[Preface]
[Orville's
Worlds] [Family] [Young
Orville ] [To New York] [To
London, and back] [The Second Marriage,
1913 – 1917] [The Third Marriage,
Rehabilitation] [The Met Years, Two
careers 1920-1924] [Photogallery]
Young
Orville
John
William Harrold married Emily Chalfant in 1872, owning a farm
on Richmond Road in Cowan, Indiana, just south of Muncie. Orville
was born in their brick farmhouse on November 17, 1877, which
is the date in the family bible and the date that Orville used
on official documents. (An incorrect year has seeped into numerous
references.) He was their only surviving child, and there is
no indication that he had a middle name or initial. Farming
was tremendously hard physical work before engines came to farm
equipment in the 20th century. At the least, Orville
learned early of disciplined labor and long hours, becoming
physically fit, which he valued throughout his life. According
to a later interview with his father, both family sides were
musical, Orville’s mother’s maternal family (the Jacksons) apparently
having excellent voices1. Orville’s grandmother had
been an able singer, and at age 65, his mother could hit a clear
high C with an exceptional voice. Orville’s father was also
a singer and church chorister in the village2, and
Orville was present for family choir practices, his father claiming
that by age three Orville had learned the hymns and could sing
them at home. It was also claimed that by age five Orville sang
songs for patrons in local stores3.
The
family moved to Lyons, Kansas when Orville nine, the child’s
first great adventure4. While a small random town,
Kansas was booming during the late 1880’s, and Orville’s father
managed a livery in Lyons, the connected being “a sort of distant
relative” named Lee Stanford5. The family had relocated
to larger Newton, Kansas by 1891 or 1892, when Orville was about
thirteen, exposing him to new opportunities. A school music
supervisor there was Mrs. Gaston Boyd, an English lady who had
graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston6.
Local lore claims that she passed by young Orville on the street
as he was shooting marbles and singing taunts at his companions7.
Taking the boy in hand (at least figuratively), she gave him
singing lessons and encouraged him to participate in choral
activities.
In
1893, Orville placed in a group of combined Kansas choruses
that performed at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. More than
just getting out of Newton, singing had earned a trip to a major
city and a world fair, having a mile-long cultural bazaar called
the Midway and Mr. Ferris’s huge new wheel-shaped ride. Orville
gained special mention there from choral director, Professor
Frederick Archer8, and was recruited to join the
choir of Grace Church in Chicago (which his mother refused).
This judge appears to have been Frederic Archer, founding conductor
of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1896, who is known to
have played organ at the Columbian Exposition9. Archer
was succeeded, after a few years at Pittsburgh, by a rising
Victor Herbert.
Mrs.
Boyd also encouraged Orville to participate in regional singing
festivals, including the State Jubilee competition in nearby
Hutchinson, Kansas. He finished prominently in one of these,
receiving his first newspaper notice for his nascent talent.
This was in May of 1894, after the economic crash of 1892, being
his last year in Kansas. His voice was changing then, presenting
a period of musical limbo (though by no means an absence of
music), but his voice had earned him notice, and a glimpse of
the larger world to be considered and sought.
At
that time, Orville also sang with a Newton, Kansas group who
fancied themselves as the Pumphouse Gang, as the father of one
allowed them to use the basement of the town pumping station.
They sang and played a variety of instruments, and others would
occasionally drop in, such a fellow announcing one evening that
they would soon hear news of him. The group later learned that
their acquaintance was Emmett Dalton, youngest and only surviving
of four Dalton brothers after their much publicized shootout
while simultaneously robbing two banks in Coffeeville, Kansas,
near the Oklahoma border. The Pumphouse Gang reportedly visited
Emmett in jail at Coffeeville, moving from there down through
Oklahoma and Texas, playing at barrooms and local spots, passing
the proverbial hat10. The Coffeeville shootout occurred
on October 5, 1892, when Orville was approaching age fifteen,
raising the question of whether he really went with the group,
or was simply around when the event occurred. But, Orville was
a free-flying and unmotivated student who may have trekked off
for a period. Another version of Orville’s wandering is that
he ran away from Kansas in 1894, at age sixteen, for the family
had lost everything there during the depression11.
Whatever actually happened, the later Kansas period is when
he reportedly played music with a group of wandering companions,
sometimes traveling by railroad boxcar, and independently wound
his way back to Indiana, where the family joined him within
a short time12. Corroborating at least a fragment
of the legend, Orville told a Hutchinson, KS audience in 1913
that he had once nearly broken his back hopping off a train
in the local rail yard12.5.
Back
in Cowan, Orville remained unsettled and unfocused during adolescence
and early adulthood, although never far from music. He led something
of a Bohemian lifestyle, with a roaming disposition, but was
affable and well liked. He described another brief adventure
after his return to Indiana, during which he played clarinet
in a local country band. With the outbreak of the Spanish American
War, the band traveled to nearby Indianapolis in order to enlist
in the army as a group, and as a band, arriving complete with
instruments13. This quite confounded the enlistment
office, which concluded to house the band overnight in their
stables, sleeping as best they could on straw and saddles. As
many of the youth had never spent a night outside their beds,
they reconsidered their quest and began slipping away under
cover of darkness. The only three remaining by morning struck
out for home, Orville having concluded that he would be dismissed
in any event for being under enlistment age.
Orville
worked at odd jobs in Cowan, and according to family lore, sometimes
plucked chickens at the Neil Barefoot farm. A later article
reiterated that he worked at poultry packing, and that he sang
during this period in a Cowan barbershop group called the Chicken
Pickers’ Quartette13.5. Orville’s parents arranged
for him to learn violin, which he later taught in Muncie14.
He extolled the violin as excellent training for a singer, being
a fretless instrument that forced the musician to constantly
be attuned to pitch and strive to control it15. Once
in Muncie, Orville was again singing in church choirs, his voice
settling into a high tenor. His mother reportedly wanted him
to be an evangelist, but he got no closer than the choir at
the Jackson St. Christian Church. He did not graduate from high
school, but worked at a variety of minor jobs, including the
shipping department of the Ball Jar Company. He was also commuting
by train to Indianapolis to play violin in an orchestra, but
as his associates there were more impressed by his voice than
his violin, he found himself becoming a popular singer in Indianapolis
German social clubs16.
Orville
worked for some time as a Muncie grocery clerk, which was something
of stability for him, so that on October 22, 1898 he married
Euphamia Evelyn “Effie” Kiger (1878-1963). She was a childhood
friend from Cowan, and an energetic outgoing woman who had perfect
pitch and played piano by ear. She was a hometown sort of girl
who likely found an attractively exciting character in long-haired
Orville. Orville taught violin, while Effie taught piano, and
would play while Orville sang, for he was known as a natural
voice who would sing on about any occasion, to the extent that
his last wife scolded him for giving away his talent.
Various
characters wandered through 19th century Indiana,
spreading their messages and goods. Most famous was John Chapman,
known simply as Johnny Appleseed. As rustic was a homegrown
Indiana character named Ginseng Johnny, who, along with his
brother, gathered wild roots and herbs that were sold for their
healing powers. A more refined sort was Alexander Ernestinoff
(1853-ca.1930), who spread music throughout central Indiana.
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, he graduated from Conservatory
of Music there. Having a fine voice, he was pursuing a music
career in Berlin when several Americans recruited him to New
York to lead a German opera company for a complete tour of the
United States. Having met his wife in New York, he relocated
again in 1876 to take charge of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra,
also leading there several German choruses. From this, he was
engaged in 1881 to lead the Indianapolis Maennerchor, still
extant as a fine men’s chorus. Ernestinoff spent the next forty
years cultivating music and music education throughout the region,
forming and directing the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, as
well as numerous area choruses and local choral events. No isolated
mid-westerner, Ernestinoff was known in American music circles,
especially among German clubs, singing organizations (Lyra Society
and Music Verein), and opera performers.
When
he married, Orville was participating in Ernestinoff-led Muncie
choruses, where Ernestinoff would certainly have recognized
Orville’s talent. Orville’s passion was obvious when Effie had
their first child, in 1899, naming the girl Adeline Patti Harrold
(always known as Patti), after Italian operatic soprano, Adelina
Patti, who rivaled Jenny Lind as one of the most famous 19th
century singers. (Adeline is the daughter’s name in the family
bible and on legal documents such as passports, and Orville
used that spelling. She went briefly by Adelina when first working
in New York.) A second girl was named Marjorie Modjeska Harrold,
after the Polish-born dramatic actress, Helena Modjeska, and
their son was Paul Dereske Harrold, after Polish-born Paris
opera tenor Jean deReske. (Effie complained that she could not
pronounce her own children’s names.) Sometime after the birth
of Orville’s daughters, Ernestinoff took him for two days to
Cincinnati for performances by the New York Metropolitan Opera
of La Giaconda and Parsifal17, his
first real experience with grand opera. By one account, not
necessarily to be believed, he heard Caruso sing on that occasion,
to which he responded, “I can do that17.5”
The
other two children followed in 1901 and 1903, along with a pit
bull terrier named Moses (commonly known as “Mose”), shortly
after which Orville was an officer, and Ernestinoff was director,
of Muncie’s newly formed Apollo Club, a men’s chorus in which
both Orville and his father participated. The Apollo Club practiced
weekly, and gave occasional performances at the Wysor Grand
Opera House, where Orville was groomed as a soloist. Ernestinoff
was coaching Orville, but Orville was of a roving disposition
and was resisting persuasions to settle down. On Monday, May
16, 1904, the club presented an afternoon recital, at which
Orville sang the finale from the early Wagner opera Rienzi,
and for which Ernestinoff had arranged for well-known Metropolitan
Opera contralto, Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink, to perform.
(She was still singing occasionally with the Met when Orville
arrived there fifteen years later.)
After
hearing Orville, Mme. Schumann-Heink proposed that he study
in Germany for two years to complete his musical education,
for which she would arrange employment in order that he could
support his family there18. The event made news around
town, sparking public speculation regarding what he would do.
One newspaper later reported that Mme. Schumann-Heink occasionally
made such offers, but that little really came of them19.
Even if a genuine opportunity, it would have entailed a myriad
of practical difficulties, for while probably hearing German
language regularly, the family was unlikely to cope with sudden
total immersion. More restrictive, Effie would not have considered
such a trip, whatever Orville’s thoughts. She never wanted to
leave Muncie, and never did. Orville stated years later that
Mme. Schumann-Heink may as well have advised the postman to
purchase a steam yacht20, and the offer was never
acted upon. Orville might have had the itch in 1904, but Germany
was too far, too complicated, too soon.
After
beginning as a gospel singer and becoming popular entertainment
at local clubs, Orville suddenly had elevated credibility and
determined desire. Having been taking singing lessons with a
Muncie vocal teacher named Harry E .Paris21, who
had arrived from DePauw University in the 1890’s, Orville began
training seriously with Ernestinoff in Indianapolis. Ernestinoff
advised him to get in front of audiences at every opportunity22,
and encouraged him to go to New York by any possible means,
for any significant vocal career was going to happen outside
of Indiana. No huge move was planned immediately, and Orville
and Ernestinoff were pictured in the newspaper, together with
Apollo Club officers, nearly a year after the Schumann-Heink
encounter. Life went on while dreams gelled into plans. Orville
worked during this period as shipping clerk for the Muncie Casket
Company, known around town for singing while he delivered coffins.
He was making $10 per (six-day) week, a reasonable income in
that day23. (Henry Ford advertised paying $2 per
day at his River Rouge plant, about a decade later, but few
workers really received that much.)
Ernestinoff
had an opera background and was influential in regional cultural
affairs. Indianapolis hosted an immense German singing festival
in 1908, with Ernestinoff as choral director, and attended by
Mme. Schumann-Heink among other German opera performers. While
it is presumptuous to suggest that he had arranged the 1904
Muncie engagement solely to connect Mme. Schumann-Heink with
his top pupil, he likely made an effort to bring them together.
He may well have sought a higher opinion of Orville’s talent,
as well as an impetus to get Orville focused on his potential
future. Ernestinoff later arranged for Orville a concert, with
orchestral accompaniment, at Indianapolis’s German House auditorium,
in which an aria from Gounod’s Queen of Sheba carried
him progressively from high A to high B to high C. The audience
responded uproariously, and Ernestinoff declared that Orville
could reach high D with equal ease24. It was probably
through Ernestinoff that Franz Van der Stucken, chorister and
director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, provided Orville
a letter of introduction to Madame Cosina Wagner (widow of the
German opera composer) at Bayreuth25.
The
Muncie meeting between Orville and greatness also attracted
a business manager and patron. Doctor James M. Quick, local
physician and Treasurer of the Apollo Club, financed Orville’s
singing lessons and organized concert engagements through Indiana
and Ohio during 1905 and 1906. Orville reportedly overshadowed
a polished Chicago tenor named George Hamlin at a meeting of
the Indiana State Teachers’ Association26. (Hamlin
was a touring concert tenor whom Orville would meet again in
New York during WWI.) The arrangement with Dr. Quick was a business
contract, in which the doctor would help support Orville and
send him to New York to become an income-producing singer, after
which Orville would split his first five-years of proceeds27.
A winter concert tour netted $35 (3 week’s pay), funding a trip
to New York City, and perhaps costing Orville his job28.
The arrangement with Dr. Quick indicates that a major decision
had been made regarding Orville’s future. Orville and Effie
must have discussed how any such future might play out, and
events brought the momentous departure in early 1906, when Orville
was twenty-nine.
As
a brief aside, the above mentioned George J. Hamlin was another
interesting regional tenor. Born in Elgin, Illinois, he was
the son of John A. Hamlin, who with brother, Lysander, made
and sold Hamlin’s Wizard Oil. This was a liniment for rheumatic
pain, which they distributed through traveling minstrel shows.
They managed classic “snake oil” medicine shows in horse drawn
wagons, in this case producing musical events and distributing
songs and sheet music. Several noted Indiana troubadours, James
Whitcomb Riley and Paul Dresser, had gotten starts in Hamlin
traveling shows. This rough sounding business was sufficiently
productive that young George was educated at Andover Academy
(now Philips Andover), and trained with George Henschel (English
baritone, pianist, and first conductor of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra) likely either in England or at the Institute of Musical
Art (now Juilliard). Around the turn of the century George Hamlin
toured Europe for several years, a bit before meeting Orville.
Hamlin later sang with the Chicago Opera Company before migrating
to New York during the teen years.
Effie
and Orville were both children of Cowan, Indiana farms, but
Orville reveled in singing, socializing, and large adventures.
While Music may have helped unite them, it was now prying them
apart. Orville had been born with a gift, which he readily enjoyed,
but he also enjoyed being freewheeling and unconstrained. His
voice repeatedly attracted attention, establishing his image
within the community. Once it attracted the attention of the
outside world, it became part of the community identity, and
grew to define Orville. Singing had coaxed him to Hutchison
(KS), Chicago, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis, tempted him with
Germany, and would send him to New York. No matter how musical
and in love he and Effie were, Orville had been leaving by degrees
for a decade, preparing for the day when he would really depart.
He was finally off to New York to test his talent and grit,
returning only when he failed, if even then. Effie loved Orville
enough to let him go, undoubtedly suspecting that she would
never follow, and that if Orville succeeded he might never return.
1. What Do You Know About Orville Harrold?, Muncie Evening
Press, May 7, 1921
2. Hoosier Tenor, The Indianapolis Sunday Star Magazine
Section, December 10, 1911, pg. 1
3. What Do You Know About Orville Harrold?, Muncie Evening
Press, May 7, 1921
4. ibid.
5. From Hutchinson Jubilee to Grand Opera in Paris,
The Hutchinson News, December 13, 1910, pg. 10
6. Obit, New York Herald Tribune, October, 24, 1933
7. Picked From the Street, The Hutchinson News, February
17, 1912, pg. 12
8. From Plow-Boy to Parsifal, Orville Harrold (Etude
Magazine, New York, July, 1922) pg. 443
9. Musical Instruments at the World’s Columbian Exposition,
Frank D. Abbott & Charles A. Daniell (The Presto Co, Chicago,
IL, 1895) pg. 137
10. Obit, New York Herald Tribune, October, 24, 1933
11. Hoosier Tenor, The Indianapolis Sunday Star Magazine,
December 10, 1911, pg. 1
12. ibid.
12.5. Orville Harrold, World’s Greatest Tenor, First
Sang Here, un-attributed news clipping in Patti Harrold’s scrapbook,
concerning appearance in Hutchinson, Kansas
13. From Plow-Boy to Parsifal, Orville Harrold, pg.
443
13.5 Orville Harrold Worked And Sang His Way To Fame,
un-attributed news clipping in Patti Harrold’s scrapbook, concerning
appearances in Chicago and Lafayette, Indiana
14. From Plow-Boy to Parsifal, Orville Harrold, pg.
443
15. ibid.
16. Harrold Still Subject, The Indianapolis Star Sunday,
February 6. 1910, pg. 10
17. From Plow-Boy to Parsifal, Orville Harrold, pg.
443
17.5 Orville Harrold’s Career Reviewed, Indiannapolis
Sunday Star, November, 26, 1911
18. Young Muncie Tenor Honored by Prima Donna, Muncie
Morning Star, May 19, 1904
19. Muncie Sunday Star, November xx, 1911, from the
scrapbook of Effie Kiger Harrold
20. From Plow-Boy to Parsifal, Orville Harrold (Etude
Magazine, New York, July, 1923) pg. 443
21. Orville Harrold Wins Audience, Indianapolis Star,
February 14, 1913
22. The Stage in the Twentieth Century, Volume 3, Robert
Grau (Broadway Publishing Co., New York, 1912) pg. 282
23. From Plow-Boy to Parsifal, Orville Harrold, pg.
443
24. The Recital, The Lima (Ohio) Daily News, May 5,
1905, pg. 2
25. ibid.
26. Orville Harrold’s Career Reviewed, Muncie Sunday
Star, November 26, 1911, from the scrapbook of Effie Kiger Harrold
27. Hoosier Tenor, The Indianapolis Sunday Star Magazine,
December 10, 1911, pg. 1
28. Obit, New York Herald Tribune, October, 24, 1933
Next ...
[Preface]
[Orville's
Worlds] [Family] [Young
Orville ] [To New York] [To
London, and back] [The Second Marriage,
1913 – 1917] [The Third Marriage,
Rehabilitation] [The Met Years, Two
careers 1920-1924] [Photogallery]
