Go back to It Begins with a Wedding.
My grandfather Henry Sulcer was a pretty cool guy; I just wish I could sit down with him and listen to him play the mandolin and tell his story. It looks like I’ll have to try to tell it for him. When he was a small child, his world was suddenly uprooted when his father, the village doctor of Ridgefarm in downstate Illinois, put his small family onto a train bound for the orange groves of Southern California, looking for a better life. We will get to his parents’ story in a later article, but suffice it to say that it did not work out very well for the family and the boy was destined to return to his Midwest roots within ten years. As a teenager, he lived with his mother in Indianapolis, attending high school and discovering a life-long passion for playing the mandolin, and a life filled with music.
Known as “Harry” in those days at the turn of the century, he joined forces with “trick” banjo player and ambitious composer named Arthur Wells, also from “the Ridge”, and guitarist Hayes Greenawalt. They were on the road together for three years, in what you could call a “boy band” of the time, performing on the outdoor stage of the summer Chautauqua festivals, the winter “lyceum circuit”; hotels, opera houses, the Y.M.C.A. Wells arranged a repertoire of three hundred numbers, including some original pieces. They played a mix of Sousa marches, “negro music”, and pieces with classical overtones – even a medley of Schubert – according to one critic, music that “goes with a rush, snap and vim that shows masters of their instruments”.
That particular Sulcer intellectual touch was already showing, even something as simple as folk music: they fashioned the band’s name “Asetceam” by mashing the Latin phrase “ars est celare artem”, or “true art seems artless”. Perhaps this may foreshadow one of my father’s favorite ideas from Renaissance art called “sprezzatura”; I’m sure Dad would have heartily approved. The band marketed itself as a class act, and Henry proved to have his sights set on a legitimate musical career.
By 1901, John D. Rockefeller’s newly revived University of Chicago was less then 10 years old, rapidly growing in stature, and sitting on land donated by Marshall Field alongside the Columbian Exposition’s old Midway Plaisance. 20-year-old Henry gave up his musical travels, installed his mother in an apartment just off campus and enrolled, beginning a long association with the University that lasted three generations (including myself).
Henry was an “artsy” kind of guy in college. Naturally, he led the Mandolin club, but eventually helped lead the combined glee and other music clubs for the University as well.
He also performed the title role in the French comedy “Gringoire”, won a prestigious prize for oratory, and was active in clubs and literary societies with intriguing names: Owl and Serpent, Tiger’s Head, Iron Mask, and Ivy, as well as The Blackfriars drama club.
He formed lasting relationships with his Psi Upsilon fraternity brothers, many of who were in the same clubs. These included men such as Arthur Lord, his future best man Charlie Kennedy, and Herbert Vanderhoof, his future business partner and boss.
He was a thoughtful student who won a whopping dollar prize offered by a professor for best verse on a current topic – making fun of the timid political character of Theodore Roosevelt’s Democratic challenger in 1904, Judge Alton B. Parker:
Alton B. —-: “My attitude?
Henry D. Sulcer
Confined within no latitude,
It gives me now such gratitude,
To look upon our platitude.
Music was Henry’s life while at the University. Could he make it a career, though?
The Owl and Serpent club met in a poky room at the top of the narrow twisty stairs of Mitchell Tower, a “secret society” where Henry would gather with other literary types. In my own days at the University I spent many hours hosting a folk music radio show in this same tiny room that had become the campus radio station, WHPK, having no idea at the time that my grandfather had regularly climbed those creaky stairs 75 years before me.
Go on to read about Henry’s attempt to become an opera singer.
Sources
- “The Asetceam Trio”, program and brochure courtesy of Gordon Sulcer.
- “List of Latin Phrases (Full)” – Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_(full) on 3 March 2013
- “Music That Hath Charms”, Lyceumite and Talent, Number 27, p. 14, Chicago, IL, August 1909
- “Sprezzatura” – Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura on 3 March 2013
- Riverside Daily Press, Tuesday Evening May 17, 1904
- “Alton B. Parker” – Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alton_B._Parker on 26 December 2014
- “WHPK-FM” – Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHPK-FM on 8 June 2013
