in the three years that I was in the club. My memory may be faulty.
ANDERSON: What, before the Carnegie appearance in 1930, could you tell us about the group and touring with the group and how much time it took as far as interaction and were there parties on the side, things of this nature, ’28, ’29?
WEITZEL: There were no tours. I don’t think we did one concert outside of the confines of the area. We had a regular concert at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, which I looked forward to with a little trepidation the first year, but the second year I went back because I remembered how much the folks enjoyed it. We did most of the girl’s schools and two or three other homes, but we did no tours. We put on a concert one year at the Willard and another year at the Mayflower. Each year we had one big concert and as I recall we may have had one or two concerts here in Corcoran Hall. But there were no tours in those days. Most of the people were working and they didn’t have enough time off to go to Philadelphia or Chicago or somewhere else. Of course, touring wasn’t as convenient then as it is today, either. And of course, Bob Harmon was working too. I guess at that time he was getting his doctor’s degree.
ANDERSON: Dr. Harmon did not uh, did he have anything to do with the girl’s Glee Club at all, or was it as you remember . . . .?
WEITZEL: I’m sure if the Glee Club was in existence then that Harmon must have, I do not recall that he had anything to do with it.
ANDERSON: I don’t see any information here. It’s interesting. Where did the group rehearse?
WEITZEL: In Corcoran Hall.
ANDERSON: Regularly?
WEITZEL: Yes, Corcoran Hall. We had one concert, the way this entrance into the intercollegiate Glee Club contest came about, we had a concert at the Mayflower jointly with Columbia University, and we got to talk to some of the members of that club and they asked us why we didn’t enter the intercollegiate contest. They felt that we had a high quality group and could make a showing. So we got busy and inquired about it and found that the only way you could get in was to win a local contest. So I got busy and got Catholic University and Georgetown and two or three others to try to get them interested and we finally got Catholic University and Johns Hopkins to join and we put on a contest at the Willard Hotel, which we won. And that’s how we got our invitation to the national contest at Carnegie Hall.
ANDERSON: Did Columbia University compete with this group?
WEITZEL: They were in that contest that year, yes. There’s a list of them in that Carnegie Hall program. It was Ohio State, Harvard, Yale, University of California, Berkeley, I think. It was pretty well representative I think of the thirteen clubs represented. They’d had one contest across the country.
ANDERSON: Could you tell us a little bit more about the Mid-Atlantic Glee Club Association?
WEITZEL: Well, it, after we won that contest, it kind of fell apart. We were automatically included in the national contest the next year, having been the winners in 1930, and I can’t recall now how much effort we put in to reorganizing the contest in the mid-Atlantic area, but we did not have a contest the next year. We just automatically went to New York. How long it lasted, I don’t know.
ANDERSON: Would you describe the preparations for the trip and the trip to New York, and then the contest itself at Carnegie Hall?
WEITZEL: Well my memory is not too good on that. I know we chartered a bus and we did not stay in New York but one night, I guess, if we stayed overnight. I don’t recall that we even stayed overnight. But I know that we were invited after the contest, we were invited over to, I don’t remember if it was CBS or NBC invited us over and we sang over the network that night, and it seems to me that we just left there, got on the bus and came back home.
ANDERSON: What about the performance itself?
WEITZEL: The performance itself was very thrilling. Carnegie Hall has a marvelous acoustical quality, and we were all thrilled with the way the tone carried. It was a very exciting evening altogether. Probably one of the most thrilling things about it was at the, after the finale of the contest itself, the university Glee Club came on stage, and all of the twelve or thirteen groups that had competed were there and we sang two or three numbers and it was really quite a thrill to hear the echoes in the hall there of the work that we did. I don’t think that I ever enjoyed group singing more than I did that night. With all that big group of us, there must have been, I guess, easily four or five hundred voices.
ANDERSON: What about the difference between the black tux that you wore and the other contestants?
WEITZEL: (Laughter) Well, we thought that we were properly attired when we got our tuxedoes and packed them away for the trip. When we got backstage, we were a little bit chagrined to find that all of the other groups were in white tie and tails, and we thought that was going to be a bit of a deterrent to our winning the contest. But we bravely walked on in our black tie and tuxedo jackets and I think we must have performed well because we won, so the next year, we decided we were not going to be the poor boys on the block, and we all attired ourselves in white tie and tails, but the second year we didn’t win. We came in second.
ANDERSON: Which was thrilling in itself, I’m sure, with the competition.
WEITZEL: It was, right.
ANDERSON: I’m fascinated with the actual contest, the three songs that were required, Lo How a Rose er Blooming was the choice of the group. How did the choice come about?
WEITZEL: Each club has a privilege of selecting a number that they feel they can do well. Then they have to do one that each club does, and I guess that’s one of their ways of judging the quality of performance. And then the third song is the school song of each school. So two of them are individual to each group. The third one is universal. They all sing it. That’s their set form.
ANDERSON: What were your feelings about Hark All Ye Shepherds, the compulsory?
WEITZEL: I didn’t care for it too much, and we were fearful of it too, because when we heard a couple of the other groups do it, we felt that they were better in their performance of it than we were. We were a little bit quacky about whether we had a chance to win or not. But we thought we did beautifully on Lo How a Rose and that’s a number that just floats. It’s a beautiful number.
ANDERSON: One question. The entire Glee Club went to the competition, or was it just select members of the Glee Club?
WEITZEL: The entire club.
ANDERSON: The college song that was the last selection, by George Roth. Was this the alma mater of the school, or became the alma mater?
WEITZEL: He wrote it.
ANDERSON: Right.
WEITZEL: He wrote it. I don’t know that it became the alma mater of the school.
ANDERSON: He wrote the alma mater.
WEITZEL: Right. I say, I guess it was the official song of the school after that, yes. George is still around. He’s failing in health, but you might want to talk to him if you can.
ANDERSON: What about the Hymn of Thanksgiving, which you . . . .
WEITZEL: The Prayer of Thanksgiving was beautiful. That was done by the entire group. I still remember that.
ANDERSON: How long did it take for the judging? I mean, was it a tense moment backstage waiting or, what were your impressions at that point in time?
WEITZEL: Everybody was chewing their fingernails waiting for the decision of the judges. It wasn’t too long though. I guess they had scored them pretty well and it didn’t take long to collect all the data and make their decision.
ANDERSON: You mentioned before that after the performance, you went to Villa Vallee.
WEITZEL: Rudy Vallee’s place, that’s right
ANDERSON: CBS radio network.
WEITZEL: Yes.
ANDERSON: What were your thoughts on this, I mean the performance, or the . . . ? Did you meet Rudy Vallee?
WEITZEL: Oh yes. I don’t remember what we sang. I guess we did the numbers we did in the contest...
ANDERSON: Did they give you a recording of this, or a tape of this?
WEITZEL: No, they never did. In those days they didn’t tape that stuff. I don’t know that they even had the facilities to do it. I guess they didn’t.
ANDERSON: Probably not, in the ‘20s.
WEITZEL: Remember, radio was not even in its heyday in those days.
ANDERSON: That’s true. In fact, there were only a few stations on the air in the1920s. What about when you returned to the campus? How were you received? A lot of jubilation, and Dr. Marvin, your impressions of him and his reactions?
WEITZEL: He greeted us very warmly, and I guess at the next rehearsal that we had, he appeared and congratulated us. But they also had a bash at which they welcomed us. I guess it took the form of a concert really, and they honored us at the concert. They had all the faculty there. They made quite a deal of it. Incidentally, Elmer Louis Kayser, who was then a student at Columbia, I think, knew that we were singing there that night and he came over and he told us later that was one of the greatest thrills of his experience in New York was to come there and see G.W. win the contest. We were always a favorite of his.
ANDERSON: What was your preparation for the next Carnegie Hall visit? I mean rehearsals…
WEITZEL: A very rigid, concentrated effort. We worked on the numbers that we knew we were going to do.
ANDERSON: Were there any different numbers?
WEITZEL: No. Those were the three that we were going to do there, we worked on aside from the regular rehearsal, we worked on them, not to the extent that we would get sick of them, you know, but to get them perfected.
ANDERSON: Besides the college song, which I think was part of the three that you had to sing, what were the other numbers that you performed during your second visit?
WEITZEL: I don’t even remember. I probably wouldn’t remember. Well, I’d remember them, because they were so indelibly impressed on our minds. I don’t remember what we did.
ANDERSON: Could you go over, how long did you stay at George Washington University? You stayed in the Glee Club the entire time you were there?
WEITZEL: I joined in the, I guess in the spring of the first year that I was there. I guess I was in three years.
ANDERSON: What effect has it had on you after your G.W. experience?
WEITZEL: What effect?
ANDERSON: I mean, did you sing more later on? Did you get into Glee Clubs?
WEITZEL: I have been in choirs. I have always enjoyed singing. Every time that there is any chance even today to get together with a little group to sing, I do, but I never followed it in any way as a career, anything like that.
ANDERSON: The actual Glee Club, your friends and individuals there, was it a cross section of majors in the Glee Club, or was it more, as you remember?
WEITZEL: As I remember it was very much a cross section. Of course, they didn’t have as extensive a program at G.W. in those days. Engineering was just beginning to be a factor, I think, and although I think we had a couple there. School of Government and Business Administration had not been formed yet then, but I don’t recall being in classes with more than two or three of them, so there had to be pretty much a cross section, I would say. Of course, some of them were day school students. Most of them were evening school. And you came and did your classes and went. Although I stayed around with, between the fraternity and the Hatchet, the Glee Club, I guess I spent a lot of time on the campus.
ANDERSON: Could you describe the campus in that period, 1928, ’29?
WEITZEL: Well, it wasn’t much of a campus. We had what we called “the yard,” which is back there between G and H and Twentieth and Twenty-first. The library, by gosh, to come in here and see this first library, it made the old library there on G Street look like a pretty pitiful example of a library. Who was the librarian? He was for many years afterwards.
ANDERSON: Right. I think I know who you’re speaking of, but I don’t remember right off hand. Go ahead.
WEITZEL: He was very active in the Arts Club up here on Eye Street. And he was around here for many years.
ANDERSON: I can get the name for that [John Russell Mason].
WEITZEL: As campus life, there wasn’t much here, except the fraternities were all very active in those days and we did with what we had, but there really wasn’t very much to offer.
ANDERSON: Was the Greek society; were there a lot of Greek houses?
WEITZEL: Yes, there were. Probably twelve to fifteen fraternities and as many sororities. The social life, I think, centered around them a lot more than it does today.
ANDERSON: Were you a member of a glee club within your fraternity itself?
WEITZEL: No, we didn’t have one. We had some sports activities. We had a basketball team, a bowling team, a few things like that, but they didn’t go in that extensively for that sort of thing.
ANDERSON: Could you tell me a little bit more about Dr. and Mrs. Harmon, your association with them as a student, and your association with them after you left the university?
WEITZEL: Well, they were certainly very easy to get along with, quite social. I guess I didn’t see too much of them except during the Glee Club activity. Later on, when he became university physician, I saw him, not always so happily, but we always got along very well. And later, when he started in private practice, I continued to go to him, and I thought he did a great job. He was, had a lot better bedside manner, so to speak, than some of the doctors I’ve been to later. It may have been because of the previous connection with the Glee Club and that sort of thing, but I always found him to be a very knowledgeable, capable and good person to know.
ANDERSON: Have you kept up with other Glee Club members of the 1930 experience?
WEITZEL: I did until I left Washington back in ’55. When I came back in ’65 or ’66, whenever it was, they kind of disappeared. Most of them, a few of them, Hugh Buckingham, Frank Scrivener, who was general manager of the club one of the years that I was there, Bill Powell, who was a first tenor, beautiful voice was struck by a street car and killed not too many years after we left school. But by ’65 when I returned, most of them had dispersed. I did keep in touch earlier on with maybe a dozen of them.
ANDERSON: Any particular individuals?
WEITZEL: Well, Hugh Buckingham was one. Frank Scrivener was another. Jack Perry, who was also a tenor, John Craighan, Anderson’s still around. Most of them had disappeared by that time.
ANDERSON: Well I‘d like to thank you for your reminiscences. I would like to stop here because we are coming to the conclusion of this side of Tape 1.
(End of Interview)
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Author or Source: MS0371/Oral History Collection
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Date Added to Encyclopedia: May 1, 2007
Prepared by: Lyle Slovick, Assistant University Archivist
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