My Artistic Friends Over The Years: Part 5 Robert C.

 

     The person pictured to the left is not Robert C, but was the conduit to my meeting and involvement with him. The girl is Sonja, a young woman I fell in love with during the summer after my high school graduation and began dating.

I was crazy about her and all was fine between us, until fall arrived. She had not dated anyone prior to myself, but when Autumn was in the air, she went off on the train to Philadelphia attending Peirce College, then known as Peirce Business school. Nothing wrong with that, per se. My wife has an Associates Degree from that same school, and may have been attending at the same time as Sonja. The problem was Sonja was a good looking blond and now she was meeting college boys.

    I was concerned as she would come home and speak of this boy or that. Since she liked Broadway Plays and music in general. I decided to impress her by writing such a musical.  I called it "Ya-Ha-Whoey. Yes, t had the same title as a song Stuart Meisel and I wrote in Junior High School. I too not only the title, but incorporated the song into the play. I also put my previously recorded tune, "My Little White Lamb" as part of the plot songs.  I added 17 original songs to the play.  (By the way, the girl her on the right as model for "Ya-Ha-Whoey" is my wife Lois.  I had a thing for good looking women.)

     I am not so sure this really impressed her, but the writing of did show me I had a problem, 17 songs for which I had written lyrics, but no music.  I could read music and I had written a few song before this, but I was far from being a great composer of music. I need a partner.

     I had met this young man at one of her parties. He rode from Philly on the same train as her. His name was Robert S. Condon. and he lived in Valley Forge. I struck up a friendship with him and along the line discovered he could compose music. One day I drove him to his home. I was much impressed by the place. We drove down a drive and I noticed the property was festooned with some exotic statues and I commented about them.

    "Oh, they're my dad's" he said

Well, they looked sort of primitive to me and I concluded he meant his father collected Native American art, but he certainly had a lot of it.

     We got to the house and we sat down in a room and I showed him "Ys-Ha-Whooy" He glanced through it and in the end he agreed to write the music.

We began meeting regularly at the Washington Memorial Chapel in Valley Forge.  Next to the church building there was a tall bell tower. Robert's family seemed to have some influence with the chapel because Robert had access to that tower. We would go up these narrow stairs and we would come to a room, perhaps halfway up, and in this room there was a piano.  He would sit and compose the music at this instrument as I read the lyrics and gave him my visions of the tunes.

I will share a secret about this location. To the right of the tower there was a parking lot and to the right of that was a field with a picnic grove at the top near the road though the park. My wife and I one summer day went down in the field and we made love in the tall hay growing there, wrapped in a blanket I carried in the truck of our car. I could look up the slight incline and watch a family set up at a picnic table as we did. I know Lois and I had a somewhat clean and bland reputation, and I hate to disappoint, but in our early years we could be rather wild and daring.

      There was another secret I didn't learn until years after when I ran across online article from Life

Magazine.  Robert's father was a well respected sculptor and the statues about the property weren't Native American at all, But had been done by his father. His father's name was Rudolph Condon and he was a friend of Jamie Wyath, the well-known painter son of Andrew Wyeth.  I could be wrong, but I believe the young man in the left of this photo my have been Robert. The msn bending over on the right is Jamie Wyeth and it is Rudolph Condon in the center.

Ah,  the people one crosses paths with in this life.