Choirboy: A Tale of Institutional Dysfunction

By Jamey Brzezinski

Art professor James Allen has landed at a community college in California’s Central Valley. Tenured and chairman of the arts division in charge of art, music, and theatre, he is pressured against his better judgment into hiring Albert Wayne Olsen to teach music and direct the college chorale.

Soon the extremely charming Professor Olsen is running roughshod over junior members of the music faculty and his younger students while currying favor with the older, locally powerful members of the chorale. Breaking rule after rule, Olsen has conned the deans and vice president, who turned a blind eye to his crimes of fraud, embezzlement, and sexual harassment. Instead, they accuse Allen of victimizing Olsen. Maligned and slandered, Professor Allen struggles with the question, Will the truth ever come out about this incorrigible choirboy?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796035315

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Copyright © 2019 by Jamey Brzezinski.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/04/2020

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

CHAPTER 1

Although the rest of the committee and I had preferred the candidate with the music doctorate from Stanford, years of directing chorales for various Bay Area colleges and universities, and significant professional experience as a paid member of the San Francisco Opera Company Chorus, the four of us had been out-voted by Acting Dean Roger Dimbro of the P.E. Department. He felt another candidate was far superior. Roger’s choice was in his late-thirties while the committee’s candidate looked about fifty. Our candidate showed evidence of a serious, professional career as a singer and educator. Roger’s candidate exuded a glad-handing sense of self-confidence that Acting Dean Dimbro was convinced was precisely what the music department needed to grow the vocal studies program. I wasn’t so sure.

Roger’s candidate held a Masters of Church Music—actually a divinity rather than a music degree—from a small, Conservative Baptist seminary in the Pacific-Northwest. He’d been teaching part-time for a couple of years at a rural community college in a small town about two hours north of Phoenix. He’d also spent a few years directing church choirs.

I was just finishing my first year as Chairman of the Arts Division at Joaquin College. Joaquin, at the time a community college of about eight thousand Full Time Equivalent Students (FTES) is located in the town of Joaquin City about 200 miles from San Francisco in California’s Central Valley. As a new chair I didn’t want to get on anyone’s bad side. In his interim position, a position we faculty referred to as a puppy dean, Roger and I had clashed several times about budget issues. Roger, was a former army colonel whose claim to fame at Joaquin College was his popular Senior Aerobics class that met twice a week at six a.m. with 180 elder students. He had a dim view of the value of arts education as something other than enrichment. In spite of statistics regarding the enormous amounts of money generated by the fine arts, film, and music industries as well as discussions about how the advertising industry is driven by film, video, photography, music, illustrators, animators and other creative professionals whose training could begin in our small, underfunded department, Roger and President Susan Keller remained convinced that the arts were a frill. When the facts I presented had contradicted their view of the arts as strictly a recreational activity, they had bridled more than once, exchanging glances that signaled to me that I needed to back down.

I’d spent ten years after graduate school as a freeway flyer, one of those unfortunate souls doomed to spend hours and hours commuting from college to college, class to class in insecure, part-time, contingent-on-sufficient-enrollment teaching gigs. I’d applied for dozens and dozens of tenure-track jobs all over the country during those years. I’d attended the College Art Association’s conventions several times—taking interviews for every position that would talk to me. Over the years I‘d had 27 on-campus interviews. Often this would entail taking a couple of days off from my part-time work and travelling halfway across California at my own expense, only to be told by the all white, male hiring committee that they were looking for a woman or candidate of color. When I’d finally been offered a tenure-track position at Joaquin College—four females, no males on the visual art faculty—less than two hours drive from the Bay Area, with all our friends and connections, we had been ecstatic. We included my wife, Judith Cross. She’s also a visual artist, a painter and mosaicist, but more about her later. So we both gave up our part-time positions, packed up our Oakland Estuary studios, and moved to the Sierra Nevada foothill town of Butterfly Creek—forty-five minutes to Yosemite Valley, forty-five minutes to Joaquin College. We were enormously happy. Four years later I was granted tenure and was elected Chairman of the Arts Division.

When Roger told Dr. Keller soto voce that he thought he’d smelled alcohol on the breath of the candidate from Stanford and I watched her eyes widen, I knew my cause was lost and I had no choice but to acquiesce. I agreed to hire Roger’s choice. It was actually a done deal before the discussion, because at Joaquin College administrators, even temporary ones like Roger, always got their way. And so, the next fall, Albert Wayne Olsen entered my world, the world of Professor James Allen, Arts Division Chairman.

<        .        >

CHAPTER 2

Fall semesters at Joaquin College always began the Friday before classes started with the ritual we called Convocation. As chairman, it was my job to introduce our two, new, full-time faculty members on stage during a formal presentation late in the morning before we broke for lunch and division meetings. As a new chair, this would be the first time I’d done this. I’d met Olsen early at the informal meet-and-greet in front of the theater and, seeing other Arts Division colleagues, introduced him around. Along with Olsen, the other new professor was Ferdinand Freisen. New was in quotes here because Fernie had been teaching in the Theatre Department for several years as a part-timer. He’d been the Theater Manager for ten years as well and segued into teaching as Richard Smalley, Professor of Theatre, had grown older and found teaching Public Speaking 101 less energy-intensive than herding an 18-25 year old company of aspiring actors through Richard III or Our Town. When Smalley had retired two years before, the administration gave his position to the Humanities Division. Even though his salary was coming out of the Arts Division budget, the fees his students earned through the arcana of Full Time Equivalent Student (FTES) attendance accounting were credited to the Humanities Division. Vice President of Instruction Dr. Jonathan Storch decided to give Richard’s position to Humanities. This left us with one less position in the Arts Division. When Edna Saccho retired from the Art Department the next year Storch gave her position to theatre, leaving the Art Department one full time position short, a situation that would continue for the next eight years.

You may have noticed two spellings for the same word. I like to spell the art form, Theatre, but when it’s the building itself, Theater. In other words, actors perform theatre in a theater.

Call me Bert, Olsen told me when I greeted him that morning.

Will do, I said as I introduced him to Beryl Garner, one of my remaining, tenured colleagues in the Art Department, and my work buddy.

Professor Beryl Garner of the Joaquin College Art Department is a well-known and often shown sculptor. Affiliated with an important San Francisco Gallery that also handled the lesser work of artists such as David Hockney, Henry Moore, and Joan Miro, Garner was most instrumental in my hiring by the college five years before. I always suspected that she’d pushed for me on the hiring committee primarily because of my connection to Art Monthly Magazine, the West Coast’s largest art publication where I’d briefly served as Northern California Editor for twelve issues in the year before Joaquin offered me the position.

For the first couple of years I wrote one or two reviews for each issue. Then, out of the blue, they asked me to take over the responsibilities of Northern California Editor. That had been a gas. Along with reviewing an exhibition for each issue, as Nor-Cal Editor I determined which artists showing in the San Francisco Bay Area would be reviewed by which writers: in essence, deciding who in the Bay Area would receive their fifteen minutes of fame that month. Foolishly, unlike many who found themselves in my position, I never tried to quid pro quo the situation. I told close friends that it would be a conflict of interest to feature their work. Glad-handing old acquaintances and school mates I hadn’t spoken to in years who came out of the woodwork requesting reviews of mediocre work in mediocre venues never spoke to me again after I’d not scheduled an article. Meanwhile artists for whom I’d arranged reviews rarely thanked me. Eventually, a reorganization eliminated the Nor-Cal Editor position whose duties were rolled into those of the Editor-in-Chief, since he was already located in the Bay Area and could assign articles himself. Later I suspected that I’d been given the editor job in the first place in an effort to get rid of my predecessor whose own art career frustrations and growing cynicism over not getting a position at U.C. Santa Cruz had begun to seep into his articles. So really, by the time I was hired by Joaquin I was no longer in a position to help Beryl’s career. Later, after we became friends, she always denied this had factored in her support. But on occasion, like when I told her I couldn’t have written about her work because of our friendship, she’d respond in a way that would lead me back to the conclusion that, indeed, she had been hoping for just that.

Although Beryl had gone off to school and lived in the Bay Area for fifteen years, she was a Joaquin County girl. Born in Joaquin City, she knew everyone and everything about the community. But she couldn’t see its faults because it was home. She couldn’t see the inequities. People in Joaquin County refer to the Sweet Sixteen, the sixteen old-time, white families that had run the county since the days of the California Gold Rush. The nearly all white county Board of Supervisors, most of who were connected by blood or marriage to one or more of those sixteen families, ruled this rural community. In the last few years of the Twentieth Century a few Hispanics, out of a population about 45 percent Latino, 15 percent Hmong, five percent African-American, had risen against all odds to supervisor positions in the various county departments. One Hmong actually got elected to the Board of Supervisors. It was a time of long awaited change in Joaquin County.

I’d lived in Oakland for 15 years before accepting the job at Joaquin College. One of Oakland’s main streets, Broadway, ran from the waterfront to the hills. Broadway was intersected over these several miles by several main arterial streets like Telegraph and Grand avenues. Still, you could drive at 30 mph from Jack London Square on the waterfront all the way to 51st Street and make every light without stopping. In Joaquin City, driving down M or G street you’d have to stop at every light. The light would turn green and you’d see ahead of you three blocks away the next light was also green. But just before you got there it would turn yellow then red, making you stop again. It was as if the Joaquin City’s traffic management philosophy was not to regulate the flow of traffic, but to make sure every car stopped at every light. My theory was that, years ago, the n’er-do-well son of a local bigwig was given a job for the street department when the ol’ man got tired of supporting him. Through the years, and daddy’s influence, whenever there was a promotion available, junior was given the position over better-qualified candidates. This went on until voila! junior is now the guy who sets the timing of the traffic lights—even though he doesn’t know what the heck he’s doing. Of course, in a rational place they might simply get on the phone to the City of Oakland and ask to speak to the guy in charge of their traffic lights to ask how it’s done. But this would mean someone in Joaquin City would have to admit that they do not know everything about everything. As time went by I began to refer to this as The Joaquin Way, an endemic stubbornness and unwillingness to acknowledge mistakes or a lack of knowledge that permeated every aspect of Joaquin County life. Although she’d lived in the Bay Area for a long time, Beryl never could see this, insisting that that’s how it is everywhere.

Here’s another example of how The Joaquin Way works. When I first started at the college they formed a committee to develop telephone registration, something several nearby community colleges had already implemented. The Telephone Registration Committee (TRC) continued to meet, with occasional updates given to the college community, for nearly a decade. Finally, with the advent of the internet, online registration became the way to go. Long after online registration was in effect at many other community colleges, Joaquin College implemented its own plan, which took several years of student complaints to get right. It was during this interregnum that it was announced that the TRC had completed its work—yeah, by becoming obsolete. Sometime later, one of the recently hired legacy faculty members, during a faculty association meeting wherein several seasoned veterans of The Joaquin Way were bitching about the college’s lack of progress in actually completing many things said, That’s not true! It was announced that the TRC had completed its work just last year!

You may be wondering what a legacy faculty member is. You know how the sons and daughters of Yale and Harvard graduates are often moved to the head of the admissions line and get accepted, even though their applications, SATs, GPAs, etc. may leave something to be desired, simply because daddy and daddy’s daddy were alumni. They’re called legacy students. At Joaquin College fully ten percent of the faculty are the children of Joaquin College faculty. Often they attended Joaquin College, transferred to one of the two nearby Cal State University campuses for their baccalaureate and graduate degrees, and then, after a national search involving dozens and dozens of potential candidates, often with significantly better academic and professional bona fides, the daughter of a faculty member or son of an administrator invariably would end up getting offered the position. These legacies often just barely met California’s stated minimum qualifications for the job. But how many disappointed freeway fliers, who’ve been paying their dues for years and at many great institutions, trying to raise children on a part-timer’s pay, continue to apply for jobs not knowing that the twenty-four year old daughter of two long-time Joaquin College faculty members, with no professional experience, no teaching experience, and a freshly minted masters degree from Turkey Tech had the job in the bag before a single application was reviewed or interview conducted: The Joaquin Way.

So after introducing Bert to Beryl and Elaine Bean, Professor of Photography and the other member of the Art Department, as well as Doc Hartley and Rob Midden, his two Music Department colleagues, and Fernie from Theatre, whom we’ve already met, we all began to make our way into the theater for the formal part of Convocation. I explained to Bert that when they introduced the new members of the faculty we’d take the stage together and, as Chairman, I would introduce him and Fernie to the assembled college community. This usually included a bit of personal, biographical information such as where you were born and where you received your degrees.

About that, James, he asked, Could you leave out where I got my Masters.

We’re an educational institution, Bert. That would be a pretty significant omission on my part, don’t you think.

Still, I really don’t want you to mention it.

Now, this was troublesome in two ways. First, most academics are proud of their alma mater and, even in the case of lesser known schools, will talk up what a great experience they had there. I thought perhaps it was because his Masters degree was from a small Conservative Baptist seminary. In the back of my mind it occurred to me that seminaries only grant divinity degrees, not music degrees. But I was more concerned, I admit, that I would be creating the impression in front of the entire college community that I didn’t know how to do a proper, public introduction. After all, this was the beginning of only my second year as Chairman and, although I’m great in front of my students, I felt considerably nervous collectively addressing 500 of my peers and superiors. So the divinity versus music degree question faded quickly. I attempted to explain this to Bert, who nevertheless insisted that I not mention his school. He was surprisingly vehement about it, so I left that factoid out of my introduction when the time came for me to present him.

Where’d he get his Masters? someone called out from the audience as soon as I introduced him without that pertinent bit of information. I quickly and quietly mumbled the name of the institution through the microphone.

Covering, when I quickly moved on to Fernie’s introduction I glanced at Bert with raised eyebrows in an I told you they’d notice expression. He was shrugging and shaking his head at the audience in what seemed to be a does this idiot know what he’s doing? gesture. Against my better judgment I’d done what he’d asked and he seemed to be creating the impression that omitting his grad school was a mistake on my part, not done by his request. I couldn’t be sure, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. WRONG! Here, during what was his first, couple of hours on the job at Joaquin College I experienced my first moment of disquiet regarding the hiring of Albert Wayne Olsen.

After the Convocation, the practice was that people would take a lunch break before staff returned to their jobs and faculty went to their various division meetings. Beryl suggested we invite Bert to lunch so we could get to know him a bit. I thought this was a good idea and Bert accepted. We invited Fernie as well, but he had only enough time to take his wife to a doctor’s appointment. Everyone else was busy. So Beryl, Bert, and I drove over to Raul’s Ranchero, a popular local eatery.

After we were settled and had ordered, Beryl excused herself to use the restroom. After she left I turned to Bert.

I knew they’d ask about your grad school, I said.

You didn’t have to answer.

"Sorry, but I was on the spot.

You could’ve pretended you didn’t hear the question.

Thinking that would’ve been politic…dishonest, but politic…I changed the subject.

So Bert, you went to a Baptist seminary. That seems like you aimed for a life of service in a religious vocation. As I recall, your background includes several years of directing church choirs.

Yes. I have considerable experience in music ministry, he responded in his smooth, FM radio announcer voice. Did I mention his voice? Bert has a beautifully cultured, deep, resonant speaking voice. He has trained and cultivated it over the years and can wield it like a weapon. I would later learn this at great expense.

Music ministry?

Yes. In many denominations the choir director fulfills a ministerial function, serving the spiritual needs of the congregation. My choir direction also included that role.

Hmmm. I was unaware of that. Being raised Catholic, we always had a strict hierarchy with ordained priests being the sole spiritual authority in the parish.

"I guess that is why we have Protestants," he said with a sneer that began when I mentioned my Catholic background.

Awkward! I thought. Changing the subject, So you must’ve spent quite a bit of effort gaining the credentials for a life of music ministry. I remember that you then taught at a community college in Arizona and now you’re here at Joaquin with no formal religious role. It seems a guy called to the cloth would stick with it rather than move into secular music education.

Well, I’ve always had a love of musical theatre and have a lot of experience there. Plus, confidentially, something happened that kind of soured me on the ministry.

Oh. Too bad, but—er—good for Joaquin College, I said, not wanting to pry. But Bert forged ahead.

Yes, I was accused of having affairs with several of the married women in the choir.

Just as he said this I had noticed Beryl walking back from the restroom and was looking towards her. When he said this I turned and looked at him. He was shaking his head while looking slightly downward, as if responding to the sad memory of an injustice done. Then he looked up at me, from under his eyebrows with a slight grin.

As Beryl took her seat I wondered: was he telling me a sad tale or bragging about past sexual exploits? This was the second moment of disquiet in my first day of working with Albert Wayne Olsen.

Later that afternoon, as I called the Arts Division meeting to order I proceeded down the agenda. When we got to the introductions I asked our new colleagues to again introduce themselves and this time talk a bit about their vision for the future of their tenure here at Joaquin College.

Fernie went first. He explained that he really wanted to focus on the students. Unlike the older members of the performance faculty in music, he wanted to build the program with traditionally college-age students. In many community colleges, the performance programs in music and theatre are full of recreational students. These are generally older students with years of experience acting in community theatre or playing their musical instrument in community bands and orchestras as a hobby. At Joaquin College the music ensembles would usually include two or three traditionally aged students and another thirty or forty significantly older students enrolled in something called Music Therapy for Older Adults, a non-credit class that was run concurrently with the credit section. The FTES funds generated by these students were credited to the Non-credit Program rather than the Music Program, from whose budget the salaries for the instructors were debited. These ensembles often became less of a class and more a private club, with the members taking the class semester after semester, year after year after year. They would socialize and, in a community like Joaquin City, had often known each other for decades and, in The Joaquin Way, were associated with the Sweet Sixteen.

Although Fernie didn’t mention this specifically, I knew this was what he was addressing, especially in theatre. If you can get an older, more experienced actor to play the role of an older adult, especially if that older actor really is a grandfather or whatever the role calls for, and the actor has been performing in community theatre for years, what chance does a 20 year old with a passion for acting, but only a few high school roles under his belt, have in an impartial audition? The same is true in music. A kid who’s blown sax for only four years is not going to stand up well against a guy who’s been playing sax for forty years, even if the kid has lots of passion opposed to the older player’s lackadaisical but completely fluent approach. Fernie and I had had many discussions about this since I’d joined the faculty five years before. He felt that having the older actors involved was unfair to the younger students. He thought of this type of older student as a ringer, the equivalent of having a semi-pro ball player on a little league team.

In his talk before the division Fernie spoke at length about getting more of the local high school drama teachers involved in recruiting students for Joaquin College’s Theatre Department. Doc and Rob exchanged glances. Doc had really run with the whole older adult game. Nearing retirement, his band was comprised of people his own age, friends really, and were definitely run like exclusive clubs. They knew it always guaranteed good enrollments, a competent if not spirited performance, and most importantly, gainful employment for music teachers. This had been at the expense of the music program, which hadn’t graduated a single music major in the five years I’d been at Joaquin College.

Frankly, the Music Department was a joke. Hartley and Midden had sat on their haunches for years. Outside of the Chorale, which had been taught by part-timers ever since Will Pittle, Professor of Vocal Studies, had had a stroke ten years before, and Hartley’s club-like Concert Band of older adults, there really was no Music Program to speak of. The Jazz Band had fizzled away when Hartley refused to let Midden, a damn good jazz trumpet player who had a small quintet that played around town, direct the ensemble. Hartley insisted that he could lead both ensembles. But as a former U.S. Marine Band conductor, Hartley didn’t swing so much as march through the hits of the thirties and forties. So few students enrolled. Rather than let Midden take over, Hartley, as Chairman of the Arts Division before I was elected, just stopped including Jazz Band in the Music Department schedule. Since then most of Hartley, Midden, and Pittle’s class loads were comprised of classes in Music Appreciation, a G.E. course for non-majors, and The History of Popular Music, which would count towards a music degree as a third, elective course beyond the mandatory, two semester Survey of Western Music. But even this class was usually filled with non-majors looking for an easy A. Music Theory, Instrumental Courses, Piano I—courses required for real music majors—were rarely offered and, with the exception of Piano I, if offered rarely attracted enough students to avoid being canceled. So the Music Department at Joaquin College really needed new blood. Which is why I was counting on Bert.

I have always played music. A self-taught guitarist, I’d opened for top bands while I was still a teenager in Southern California. I’d played for audiences as big as 3,000 paying customers. Then for years I’d done a solo folk thing, playing at coffee shops for soup and tips while working my way through college. I’d even thought about majoring in music instead of art, my first love. But in my first college music class I realized everyone but me had a good grasp of music theory. Although I played well, I could barely read a note. As Chairman of the Arts Division I was also Chair of the Music Department. It was a real thrill for me to hire real academic musicians to build a program that had the goal of starting young people in their professional training as musicians. I was secretly thrilled when Will Pittle announced his retirement the year before and Hartley and Midden both announced that this year, Olsen’s first year, would be their last. Now we could hire younger blood, full of passion for performance, and build a real music program. All of this was underlayment for Fernie’s remarks and, although these thoughts remained unspoken, there was some understanding around the table. I praised Fernie’s approach mentioning that getting the next generation started in higher education was, indeed, our primary mission.

When I asked Bert to speak about his plans Doc Hartley, former Chair, commented that it was too bad that I blew his introduction. I expected Bert to maybe explain that he’d asked me not to mention his grad school, or at least somehow cover for me in front of my colleagues. He said nothing about it and I thought it would sound petty on my part to clarify. What he did do was somewhat more sinister.

I’m not going to criticize the way things have been done around here before now. Every faculty I’ve been on has its own culture, this from a guy who so far had taught part-time at one other community college. My plan is to build on the great things that Doc and Rob have already accomplished.

What he did in his remarks, beyond leaving the impression that I’d forgotten to mention his grad school, was to flatter Hartley and Midden and put in their minds that, not only could I not handle a simple introduction properly but that Fernie and I were critical of their performance as faculty over the years. It was so subtle that Fernie missed it completely and, although it was my third moment of disquiet, I was still naïve enough to give Albert Wayne Olsen the benefit of the doubt. I preferred to believe that the impression he created was inadvertent.

WRONG!

<        .        >

CHAPTER 3

And so I began my second year as Chairman of the Arts Division at Joaquin Community College. Fortunately for all new college administrators the unsung heroes (heroines) of educational or any other institutions are the secretaries. Every chairperson, dean, vice president, president is usually blessed with a comparatively modestly paid secretary, administrative assistant, or whatever the job title, who knows the ropes and can teach the administrator how to do the job they’ve been hired to perform. My good fortune was to have Beverley Lettucca as my first Division Secretary.

Bev was great. She knew every form, every process, every procedure, and everyone at Joaquin College. She had a great sense of humor, was fast and efficient, and loved the arts. She never missed a performance or an art reception in our gallery.

About 20 years older than me, she’d worked at Joaquin College since she’d gotten a certificate in Office Management 25 years before, after her divorce from a Country and Western musician with whom she’d had a couple of daughters, now grown with kids of their own. She’d known many of my fellow chairs since they’d first been hired as faculty. She was active in the union and the staff senate and had been a division secretary for over fifteen years, finally landing in arts, where she’d wanted to be, when Jackie Meeks, our former secretary, transferred to the P.E. department…where she’d always wanted to be.

That was one of the stranger things about the management style at Joaquin College. When a staff employee had a serious interest in something, Arts in the case of Bev or Athletics in the case of Jackie, it seemed the college did everything possible to keep them from working in that area. This was another aspect of The Joaquin Way. Often staff would have to scheme and horse-trade for years with byzantine elaboration before they could get the position they really wanted. A staff member asking for a transfer to a certain area outright was a sure way to guarantee that they’d be assigned to an area that would require them to spend many hours of extra work just to get up to speed. Bev explained this to me one night when we ran into each other at a favorite al fresco dining spot where Rob Midden’s quartet was playing. Rob’s never getting to lead the Jazz Band was a case in point. The Joaquin Way.

My first encounter with Joaquin College was at a community college job-fair at the San Jose Marriott. These affairs have booths where different schools send representatives to pass out information about certificated teaching and administrative jobs. Often they will post a sign saying something like: Biology, Math, History, indicating the faculty positions they are hoping to fill. Joaquin’s booth had a sign that said: Art, French, Counseling, English, Philosophy. This happened to be in a year when the California budget was going through one of its periodic crises, so five faculty positions in one year seemed like a lot, especially for a smaller college like Joaquin.

You have five jobs and one of them is an art position. Seems like a lot of hiring considering the budget crunch, I said to the attractive Japanese-American woman manning the booth. This was Janet Fujikawa, Human Resource Technician II. I would later learn that she was married to Jack McClure, Chair of the Social Sciences division. Both were good people, which doomed them to be in eternal, low-level conflict with the administration at Joaquin. But of course, I didn’t know this at the time

Wel-l-l-l, she said smiling a somewhat embarrassed grin at me, it’s really only two positions. One is English and Philosophy. The other is an Art/French/Counseling position.

Since any of those positions would require a Masters degree, it would appear that Joaquin College expected to find one person with graduate degrees in two specific disciplines and someone else with Masters degrees in three specific disciplines. That was another quirky philosophy of The Joaquin Way. They felt that everyone should wear several hats. Firmly believing in the phrase a jack of all trades, they conveniently forgot the master of none ending to the old adage.

Well, good luck, I said, recalling that Judith and I had driven past a Los Campos-Joaquin City 40 miles off ramp on interstate 580 many times on trips from Oakland to Southern California to see my folks. I remember wondering about Joaquin City. Who lived there out in the middle of the vast Central Valley? Were they all farmers wearing bib overalls and straw hats? What would it have been like growing up a million miles from anywhere in the isolation, the heat, the smog? Little did I know at the time that I would be spending more than twenty years of my professional life working in that very place.

Eventually my colleague Beryl explained that she’d begged and begged then college president William Bonhed to split the art position out of the job. The guy who’d previously held the position had been a Belgian mercenary pilot who had moved to the Central Valley when the Congo gained independence. He and his brother had run a crop dusting business and somehow he ended up teaching art. He’d studied at the Ecole d’beaux Arts in Belgium, spoke French, and with the lowered standards at Joaquin applied, became the academic counselor for arts students and a French teacher. Apparently it took considerable effort on Beryl’s part to convince President Bonhed that French speaking, former Belgian mercenaries with art degrees and an interest in counseling, willing to live in an isolated location like Joaquin County were not a dime a dozen. However, Beryl never let me forget how she’d single-handedly gotten me my job through persistently nagging the former president.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, was how she’d put it.

Again and again she’d feel compelled to contribute to the division’s needs by nagging at administrators behind the scenes. Regardless of how much work others had contributed to needed tasks, or getting new equipment, or arguing a case before a funding committee, or otherwise wading through endless channels of bureaucratic murk, Beryl would always take full credit for things accomplished because at some party or function she’d run into an administrator and spend a few minutes bending their ear about an issue. If and when the issue would have a happy resolution for the arts she would hyperbolize about the 40-60 hours she spent on the issue. The 40-60 hours would, in reality, be two, five-minute conversations wherein she’d likely to have been told to submit the paperwork and go through proper channels. But as soon as something happy happened it would be:

See. It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. She’d say this if she was in a good mood. Or, I’m sick of putting in 40-60 extra hours a week in order to get things done around here, if she was in a bad mood.

This would be from a colleague who, for the twelve years I was chair, every afternoon, precisely at 4:00 p.m. when her office hour was over, would poke her head in my door and say something like, See ya later. Pete and I are going up to Bass Lake or I have to take Bitsy to the vet or I’m off to an SPCA fund-raiser. But basically, as I explained many times to part-timers who complained to me about her, her heart was in the right place.

So Bev had shown me the ropes. She’d explain the acronyms and the functions of the various college committees. In my first year or two it was all very confusing. But Bev held my hand and walked me through until she had a boss who knew what he was doing. Together we’d managed the rhythmic ebb and flow of paperwork relating to scheduling, budgeting, and supervising the division’s one hundred odd courses in art, music, drama, and photography being delivered by seven full-time and 25 part-time faculty to between 1200 and 1800 students for two full semesters and one summer session each year. It was a lot of work, but since I was given release time for half of my teaching load and, after Bev and I got our work vibe going to the point that we could spend only an hour or so a day on administrative tasks, I realized I could continue to teach as much as before, taking the extra classes as overload and really bumping up my pay. So it was worth the effort because of the extra money.

Meanwhile, Judith converted the garage at our home in Butterfly Creek into her studio. Sheetrock, insulation, and a wood stove and she was in business. After she did two large mosaic floors in our foyer and dining room she began to look for mosaic opportunities. Ultimately she would get several commissions for public murals on a large scale. When we moved out of our large studios on the Oakland Estuary we had to settle for smaller space in Butterfly Creek. But it worked out. She got the garage and I settled for a large bedroom with an outside door.

Several natural disasters—the Loma Prieta Earthquake, the Oakland Hills Fire, the Northridge Quake, and frequent fires in the foothills that I’d encounter on my 45 minute commute to Joaquin City—began to inspire my work. I was used to doing fairly large paintings in a series I called Views from Above. But the smaller studio and a desire to explore some new directions created an opportunity that filled me with creative energy. Soon I was scheduling a show at the San Francisco gallery that had handled my work for years. California: Burning, a show of small, one foot square oils, went up right about the same time Judith received a commission to do an eight by forty foot mosaic for the front of the new, Joaquin County Art Center.

Somewhere along this time we decided that we’d look for a place outside of town. We bought a five-acre parcel with an unfinished, 2100 square foot shop on it. We put in septic, drilled a well, and converted the building to create a live/work space. Butterfly Creek flows through the acreage, so there are beautiful rock formations, huge California live oaks, waterfalls, and several swimming holes—perfect in a climate that will reach 100 degrees for weeks at a time every summer.

But Butterfly Creek has its downside. Although beautiful, it is one of the most politically conservative areas in the state. Most Americans have a view of California derived from Hollywood. They envision 800 miles of sunny beaches, beautiful, vain people with the sexual mores of an alley cat, and drug crazed, gay hippies running around naked in San Francisco. Yes, California does have all of that. But once you get north of Santa Barbara you’d better wear a wetsuit if you go into the ocean or hypothermia will set in, even during the summer. Because of the Gulf Stream, I think New England’s beaches have warmer water temperatures in the winter than 80 percent of the California coast in the summer. Hollywood does attract more than its fair share of attractive people trying to break into the movie biz. And as far as the hippies and gays: California culture is tolerant of diverse lifestyles. Its mild climate does allow the homeless to live 24/7/365 on the streets in most of the major cities. We certainly don’t get the snowstorms of Chicago, New York, and Minneapolis, so we get many of their homeless. As for gay folks, I suppose many gays in the Castro in San Francisco are from California. But working in the arts I’ve known a lot of folks in the LGBTQ community. A big percentage of those I’ve known were raised in the Bible Belt, Midwest, Utah, and other extremely conservative places. They only come to California to escape the repressive culture of the right-wing Christians that raised them. You know, parents who spend years and years telling their kids that all sex is dirty, filthy, and will give them diseases in this world and will lead to Hell in the next. And then when Billy Bob ends up so frightened of what a vagina might do to him that he ends up gay, (I know this isn’t how it works) his fundamentalist parents (who likely conceived him before this, his fourth and her third marriage) are astounded when he calls from California to tell them he’s found the man he wants to marry. Of course, this takes at least two phone calls because his parents divorced when mom fell in love with dad’s cousin. Then they blame the devilish influences of the California lifestyle when Billy Bob comes out of the closet. In terms of what the good folks in Idaho, Alabama, and Indiana might call weirdos: we Californians don’t raise any more than the other states. But we do welcome them. We embrace them. In fact, as an artist/musician/writer, I count myself among the weird. Most of my friends are weird. I kind of collect ‘odd ducks.’ I like ‘em. Of course, a lot of the weird ideas Californians come up with, we are happy to sell to the rest of the world: personal computers, movies, contemporary music, new technologies, medical processes and procedures…that sort of thing. Tolerance is what made the Netherlands wealthy in the 17th century, the USA in the mid-20th, and what makes California the wealthy, creative tail that wags the dog today in Twenty-first Century America.

But in truth, much of California is as conservative, as Red State, as anywhere. Even with the roughly 60/30/10 percent split between progressives, conservatives, and independents that means there are still more registered Republicans in California than there are citizens of many states. California is the biggest agriculture state in the country. Unlike most farmers in Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, and other grain raising states, whose politicians continually complain about the deficit: most of California’s farmers aren’t subsidized by the taxpayers. Our vegetables, fruits, and nuts actually turn a profit. Then there’s the livestock. Remember all those old cowboy movies and serials on T.V.? While watching them, most of the time you’re looking at the California landscape. The posse chasing the outlaws outside of Dodge City, the Lone Ranger chasing bad guys through Texas, Maverick, the Big Valley were all filmed in California with the exception of the occasional, long shot, stock footage of Monument Valley in New Mexico.

So Butterfly Creek is very Redneck and proud of it. Fiercely independent people who want to be left alone, is how one real estate broker described the people to me. It’s the only place I’ve ever been where you could listen to a fat, bloviating, right-winger’s talk-radio show while walking from shop to shop, without missing a word. It’s also the only place I’ve lived, or even been, where the first question most folks ask after you tell them your name and shake their hand is usually and where do you go to church. If you say you don’t go to church the chill is palpable. Folk’s in these parts take their religion, or your lack of it, very seriously. One guy, a kind of street preacher, affixed what appeared to be a yellow, diamond shaped, traffic, caution sign to the back of his pick-up. Oversized, in skillfully painted black letters would be quaint, cautionary messages like: So-called Virgin Mary is the Whore of Babylon! Or: Papist Anti-Christ, Your Followers Will Burn In Hell! and other anti-Catholic witticisms. He wore his hair in a sort of 1965 Beatles cut and died young. Perhaps the Good Lord took offense at this guy’s description of His mom.

That down side…very limited social contact for a couple of artists—liberals—from the Bay Area…was a difficulty. Most of the like-minded people we met in the eight years we both lived there were considerably older than us. Judith and I couldn’t have kids due to corporate malfeasance in the form of a poorly designed I.U.D. Unfortunately, the people we did click with tended to dominate the dinner conversation with talk about which colleges their son got into and where their daughter was going to spend her year abroad. Most of them were artsy transplants who had moved up to Butterfly Creek during the back to the land movement in the hippie era. Then they’d grown up, raised kids, invested in real estate, etc. All very nice people, but as professional artists, Judith and I were seen by them as living an exciting dream and fussed over with exaggerated enthusiasm. So although we liked them, the dinner talk about kids eventually got boring and made us feel left out, and any talk about art or our art careers became somewhat embarrassing. We’d celebrate the solstice and the equinox with them and would take our turn hosting the occasional soiree, but it wasn’t like the fun we’d had in Oakland. In fact, after living in Butterfly Creek for 14 years I’ve kept in touch with one guy, who manages my old place as a rental, and another, Mike Hubley, who’s now about 85. Mike studied art and electrical engineering at UCLA on the G.I. Bill after WWII. He’d gotten into the intelligence end of things during the war, and after. His education complete, he went to work for the company, where he’d eventually met his second wife, Suzie. They’d retired to Butterfly Creek and we’d met them through mutual friends right about the time we moved out to the live/work on our five acres.

Our Oakland friends, mostly artists—people don’t realize that more Bay Area artists live in the East Bay than San Francisco, the rent’s cheaper and the weather’s warmer—would come up to spend the weekend. We’d all drive up to Yosemite, take in the sights, and hang for a couple of days. Some of these people had been friends for years. We’d spend Thanksgiving with them or they with us. They were like family, really. But after the first few years their trips became fewer and further between. Our trips to the Bay Area also became less and less frequent as well.

We’d also met, through Beryl, her circle of friends. This included one or two actual artists and a bunch of very nice people. Kiki and Dan Maddingly were the most interesting. Kiki grew up in Joaquin City. She eventually finished her M.A. and then, via The Joaquin Way, went to work for Joaquin County Mental Health Services. She mostly did assemblage, gluing things together to make sculptural pieces. Dan was part of that late sixties hippie back to the land movement. He’d settled in Butterfly Creek where he set up a ceramics studio. Eventually, to earn a living, he’d learned the trades and gotten his contractors license. Sometime after this Kiki hired him to build an outside staircase to her studio by the Union Pacific tracks in central Joaquin City. He whipped out the staircase in a day which so impressed Kiki she fucked him on the spot, as she put it. I always felt she had a touch of Aspergers. That had been a dozen years before I met them and they’d been together ever since.

The problem with Butterfly Creek was therefore a lack of social contact in town, and too remote a location that made it difficult to drive down to Joaquin City for Dan and Kiki’s parties. For the first few years we’d go. But then, we’d have to leave early making sure one of us was sober enough to drive the 45 miles of well-patrolled, winding mountain road up to Butterflty Creek. So by about the fifth or sixth year I was at Joaquin College, about the time Albert Wayne Olsen joined our faculty, we were beginning to feel a bit isolated.

During the week I spent all day communicating with students, colleagues, and staff. But Judith spent pretty much all week alone in her studio. By the time I got home at six or seven—on days when I didn’t have a night class—I’d be all talked out. So our communication began to suffer…and so did our marriage.

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CHAPTER 4

As the semester progressed the two new guys got in the groove. I told them they should focus on getting their classes up and running. My first four years at the college, before I was elected Chairman, I found myself the Arts Division’s representative on all the committees we were required to participate on. I was on the Curriculum Committee, the Faculty Senate, the Facilities Committee (as a non-voting alternate), and the Representative Council of the Joaquin College Faculty Association. Doc, as Chair during this time, was on the Instructional Council. Beryl, Elaine, Richard, and Will were committee-free and Rob Midden did some counseling for the division. Now, as Chair, I didn’t want to dump committee work on the new guys the way my colleagues had dumped on me when I was the new kid. Besides, I was expecting Fernie and Bert to build their programs. Music and Theatre needed work, serious T.L.C. At first it seemed to me that they were both doing a fairly good job for their respective departments.

Fernie had contacted all the high school drama teachers in the county, whom he already knew due to his part-time work during the previous years. He held several weekend workshops and developed a new energy in the program. His first semester enrollments were up considerably. One of his other ideas was to take Drama I, History of Dramatic Literature, back from the English program where it was cross-listed as Eng 11. He was very excited and somewhat adamant about this idea, seeing it as a good feeder class for his Acting and Drama Production classes. He urged me to speak to Vice-president of Instruction Jonathan Storch.

Have you ever met Bobby Ballisterri, Storch asked me.

Once or twice… briefly. Why?

She’s kind of…problematic. She teaches History of Dramatic Lit now. I know that she’s put a lot of effort into developing the class. Takes the students to plays; shows lots of videos; has them read plays aloud.

"I can imagine, Jon. But now that we have a full-time theatre professor, and the course is History of Dramatic Literature, don’t you think Fernie should be teaching it? He feels it’s essential to—"

Yes. I understand, James. But like I said, Bobby can be…umm… a problem.

Could you at least bring it up to her. It sure would help bring up Theatre’s FTES.

This was important because the number of FTES that each division generated theoretically had an impact on that division’s funding for things such as new equipment and faculty. Storch promised to speak with her.

A few days later I had a phone message:

You FUCKING SLEAZE!!! it was Bobby Ballisterri. I spent hours developing this class when YOUR fucking division fucking bailed on it. How DARE YOU try to steal it, you SHIT! And tell Fernie to SHOVE IT UP HIS ASS!!

Whoa! I saw what Storch meant by Professor Ballisterri being problematic. So I called Fernie telling him that Bobby was pretty reluctant to give up the class. But Fernie was insistent:

I really need to get this class into the Theatre Program.

It might be tough to make that happen.

But I really need to bring up the FTES.

Okay, I’ll talk to Storch again.

Bobby really doesn’t want to give up the class, is how Storch put it.

Yeah. I got that impression from the phone message she left me. Did you tell her that Fernie felt it was an important element to his program?

Well…I really didn’t get that far. Maybe you could encourage Fernie to reconsider.

He’s concerned about good FTES. He doesn’t want his program cut.

Tell you what. You tell him that I guarantee that we’ll give him all the slack he needs and that I won’t cut his program. Tell him I really value the Theatre Program. But try to discourage him. I find Bobby somewhat…difficult to deal with.

I’ll bet. My ear was still burning from her call and I felt the need to disinfect my phone. Later I talked to Fernie. I told him that Bobby was still reluctant. Fernie began to argue. So I pointed out that she’d done a lot of work and would probably be resentful and unwilling to help him get the class up and running. That meant he would have to prepare formal lectures, like I had to do when I started to teach Art History. He’d have to research different plays, require term papers that he’d have to read and edit and develop quizzes, tests, and exams. As I spoke, I could see Fernie’s adamant enthusiasm slowly melt away when he realized there would actually be some work involved.

Fernie’s wife, Katerina, has MS. Born in Sweden, she’s a wonderful woman who Fernie met while trekking in the Andes. At the time he’d recently gotten divorced. She was widowed tragically young with three preteen children: two daughters and a son. They’d become friends on their adventure and had kept up communication after Fernie had returned to the States and she’d gone back to France to her deceased husband’s ancestral estate. Then she’d come to visit him in California and had never left. They also had a child of their own, Anya, who was about twelve at the time I’d hired Fernie. The MS by that time had progressed to the point that Katerina’s movement was being noticeably affected. My mom’s brother had been diagnosed with MS when he was in the Navy during WWII. The type he had hit all at once, a sudden deterioration that was then more or less stable for the rest of his life. Katerina had the variety that was slowly developing, gradually limiting her movement and mobility more and more over the years.

Fernie was very popular with his students. When he was a part-timer I’d often seen him on the lawn with the theatre students acting…or acting-out as theatre people tend to do. I’d really pushed to hire him because of his student first attitude and infectious enthusiasm. In fact, Beryl and I kind of packed the hiring committee, stacking the deck in his favor. But still I had to go head to head with Storch when he and Dean Ann Olden of Student Services were pushing for another candidate. Fortunately, when Storch let the other candidate know she hadn’t gotten the job she called him back a few minutes later and lambasted him on the phone. This was fortunate because Storch was quite pissed that I had been so adamant in questioning the fairness of Dean Olden’s bringing up past history with Fernie during our deliberations. This was, in fact, illegal discrimination according to state hiring guidelines. This was also a big factor in why I didn’t raise a big stink when Dimbro insisted later that semester, that Bert Olsen should be our new Chorale Director. I’d already had one conflict and didn’t need another. So when the disappointed candidate had the bad form to chew Storch a new one over the phone, he felt that by insisting on hiring Fernie I’d enabled us to miss a bullet in the form of another Bobby Ballesterri.

Fernie had missed several of the myriad deadlines for the endless red tape of academia, so I already had him pegged as a procrastinator and pretty damn lazy to boot. All of his classes were pretty much fun. Acting I, II, & III, Drama Production, Stagecraft, these are the core of the Drama Program…the real stuff, hard work with a lot of time required beyond the scheduled hours...but fun. Fernie had never taught a real academic class in his life. He figured he would be able to just wing it. I pointed out that when I started teaching Art History I was very familiar with the material. But I still had to do a lot of research, slide and lecture preparation. I exaggerated the effort it took. When I explained that History of Dramatic Literature would be a much more formal and dry course, and would entail prepared lectures, grading tests, and editing term papers…I knew he’d back down. When he realized the work involved, and considered Katerina’s medical situation, he did.

Welll…I guess I can let Bobby keep teaching it…for now.

That’s mighty big of you, Fernie. Thanks.

When I let Dr. Storch know that Fernie had backed-down on his demand he was greatly relieved. We both knew that Fernie was right. History of Dramatic Literature belonged in the Theatre Department. But now Storch wouldn’t have to go to the mat with Bobby Balleserri. His relief was palpable.

So I learned three things about three of my colleagues at Joaquin College from this episode. Fernie Freisen was lazy. Dr. Storch was a coward, or at least, severely confrontation averse. And Professor Bobby Ballisterri of the English Department was a friggin’ nutcase! They all fit neatly into and subscribed to The Joaquin Way.

<        .        >

CHAPTER 5

Let’s get back to Professor Albert Wayne Olsen in his first semester at Joaquin College. Late in the semester Bev came to me with a concern. She’d been singing in the Chorale for several years before we hired Olsen and was familiar with how the Chorale ran at Joaquin College.

James, there’s a slight problem I need to bring to your attention. It’s about the Chorale. You know Bert has really built up enrollments so there’re about seventy people in the Chorale now. Well…most of them are women.

Yes. He’s done a good job there. So what’s the problem?

"Bert insists everyone be there, ready to start at seven sharp. At eight we take a five-minute break so we can end the session right at nine. Since we meet right after dinner, maybe followed by coffee, and the nearest women’s room across the lawn in the administration building has only one stall…well, it’s difficult for us all to do our business and get back on time if he’s only