Young musicians pay visit to Hollister
The verdict is unanimous: the Giant Dipper roller coaster at the
Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is
”
brilliant.
”
Young musicians pay visit to Hollister
The verdict is unanimous: the Giant Dipper roller coaster at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is “brilliant.”
Artichokes are “horrid,” and dipping them in mayonnaise or melted butter “only makes them worse.”
Those are some of the impressions gleaned this week from an ensemble of student musicians from London staying in Hollister during part of a California tour. The students, ranging from middle school through high school in age, are enrolled in Sedgehill School, which emphasizes fine arts as part of its curriculum.
Sedgehill is located in Lewisham, one of London’s boroughs, containing about 900,000 residents.
Two tour buses pulled into San Benito High School Saturday, and the 56 students and 11 chaperones on the tour spilled off to be paired with families throughout Hollister.
How they came to land in Hollister is quite a story, one going back more than 40 years.
“I think it was around 1964,” said Marge Yarmuth, of Hollister. “I was a huge Beatles fan and the coolest thing you could do was to have a British pen pal. I think I first hooked up through a teen magazine. I got the name of a girl and we exchanged a few letters.”
“She had a friend who was interested. That was Tony.”
“Tony” is Tony Masters, the music director at Sedgehill for some 35 years.
Since those first tentative letters, Masters and Yarmuth kept up their correspondence and eventually became very close friends.
Masters and his wife, Mary, are staying this week with Yarmuth and her husband, Dale.
“I’m just thrilled to death that they’re in Hollister,” Yarmuth said.
The students and their chaperones are maintaining a torrid pace. After beginning the tour in Los Angeles with a performance at Disneyland, they traveled north for a brief stay in Monterey and a performance at Roaring Camp in Felton.
While in Hollister, they performed three dates in San Francisco, at Union Square, Pier 39 and, on Wednesday, they opened the Giants-Padres game at AT&T Park with a performance of the national anthem. Their only local performance was Wednesday morning at San Benito High School.
The students loaded up and headed for San Francisco International Airport Thursday morning, with a stopover at a mall for shopping.
Monday’s trip to San Francisco included a ride across the Golden Gate Bridge and back, where they saw protest banners hung from the span asking China to free Tibet. San Francisco is the only American city to play host to the Olympic torch run, and the event has drawn protests in Europe and here.
That brush with history was answered with more history two days later, when the group toured Alcatraz.
Director Masters appeared at Monday’s meeting of the Hollister City Council, where he accepted a plaque from Mayor Brad Pike, and presented a certificate of his own, containing a mayoral proclamation from Lewisham.
Secondary schools in England roughly span American middle and high schools, and members of the ensemble range in age from 11 to 19.
Don and Bari Smith of Hollister hosted one of the chaperones, 25-year-old Hannah Powell. Powell is a third-year physical education instructor at Sedgehill.
“We’re having a great time,” Bari Smith said. “This is her very first time to the United States, so everything’s new to her.”
The sagging U.S. dollar is good news for European visitors, something not lost on the musicians or their chaperones.
“We had a fun time at the outlets,” Smith said. “She was amazed at the prices. Everything was so cheap.”
Several of the visitors took in Mission San Juan Bautista for a crash course in early California history.
But much of what they gained were everyday experiences.
Powell enjoyed being part of an American family, watching a Little League game, visiting the supermarket and talking hockey with the Smiths’ two sons.
But there’s one bit of home Powell was happy not to leave behind.
“She was very relieved because she could have a proper cup of tea,” said Smith, herself a British expatriate.
Coming from one of the world’s great cities to small town America seems to have produced revelations for most of the entourage. Rosie Rutherford, 14, is on the tour moving equipment. A brother plays in the band. She noticed that the streets here are “wide and long.”
She enjoyed California’s vastness, in part because she liked reading on the buses during travel time. San Benito County’s topography came as a surprise. The hills we take for granted were welcome. She credited the region’s relative lack of history to our reputation for earthquakes. During her brief stay, she was able to infect her host family with a passion for the television program she loves, “Dr. Who.”
One aspect of Hollister outdoes London, Rutherford said. “I was expecting a small school, but [San Benito High] is huge!” And Hollister itself was a pleasant surprise. “I enjoyed Hollister more than I thought I would. Our band teacher said it would be really small with really small houses, but it’s very nice.”
Louise Leslie, 12, plays trumpet. She found that being away from her parents for two weeks – for the first time – is a valuable experience, as much as she missed them. She did travel with a larger-than-life doll, also named Rosie, as a touchstone to home. Leslie said “staying with a whole new set of people” gave her new perspectives. The best experience? No question, it was Disneyland. The worst? The dreaded artichoke.
