by Peter Twitchell
Today I would like to talk about how I got interested in music. It’s not a long story. I grew up as a boy infant. I remember being bundled up in a sled with a sleeping bag and canvas to protect me from the extreme cold winters we had in the 1950s.
I don’t know if you call it a gift but I’m amazed that I have a photographic memory. I remember moments as an infant and as a one-year-old and people and names like Moses Buzz who helped Mom put me in the sled and making sure I was protected from the cold.
My mom Sarah without fail walked from across the river a quarter mile upstream from the old airport and walked all the way to Bethel on the river to go to church.
She occasionally got a ride from Albert Romer Sr. who was at the time one of the pilots for the Northern Consolidated Airlines. As far as I know he could’ve been the captain. He would put us into his van and drive across to Bethel on the frozen Kuskokwim River ice and get us to the church where he was the choir director. Every Sunday night service without fail the Moravian Church choir would sing the song or songs that they had rehearsed the previous Wednesday night service.
My dad David was a guitar player playing country and gospel tunes in our home and then many homes around Bethel. That was a popular social activity – the people of Bethel shared going from home to home, having something to eat and something to drink and then sing and dance the night away. That’s a tradition probably carried forward from the time Bethel became a city in the 1930s and probably even before that. That was the peoples’ favorite pastime.
One day when I was a boy of probably about five years old Dad came home without his white acoustic guitar and told mom that Sammy Samuelson had borrowed his guitar. He got it back sometime later because I remember playing with the guitar strings trying to make sense of the music Dad produced on it.
Mom played the keyboards, she played the mandolin, and had an organ which you had to pump by foot to produce the sounds.
When I was a boy no older than seven years old Dad came home with a small box that turned out to be a record player that you wound up. In a small box it had about 15 needles that needed to be replaced every few days because Dad gave me that phonograph and a stack of 45 RPM records of country and 50s rock ‘n’ roll music.
I started to breathe and live with music at a very young age.
When my dad passed away August 21, 1965 I was 15 and all of a sudden there was no money coming into the home either from Bristol Bay in the summer or from trapping. My Dad was a fisherman in Bristol Bay and a trapper in winter for fur bearing animals.
Mom was a homemaker and made the greatest curries from beef and reindeer. She made the best cookies, cakes and apple pies that I have never found a match for. Whatever she put into that pie I was never able to duplicate, the great flavor or find it anywhere else.
One year back in ‘95 I drove from Orlando, Florida and drove up the eastern seaboard to the Trump Plaza along the coast and then over to Allentown, Bethlehem, and Lititz, Pennsylvania to visit with Moravian church pastors that had retired there. I spent the night with Otto Dreydoppel and his wife In Allentown. I was surprised when the Moravian Church community had a big gathering to welcome me with a big dinner.
The Charles Eichman family, Douglas, and Gracek Schatzsneider were there including many of the early Bethel Moravian Church Families that were in Bethel even before I was born.
This is part 1 of 2, we will continue next week with part 2, quyana.
