Yes It’s True: A huge honor is traced to 75 Years Ago

“It’a small world after all,

It’s a small world after all,

It’s a small world after all,

It’s a small, small world.”

What do this publication’s 75 Years Ago section and Dvorak’s New World Symphony have in common?Bear with me, I’ll explain.

I have been intrigued by the occasional post in the Townbroadcast 75 Years Ago section of “Bygone Day” in which a Mr. And Mrs. Dannenberg from Allegan have been reported to have paid a friendly visit to a family in this area.

Always included in such accounts is their daughter, Joymly Dannenberg, accompanying them.

So all the memories come flooding back.

I always thought the name Joymly was a bit usual, so I never forgot it, especially when I learned of her existence as a sophomore at Grand Valley State College in 1967.

Actually better known as Joy, she was a sort of fitness freak who worked out in gyms and seemed to have an eye at becoming some kind of a physical fitness instructor or perhaps a sports medicine person who attends to athletic teams.

I learned of her interests from her boyfriend, Tom Waterfield, who became an unlikely roommate of mine in the spring of 1967 while we were living in Muskegon House in Grand Valley Apartments. Waterfield was saddled with joining me, Walter G. Tarnowski and Jim Blanchard in Apartment No. 10 because the complex was being squeezed by financial difficulties.

Tom Waterfield told me that Joymly was best known as Joy, and the two of them were getting along well together because of their mutual interests in athletics. Tom was a member of the Grand Valley crew, back before the time GVSU became famous as an NCAA Division II jock school.

I remember seeing her several times and noted she was a redhead.

I had very little in common with Waterfield, but to this day I have to thank him for turning me on to classical music, particularly the “Symphony No. 9, from the New World” by Anton Dvorak. Waterfield somehow came up with a really cheap record of the symphony, played by the Prague Symphony Orchestra with conductor Jan Marek. He brought the record into our apartment.

When I and other Grand Valley students began to fan out to our homes in June, I became very aware that I couldn’t get along without the New World Symphony and “The Moldau,” introduced to me by Walt Tarnowski.

So I stopped in at Dodd’s Record Ship in downtown Grand Rapids and asked Gerry Dodds for copies of the two works. He recommended Leonard Bernstein’s rendition of The Moldau, written by another Czech, Bedrich Smetana, plus Otto Klemperer’s recording of the New World Symphony.

My interest in classical music skyrocketed and I began to buy other records. I decided to take Music History 301 for the following winter term and purchased the records that were to be played by Prof. Daniel Kovats.

I was wildly successful in music class, memorizing all of the material and earned my first A in a collegiate class.

In the spring of my sophomore year, roommate Bruce Obits decided to take Music 301 as well, thinking it must an easy class since I had earned an A. When he had to do a term paper, I suggested the New World Symphony because it had an interesting story.

I told Obits about how Dvorak was asked to come to the United States and write a symphony after Tchaikovsky turned America down in 1893. Dvorak got a little homesick and was allowed to live in a Czech neighborhood in Iowa. This was where he personally witnessed the funeral of a Native American tribal chief, which inspired him to write the slow and very melodic second movement of the New World.

The main theme in the movement later became the folk song “Goin’ Home,” which was prominent in the 1948 movie “The Snake Pit,” which earned Olivia deHaviland and Oscar for best actress (see this week’s Townbroadcast 75 Years Ago entry).

Bruce Obits was so impressed with the story and the music that he took the record home to Newaygo to play it for his mother. She asked him to have it played for her funeral.

But Bruce developed Hodgkins Disease and died of it in November 1973. The second movement, “Goin Home,” was played at his funeral, and the pastor said, “Yes, friends, Bruce is goin’ home.”

To this day, it’s extremely difficult for me to think of a greater honor bestowed on me in my lifetime.

So indirectly, Joymly Dannenberg and Tom Waterfield did me a huge favor.