Coincidences can be life-changing and that was certainly true of my Yale College career. By a series of coincidences I ended up as a singer in the early days of the YALE RUSSIAN CHORUS. That put me on a path where I could build the chorus success into a series of later successes. Not only did the chorus make my career at Yale but it also had members who were bright graduate students. By keeping up with them intellectually it helped get my grades up so I could get into Yale Law School and an internship one summer in the office Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota between his 1960 and 1968 presidential campaigns.
It also helped my resume stand out when I was looking for a law career in Boston which was and is notorious as a meritocracy where many bright law students try to get and hold onto relatively few available law jobs.
Getting back to 1956, when I was applying for college, Harvard was my safety school because I wasn’t sure of my chances of getting into Yale and my father taught physics as a Harvard professor.
With my lowly C average from Exeter, I got into both Yale and Harvard. What I didn’t realize but the universities did, was that the C average was very respectable because it meant that I was in the middle of a nationally selected group of very bright students, 50% above me and 50% below.
In those days, in 1956, an Exeter education almost guaranteed to get a student into Harvard, Yale or Princeton: about 180 of our class of 230 went there. EXETER red went to HARVARD red, about 100 students per year. Andover blue went to YALE blue. When I walked around HARVARD yard visiting my father, I would recognize almost one out of every 10 Harvard students passing by.
My first year at Yale I coasted and took the ROTC course because I felt that the army might motivate me. After one year of ROTC I felt I was sufficiently motivated and quit because I hated the program and there didn’t seem to be on wars on the horizon where I might be a private in the foxhole. The Korean war was over and the Vietnam war had not yet begun.
However, I got no credit for the one year so in the fall of 1957, in my sophomore year I had to make up a credit. I found languages easier than science and there was a double rate Russian course. We met six days a week, Monday through Saturday, a combination of grammar and native Russian speakers.
The Russian Chorus had begun as a part of the Yale Russian club. Now it was going off on its own. it was a good thing I was in on the new beginning because my music ability was limited although I did like to sing.
When spring 1958 came somebody said we are the Russian Chorus. We should go to Russia. That seemed a far-fetched and unlikely possibility. But I learned something: if you wanted to accomplish something big, with luck, perseverance and Yale connections, you could make it happen.
Five years after the death of mass murderous Stalin, at the beginning of August, 1958, we were in Moscow, thanks to a free trip on Panama Airways, sympathetic Alumni and chorus families and seed money from a minor private foundation. Officially, we were part of a new cultural exchange program between the Soviet Union and the US. In fact, we were young singers without one concert date. So we improvised by singing Russian songs in parks in the early evening as Russians were leaving work. We were a novelty: “Who are these young American men who are singing our songs?”
After about 45 minutes we would stop and each one of us would be surrounded by 30 to 50 Russians all wanting to know what it was like in America. I and many others could answer their questions in Russian. That was the successful drill that we repeated almost every night of those 30 days. I would pick the prettiest young lady in the group and ask for a date the next day and was never turned down. That was great for my ego until I returned home. We sang at female colleges and I found that invariably the young women, who were serious students of matrimony, said they were “pinned” with the fraternity pin of a young man and so were unavailable.
The highpoint was an impromptu concert we gave in Moscow in Mayakovsky Square, named after the famous Soviet poet. We drew a crowd of 5000 and made the front page of the New York Times the next day.
Perhaps the Russian music is so great because their lives are so miserable. One native Russian instructor in the Russian course advised the Russian club in 1954 that the only way they would understand the Russian “soul” was to sing their songs. And so began the Yale Russian Chorus which now has alumni who can put together 100 singers in Woolsey Hall and they sang in the White House in the George Bush and CLINTON years for Yeltsin and Gorbachev.