Eddie Van Halen was in the parking lot of Roosevelt Middle School in Monrovia when the district officer came to tell the music teacher her program was being cut. He had stopped to fix a tire. He heard everything through the open gymnasium window. Then, he went inside. September 1979 Monrovia, California San Gabriel Valley A Tuesday afternoon, 3 weeks into the school year.
A district budget officer drives into the Roosevelt Middle School parking lot in a county suburban. He carries a folder. The music teacher is setting up for afternoon rehearsal when he comes through the gymnasium door. Her program ends at the end of the month. In the parking lot, a man crouches beside a van with a flat tire.
He has the hood of his jacket pulled up against the September heat. He stops working when he hears the voices through the open window. He listens. Then, he stands up. Here is the story. Margaret Reyes is 43 years old. She has been the music teacher at Roosevelt Middle School for 14 years. She came to the job in 1965, the year the school opened its music program with a donated upright piano and 12 used instruments from a high school in Arcadia that had upgraded its band.
She had inherited a program that existed on paper and built it into something that existed in fact. 41 students, a concert band, a jazz ensemble that played at the district festival every spring, and a choir that had won the San Gabriel Valley choral competition 2 years in a row. She grew up in Monrovia.
Her father, a house painter named Victor Reyes, had taken her to hear the Pasadena Symphony at the Civic Auditorium when she was 8 years old. She had come home and told him she wanted to play an instrument. He had taken her the following Saturday to a music store on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena and asked the man behind the counter what the cheapest instrument was that a child could learn quickly enough to stay interested.
The man had said clarinet. Victor had bought a used Bundy clarinet for $12 and driven home with it on the seat beside him like something fragile. Margaret had practiced it every day, 30 minutes before school and 30 minutes after without being asked because no one had told her not to and because the sound of it was something she needed to make.
She was good enough by 12 to earn a place in the school band, good enough by 16 to play in a community orchestra in Arcadia, good enough at 18 to earn a partial scholarship to Cal State Los Angeles where she studied music education and graduated in 1958 knowing she was going to spend her life teaching children what Victor Reyes had bought her for $12.
She had been doing exactly that for 21 years. The district budget officer’s name was Gerald Simms. He was 51 years old, had been with the Monrovia Unified School District’s finance office for 9 years and had delivered this kind of news before. Program cuts, position eliminations, the specific communications that budget shortfalls produce in school districts when the options have been reduced to the ones that hurt.
He was not cruel about it. He was efficient. He had a folder, a form, and a timeline. He found Margaret in the gymnasium at 3:15 in the afternoon setting out music stands for the 4:00 rehearsal. 41 stands, one for each student. She set them out herself rather than asking students to do it because she liked the 15 minutes of quiet before rehearsal began, the empty gymnasium with the afternoon light coming through the high windows and the stands in their positions waiting.
She was placing the 37th stand when Gerald Simms came through the door. He introduced himself. He said he had news regarding the music program. He opened the folder. The Monrovia Unified School District was eliminating all non-core curriculum programs at the middle school level effective October 1st, 1979 in response to the funding reductions produced by Proposition 13, which California voters had passed the previous year.
Music, art, and drama programs at all three district middle schools would be discontinued. Teaching positions associated with these programs would be eliminated. Margaret’s last day would be September 28th. He said it in the tone of a man reading a document that has already been finalized, which it had. He said he was sorry.
He handed her the form. He said she would receive the standard separation package and that HR would be in touch. Margaret held the form. She looked at the 37 stands she had set out. She looked at the four she had not yet placed. She looked at Gerald Sims. “My students have a concert in November,” she said.
Gerald looked at the form. “The program discontinuation is effective October 1st,” he said. “The November concert would be outside the program’s operational period.” Margaret set the form down on the nearest music stand. She picked up the 38th stand and carried it to its position. She placed it.
She went back for the 39th. Gerald Sims watched her for a moment, then he said goodbye and walked back through the gymnasium door. In the parking lot, Eddie Van Halen had heard most of this through the gymnasium window, which was propped open with a wooden block to let the September heat out. He had been crouched beside the rear passenger tire of his van, the same white 1968 Ford Econoline that had been carrying the band’s equipment since 1973.
Now with 94,000 mi on it and a passenger tire that had been slowly losing pressure since Pomona when the county sedan had pulled in beside him. He had heard the door open, heard the footsteps on the gymnasium floor, heard the folder open and the form being read and the word October. He stood up. He had grown up 7 miles from this school in Pasadena on the same streets and in the same kind of neighborhoods that produced children who came to Roosevelt Middle School and sat in Margaret Reese’s gymnasium on Tuesday afternoons and learned to read music from stands she had set out herself before they arrived. His own music education had been his father Jan’s doing. Jan Van Halen, who had played clarinet and saxophone and piano in a dance band in the Netherlands before bringing his family to California in 1962, who had sat with his two sons every evening and shown them what music was made of. Eddie had not needed a school music program, but he’d played enough clubs
and enough San Gabriel Valley venues over enough years to know the children who had, the ones who had carried instruments home on the bus and practiced in apartments where there was not much room and who arrived in those clubs 20 years later as the working musicians who made everything else possible.
He opened the gymnasium door. Margaret was placing the 40th stand. She looked up. He was wearing a plain jacket and jeans and a baseball cap. He had a smear of tire grease on his right hand. He looked like a man who had been fixing a tire in a parking lot, which was what he was. “I heard,” he said, “through the window.” Margaret looked at him.
She was not alarmed. A man who had been fixing a tire in a school parking lot and had come inside after overhearing something was a specific category of situation and her 21 years of teaching had given her a precise instinct for the intentions of the people who walked through her gymnasium door. She went back for the 41st stand.
“How many students?” he said. “41,” she said. “Concert band and jazz ensemble.” Eddie looked at the stands, all 41 of them, placed in their positions, waiting. He said, “What does it cost to keep the program running for a year? Margaret stopped. She set the 41st stand down where it was. She looked at him.
She had not been asked this question before. She had been told what the program cost. She had submitted budget requests. She had argued for line items at school board meetings. She had never been asked by a stranger who had come in from a parking lot what it would cost to keep it. She thought about it.
Instruments, maintenance, sheet music, the festival registration fees, the concert programs printed at the copy shop on Myrtle Avenue. $3,200, she said. For a year. ; [snorts] ; He reached into his jacket pocket. He took out a checkbook. He looked for a pen and found one in the breast pocket of his jacket, the same pocket where he kept picks when he was playing.
He wrote the check on the 41st music stand. He wrote the date, September 11th, 1979. He wrote the amount, $3,200. He wrote the pay, Roosevelt Middle School Music Program. He signed his name. He handed the check to Margaret. She looked at it. She looked at the signature. She looked at him. The recognition arrived slowly, the way recognition arrives when the context is wrong, when the face belongs in arenas and record stores and not in a gymnasium in Monrovia with a smear of tire grease on its right hand. The name on the check, she said. He put the checkbook back in his pocket. This is for the program, he said, not a donation. I want a receipt that says the program is funded for the year. Take it to the district. He looked at the 41 stands in their positions. Drop your city or state in the comments. I want to know how far this goes. Your students have a concert in November, he said.
He walked back out through the gymnasium door. Margaret Reyes stood in the gymnasium with the check in her hand and the 41 stands in their positions and the afternoon light coming through the high windows for a long time after the door closed. She took the check to the district office the following morning.
Gerald Sims received her. He looked at the check. He looked at the name on it. He looked at Margaret. He made three phone calls. The program discontinuation notice was withdrawn. Margaret’s position was retained. The district accepted the private funding with the specific efficiency of an institution that has discovered an unexpected solution to a problem it had considered resolved.
The November concert took place as scheduled on the 14th, a Thursday evening, in the same gymnasium where the stands had been set out and where the form had been placed on the 38th stand and where a man with tire grease on his right hand had written a check on the 41st. 41 students performed. The gymnasium held 230 people.
Parents pressed three to a row in the folding chairs, siblings sitting on the floor at the sides, neighbors who had seen the flyer on the bulletin board at the Monrovia library. The district superintendent attended, having received a call from the board chair who had received a call from Gerald Sims who had processed the check and made his three phone calls and had been thinking about the whole thing since September.
Margaret conducted from the front in the dark blue dress she wore for every concert, the same dress for 14 years because it was the right dress for standing in front of students and it had never given her a reason to change it. The jazz ensemble played three pieces. The concert band played four. The choir, which had won the San Gabriel Valley competition two years in a row, performed last.
They performed a piece Margaret had arranged herself, a three-part harmony setting of a song that most of the parents in the gymnasium knew from the radio. The gymnasium was completely quiet when they sang it. Not politely quiet, the other quiet, the one that arrives when something is happening that the room has decided deserves its full attention.
When it ended, the applause lasted a long time. Margaret Reyes taught music at Roosevelt Middle School for 11 more years after that September afternoon. She retired in 1990 at 54 in the same gymnasium on the same Tuesday afternoon schedule with the same afternoon light coming through the high windows.
Her last class was a Tuesday rehearsal. She set up all 41 stands herself as she always had. When the rehearsal ended and the students filed out, she collected the stands one by one and stacked them in the storage closet at the back of the gymnasium. Then, she sat on the piano bench for a few minutes in the empty room.
Then, she went home. After she retired, she kept teaching. Private lessons from her house on Myrtle Avenue in Monrovia, a few blocks from where she’d grown up. One student at a time, clarinet and piano and basic music theory, the same things Victor Reyes had made possible with $12 in 1944. She charged $12 an hour for students whose families could afford it and nothing for the ones who couldn’t.
A distinction she did not announce or discuss, which her paying students discovered gradually by noticing that some of their classmates were never invoiced, and which those classmates discovered by noticing that they were never asked to pay and were never going to be. She retired from private teaching in 2003 at 67.
By then, she had taught music to 412 students in the San Gabriel Valley, not counting the 41 who had been in the gymnasium on September 11th, 1979, setting up their stands for 4:00 rehearsal, and knowing nothing about what had almost been decided in the parking lot outside. In 2004, three of her former students, all of them adults now, one a professional musician in Los Angeles, one a music teacher in Arcadia, one a sound engineer at a studio in Burbank, pulled money to donate a bench to the Roosevelt Middle School music room. It is placed against the wall near the door, exactly where Margaret used to stand when she wanted to hear how the ensemble sounded from the back of the room. A small plaque on the bench reads, “For Margaret Reyes, who set out all 41 stands.” The music room still has 41 stands. Some of them are the same stands Margaret placed in the gymnasium on September
11th, 1979, before Gerald Sims came through the door. Some of them are replacements, newer, purchased in the years after the program was retained and grew. They are all the same height. They fold the same way. On Tuesday afternoons, when the afternoon rehearsal begins, the light comes through the high windows, the same way it came through on that September afternoon.
It falls on the stands in their positions. It moves across the room as the rehearsal goes on, and the students play, and the teacher at the front listens from the position Margaret always listened from, the center of the room, where you can hear everything. By the time the rehearsal ends, the light has reached the bench by the door.
Then, it moves on.
