Back when I was in college, some campus organization called the Lecture Series Committee (LSC) would show weekly, fifty-cent-admission movies, in a large lecture hall. Mostly they were close-to-first-run recent flicks, with a classic thrown in every once in a while. Students would laugh or cry, the movie would end, and everyone would leave when the credits rolled.
On one occasion, though, maybe around 1970, they showed the 1962 movie version of "The Music Man", the great story of the con man who comes to a small town in Iowa in 1912 to sell band instruments and falls in love, that sort of thing. We've all seen it; it's a classic now but back then was only a few years past its release.
Among the stars are the four members of the School Board, played by the members of the Buffalo Bills barbershop quartet. They're the four whom the con man keeps distracting by getting them to sing every time they confront him asking for his "credentials."
For this showing at M.I.T., the lecture hall was packed, with standing students all around. Admittedly, it was winter in Cambridge, not much else to do except study, but it was really jammed. Lots of laughter, lots of fun ... then the credits ran.
And no one left!
Four or five hundred college kids, who by this time were usually heading for the exits, stayed in their seats and actually applauded the credits! You'll recall that the final scene is this gargantuan band pouring out of the auditorium, and as they march down the main street, all the main characters join in the parade. For the credits, the actors' names show on the movie screen as each star marches along ... Robert Preston, Shirley Jones, on down the line. The kids in the lecture hall applauded vigorously as each one was seen ... Paul Ford ... Hermione Gingold ... Buddy Hackett ...
Then came the School Board, among the paraders. And when the name "The Buffalo Bills" appeared on the screen, the movie audience stood up! I will never, ever forget that. Amidst the applause, itself unusual for an LSC movie, or maybe any movie, what got everyone even more roused, enough for a standing ovation, was a barbershop quartet.
I recall that moment today as I remember a gentleman named Dick Grapes of North Tonowanda, NY. That name will probably not ring a lot of bells for you; he was not in that movie, nor did he go to M.I.T. But Dick Grapes was certainly part of the story.
Barbershop quartet music is simply phenomenal when done well (and execrable when done poorly). The Buffalo Bills, who started in the late 1940s in Buffalo, New York, were indeed phenomenal, enough to have won the international championship of barbershop quartet singing in 1950. The winning group consisted of Vern Reed, Al Shea, Bill Spangenberg -- and Dick Grapes.
The four were not professional singers; Shea was a cop; Reed a boys' club executive and Spangenberg a truck driver. Fortunately, their jobs allowed them flexibility to comply with their heavy singing schedule. But when the opportunity to move to New York City and be the quartet in the Broadway version of the Music Man came up in 1956, they decided that either all four would go together -- or the quartet would not go.
Dick Grapes had a very good job in sales. When the Bills won the audition, he determined that he simply could not take the risk and go to New York. However, he argued sternly that the group should indeed pursue the opportunity with a replacement -- which, to our everlasting joy, they did. Fifty years later, I was privileged to meet Mr. Grapes, then in his eighties, as he emceed a contest and regaled the 10,000 fascinated attendees with Buffalo Bills stories. What a gentleman I met, a great story-teller but the same warm, kind individual who decades earlier had pressed his friends to succeed even when he could not join them.
It is an interesting aside that these days, the mention of the name "Buffalo Bills" is far more likely to evoke thoughts of the NFL team of that name. That has more relevance to this story than you might think -- for many years, the older gentleman manning the down marker at the Bills home games was none other than Dick Grapes himself.
Bill Spangenberg died, sadly, in 1963 shortly after the release of the movie version, Al Shea in 1968. Vern Reed, the little tenor with the dark-rimmed glasses, passed away in 1992, Scotty Ward, who was the substitute baritone who joined the School Board for the Broadway and movie versions, left us in 1988.
The Sunday before I first published this in 2015, Dick Grapes passed away, a few weeks after his 90th birthday. The last of the Buffalo Bills is gone, but they're reunited where the angels can hear how it's really done. Kind o' like this.
Copyright 2017, 2015 by Robert Sutton
