(Chapter I?)

Due to this modern miracle called Facebook we never seem to lose people from our past.
So as I write this among my five or six readers are people who attended my “farewell” party when I departed New York City in the late 1960s for “a little out of town experience” as well as a FB friend, Dennis Conway, who accompanied my musical saga South Africa during my days there.
I was playing second oboe in my native New York City with the American Symphony under the legendary Leopold Stokowski and the orchestra bus was taking us from Carnegie Hall from a triumphal concert to Long Island City to repeat with the Maestro´s unique version of Beethoven´s Fifth Symphony and his stupefying orchestration of a Bach organ work.
Next to me was an Austrian violinist who began to tell me about the lovely eight years he had spent in the SABC radio orchestra in Johannesburg, South Africa. The years included not only lovely music making but parties and sunshine.
His saga sounded so lovely that I requested the address of the orchestra (this was before Google was invented) and subsequently wrote to Jo´burg (as Johannesburg is better known) and sent one of those now antiquated reel audio tapes as an audition of what I could do.
To my surprise, I was accepted by South Africa´s equivalent of BBC orchestra!
The contract would be for two years with my round-trip fare paid and my work week would include daily rehearsals (morning and afternoons),recordings and a weekly concert with a salary being paid for something I would have done for nothing …if there were no bills to be paid!.
At the time I was indeed on my way “up”(?) as a free-lance oboist and English horn player in New York City playing with the Radio City Orchestra, the Opera and Gilbert and Sullivan Orchestra of New York, performing chamber music recitals at local libraries and even managed to sub one snowy evening on Broadway .
But all the above—as usual –never paid the bills for my first—and it turned out to be last –apartment on 29 West 70th Street near Central Park.
So I had to use my substitute teacher´s license I had earned from the Manhattan School of Music to accept sometimes daily calls at 7 am by Junior High School and High Schools to fill in for teachers calling in sick at what Hollywood correctly portrayed as New York´s Blackboard Jungle.
These public schools had upright, ambitious and conscientious students but also young ruffians and potential criminal from all over the world and also underprivileged from drug war areas far from the romantic neighborhoods of Woody Allen´s Manhattan.
A blackboard jungle indeed which could indeed be dangerous, especially for a substitute teacher only trying to earn some cash to support his oboe playing musical career.
A student threatening to send her brother´s gang to get me (don´t know what I did?) convinced me that I was in the wrong line of work at the ´´Bored´´ of Ed.
Accepted for my first full-time musical job, I visited the South African Consulate in midtown Manhattan and was given an LP (remember those?) with the SABC radio orchestra playing extraordinarly well Debussy´s “La Mer.”
I was convinced that going to what my father called a “jungle” would be a wonderful musical experience, especially in what Hemingway called the “Green Hills” of the African continent.
At my packed farewell party on West End Avenue and 96th street hosted by an oboist ex-classmate at the Manhattan School conspicuously wearing a see-through blouse, I was told by my fellow double reeders “ Bon voyage … see you in a few months.”
Everyone who knew me believed it wouldn´t be too long from before I would be flying back to the bright lights of Broadway.
My air ticket brought me to Paris to pick up a new English horn and visit the famed market place called les Halles, where I heard for the first time the term “globetrotter,” from a woman who claimed she was seeing the world without any other particular objective.
Since it was possible in those days for the same price on my air-ticket I also stopped off in Rome.
In Italy for the first time, my only memory– besides throwing coins into the famous Trevi fountain where Fellini filmed Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg diving in during La Dolce Vita– was a toothache which sent me to a local dentist, whose office resembled a palace. (His bill for my visit also was one for a Royal budget!)
I was ready to abandon my adventure and return to New York City but something –a sense of adventure?—sent me to Johannesburg.
Arriving enthusiastically at the Jo´burg airport I was met by someone I was sure had come from the SABC radio orchestra to give me a royal welcome.
But no …it was an official from the airline company.
“Sir we are sorry to inform you that your overweight baggage charge must be paid before we allow to depart the airport!”
Welcome to South Africa!
PS –Because of my mix-up of dates (unlike Americans, South Africans–like Englishman– put the day before the month),I had arrived on the wrong date and no one from the SABC radio orchestra was at the airport to meet me!