Catching up with Mr. O
Ihad a few stellar teachers as a kid, and I loved and was inspired by them, but there was one who made high school less of a hell than it would have been otherwise.
For years, Louis Oliverio had been on my mind. He had been my high school band director in Shinnston, W. Va., the little town I grew up in, a two- hour drive south of Pittsburgh. We band kids called him Mr. O.
When I finally decided to go back to visit my family recently, I got Mr. O’s email from my brother and we arranged for a visit.
My mother and sister, both retired teachers, have talked about how rewarding it is when former students call and visit to tell them how important they had been to their lives. The pandemic has made me realize the importance of telling people what they have meant to me.
When I drove up to his house, he was on his deck, watching for me, waving, smiling that smile I remembered. He looked like an older version of the exact same Mr. O.
“Let’s sit on the deck,” he said. We sat more than 6 feet away. We took our masks off. Then we launched into a visit that lasted almost an hour, talking about the things we spend time doing
thesedays, talking politics, talking about our gardens and reminiscing about those days in the band room by the river. I would mention a bandmate and Mr. O would remember what instrument she or he played.
I joined the band my first week of high school, wanting to play the tenor saxophone. I practiced a lot, determined to march with the Orange and Black in the Thanksgiving Day parade.
“I didn’t think you were ready,” Mr. O recalled on his deck that day. “Your horn didn’t have a lyre to hold your music, so I thought that was a good excuse.”
He didn’t want to tell me he didn’t think I was ready. Even when he was keeping us in line, literally and figuratively, even yelling at us because we were jangly teenagers, he had a gentle soul.
“You told me, ‘ That’s OK. I memorized the music,’ ” he said, grinning.
Mr. O was the kind of teacher his students wanted to please. He took the job shortly before I started high school, and he whipped into shape what had been a pretty ragtag group. Our school, and our town, was smirked at by kids from Clarksburg, whose schools and bands were much bigger, with better resources.
Kids from Clarksburg called our town an unflattering name, but by my senior year, we were holding our heads up a bit because we had Mr. O.
That spring, we competed in a regional face- off of concert bands. Mr. O chose “Finlandia” for us to perform. “Finlandia” is a challenging work by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. Our band of 52 had no string section. Mr. O knew what a challenge he presented to us, and we knew by his choice that he was placing his faith in us.
The theme has a blast of recurring staccato notes, really fast notes. My brother played trumpet as a freshman that year and I remember him practicing at home, trying to perfect the speed of those notes.
We practiced “Finlandia” every day in band class, it seems, for weeks before the big day. “Finlandia” was hard. We practiced the hell out of that piece, and on the day of the competition, everyone’s fingers no doubt trembling, we played the hell out of it for the judges.
But we were really performing for Mr. O. We would have run through fire for him.
Backstage afterward, we waited for the verdict. We were hyped. We knew we had nailed it, but there were so many reasons why we might not get the top score. We were the Shinnston kids, with no oboes, violins or cellos — no strings at all.
Mr. O paced. My heart was thumping. My bandmates made nervous chatter. Then he was called in to talk to the judges. We sat, and I remember how quiet we were. It seemed to take him forever to come back, and when he did, his lips were pursed.
I was relating my memory of that day to him on his deck: “And you said, ‘ You mushrooms!’”
Mr. O threw his head back and laughed. “I called you that, didn’t I?”
He called us that regularly. It was a loving admonition. We loved that he called us mushrooms, but at that moment, it sounded like a signal for disappointment. I think I remember that someone let out a sob.
Finishing the story, which Mr. O already knew, I said, “Then you said, ‘ One. We got a one.’ And we went wild, screaming.”
We sat there grinning at each other, at the memory of Shinnston kids in triumph.
Before I left, I took a selfie of us, both careful not to face each other as we got into place.
Several days after I was back in Pittsburgh, I got an email from Mr. O that read, in part, “Thank you for returning to my life.”
Just as the hell that was high school had a few bright spots, the hell that has been 2020 has, too.
One of those was that afternoon with Mr. O.