My awkward pre-teen and early teen years were spent at Gray Avenue Elementary, grades six through eight, which no one referred to as middle school in 1959 to 1962, or even into the later sixties in our small California Central Valley town.

(Photo: me at 13, before 8th grade graduation dance, with my mom. I wasn’t happy about what the beauty shop did with my hair.)

Our weekly music teacher there was Mr. Burtis, a big blond fairly handsome man with a baby face, glasses, a strong physique, and a very short haircut. My first significant memory of him in sixth grade is from the day he brought in a record player and played some classical music for us. I was sitting a way back in the classroom, in one of those big modern metal desks, rose pink, Formica fake wood slanted top that opened so that you could put your books inside, with an attached wooden chair.

I don’t recall clearly what the piece was, but it may have been Beethoven’s “Pastorale.” I was envisioning horses running across a field on a sunny day, maybe some smaller animals, and lots of foliage surrounding; I can see it still. I was really into the music and was pretending I was conducting, waving my hands over my desk a bit. Not making a show of it, or throwing my arms to the side or anything, just looking up above the blackboard, imagining the country scene, and enjoying the piece while directing. That’s how much of a geek I was, thinking I was deeply experiencing the joy of the music, and most of the kids couldn’t even see what I was doing. Some of the boys behind me may have had their heads down on their arms on their desks, even.

After it finished playing, Mr. Burtis said something like, “Now on this next one, just hold still in your seats and don’t make any gestures or anything.”

This was clearly directed only at me and I was mortified. I did as I was told, but rather than enjoying the next classical piece, I just sat there red-faced and could barely pay attention to the music. I mean, looking back on this several times throughout my life, I have thought, “Couldn’t he have just been amused by my love of the music and let it go, the geeky girl in the back of the room?” I don’t think any of the kids in the class were distracted by what I did… but of course I can’t know that now. I never asked anyone; I was too embarrassed about being called out.

Mr. Burtis also directed a girls’ chorus there, and gave tryouts that year; I got in and was assigned to be an alto, both my pleasure and my cross to bear forever after; I’ve always had a voice that was on the deep side and now that I’m old I can almost sing a respectable tenor in the male range. Or contralto, the lowest female range part which has a scant number of pieces written for it. I don’t know that I’ve ever sung in a group that performed a piece written for contralto.

Gray Avenue School Girls’ Chorus had about forty girls in it. We jammed ourselves into the one room in the school big enough for this, Mr. Burtis’ music room (which may have been where the band practiced but I think I remember them having a different space)—and practiced there as part of our regular curriculum, probably once a week, and also sometimes after school. The one piece I remember practicing repeatedly, possibly year after year, was “The Sound of Music.” I can still remember the exceptionally boring but pretty easy alto part; it’s so deeply ingrained in me. I think Mr. Burtis may have written the arrangement but I’m sure he had access to tons of choral arrangements pre-written.

We traveled to a few different venues within 50 miles of Yuba City to perform sometimes and sang in annual competitions. I remember best the ones in Chico, a long hour’s bouncing school bus ride north of Yuba City, which was fun, taking a Saturday and being in a huge crowd of other school choruses. I can’t remember if we placed; I think we did. I know Mr. Burtis would have been both disappointed and ticked off if we didn’t place, because we worked so hard. And he would have let us know, if we didn’t win anything, that we didn’t work hard enough or take the music seriously enough.

At rehearsals, when he was going over the separate parts, we were supposed to be quiet, but it was not easy for eleven- to thirteen-year-old girls to stand there silent for ten minutes, so we’d occasionally be quietly chatting or even giggling about something. Maybe not always so quietly. This would bring down his wrath; if everyone in the chorus was chattering away, he would stand in front of us for a few minutes and clench his jaw repeatedly. We came to recognize this as the sign we were about to be yelled at. Such an angry man to be teaching such a glorious subject.

Given I was one of the shortest girls in the group and stood in the front row (three or four rows deep) I often was specifically called upon not to talk, even though others were talking. We had one girl who had an exceptional soprano voice, and although she was also short, and was chattier and gigglier than I was, she was never singled out for discipline. So, I came to think that Mr. Burtis just didn’t like me. I thought he did not kick me out because I had a good voice, always knew my parts, and was the polio girl; it would look bad if he got rid of me given I wasn’t the only one who talked in rehearsals.

In seventh or eighth grade, I made up a song to sing at our sports games using the name of our school mascot. I couldn’t play sports, but I loved to watch the boys play and went to all the home games and to the away games if I had a ride.

The song’s words went like this:

“Come on and fight, Blue Jays, you’re right, Blue Jays.

Be Blue Jays, and smile, smile, smile.

Yell, Blue Jays, you’re swell, Blue Jays,

We’ll be Blue Jays all the while, while, while.

If you’re gonna be a Blue Jay, fight, fight, fight!

Every time we play a game we play it right!

So yell, Blue Jays, you’re swell, Blue Jays!

Come on, you Blue Jays, and fight!”

It was not long before many of the kids knew it, the girls cheering from the sidelines particularly. Mr. Burtis went to a game one time and heard us singing it and asked around where it had come from. I think he may have thought one of the teachers wrote it. One day he came to my home room and asked me to come to his music room. I definitely thought I was in trouble and he was probably kicking me out of the chorus; he was also the Vice Principal of the school.

Instead, he sat down at the piano and said to me, with something I can only describe as a new respect in his expression, “I heard the song you wrote. The Blue Jay Fight Song? I thought we could put it to music and teach it to the school.” I could not have been more stunned. After I picked my chin up off the floor, he asked me to sing it for him, and we spent perhaps an hour going over it until the phrasing and timing were right.

He wrote it out on staff paper and then… of course…. to make it partly his… wrote parts for everyone and arranged it. At the top of the mimeographed sheets appeared, “Words and music by Francine Allen, Arr. by D. (for Donald) C. Burtis” and the date, probably 1961. The parts were a little difficult for the kids who didn’t have musical ability to learn, but he was determined. Mostly it was the chorus that learned the parts.

I think he was taken aback that I could do something that creative and had that much commitment to music, given he thought I was troublesome. I enjoyed a little higher regard from my music teacher and took pride in the song being the team’s “official” song, for however long it was taught and sung there.

I looked up Mr. Burtis’s obituary. He was in his early thirties when I was taught by him and lived into his early nineties. He was dedicated to the community and did a lot of volunteering, and was proficient in more instruments than I’d been aware of; he also had traveled in the summers with his wife (of nearly seventy years at the time of their deaths) to all states except Nebraska, and a few countries outside the US.

But I experienced him as a musical task master with a rather volatile temper and pretty lofty expectations of pubescent girls; I always felt he was in the competitions for his own glory as much as our sense of accomplishment. Maybe I misunderstood during my naïve years, although I know now that musical directors have a definite sense of ownership of the work their groups produce. I was quite relieved near the end of our relationship to gain his almost astonished respect.

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