Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 67

My first brush with celebrity was Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who twice sought and twice failed to win the Democrat Party’s nomination for president. When I was fourteen, he and his entourage came into the drug store where I worked as a soda jerk. I remember how tall he was and how long the holder for his cigarette was. He ordered a small coke. His bodyguard gave me a nickel. I rang it up, and that was that. After he left, the pharmacist came over and told me the identity of the distinguished-looking gentleman.

The second celebrity I saw and heard up close was Pat Boone. His little sister Judy and I were freshmen in the same college when, the first week we were there, Pat, at the height of his popularity, came and gave the school a free concert in her honor.

In 1965, Harvey Lavan “Van” Cliburn came to Abilene, Texas, to give a concert. My girlfriend, far more cultured than her hayseed boyfriend from Tennessee, persuaded me to go. Taking with me no appreciation for classical music, I was mesmerized. For the first time in my life, I was aware of being in the presence of true greatness.

In 1958, Cliburn, twenty-three years old, had won the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. Six months earlier the Soviets had launched Sputnik, scaring Americans into believing Russia could destroy us with intercontinental missiles loaded with atomic bombs.

Cliburn captivated the Russians with his performance. Premier Nikita Khrushchev personally approved the judges awarding the prize to an American, saying, “Is Cliburn the best? Then give him first prize.” Time magazine proclaimed Cliburn, “The Texan Who Conquered Russia.”56 Cliburn helped bridge the gap between two mortal enemies. Immaculately expressed music did what fifty thousand nuclear-tipped missiles did not and could not do.

Van Cliburn died February 27, 2013. He taught me the difference between celebrity and greatness.