would stay in farmhouses, with the use of mini kitchens in the barn. Her father would
visit the family on weekends and the family would return home in the fall. Her mother
was very bright and sang; her father was a very gentle man.
While one associates Charlotte with singing, her formal music education began at age 8
with piano lessons, studying with Elvira Szigeti who was the wife of the Met Opera
Orchestra concertmaster. Her mother exchanged cheese for the lessons. Later, Charlotte
would travel to Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan for voice lessons. Richard
Goode the renowned concert pianist and Beethoven specialist was a student of Mrs.
Szigeti. He was 5 or 6 when he started and Mrs. Szigeti arranged for Charlotte (age 12)
to coach him at his home in between regular lessons with her. She remembers his little
fingers flying over the piano keys.
After an audition and extensive audio test, Charlotte was accepted at LaGuardia High
School of Music and Art, an important step as it was free. At 12 years of age she would
travel to upper Manhattan from the Bronx. Her Dad would drop her in the morning at
the bottom of the hill and she would run up the over 300 steps--usually arriving late.
The high school had four orchestras and four mixed choruses- one for each grade level.
All academic subjects were included as well as conducting, theory, music history, and
voice lessons which was, and still is, her major instrument. She particularly remembers
her theory teacher, Mrs. Ruth Bilchick who frightened most of the students. The
teacher’s response to checking each student’s harmonizing assignment, indelibly etched
into Charlotte’s memory, was “Do you love this as a mother loves her child?”. If the
answer wasn’t the “correct” one and/or quickly forthcoming, you were brusquely
ushered back to your seat for further consideration of your “musical offering”.
Her senior year, she was the student chorus conductor of the senior chorus. Rehearsals
were held in one of the two towers of the building that looked like an ancient castle.
Today, the school has been consolidated into a new building with the High School of
Performing Arts which, at that time, housed the drama and dance programs. After
graduating in 1951, Charlotte attended Queens City College on Long Island, spending 1.5
hours commuting each way via trains and buses. After one year, she transferred to
Hunter College in the Bronx. It was here that she switched from Music to Elementary
Education because she was bored with the music program, not realizing that the
boredom occurred because she had already studied all of the curriculum in high school.
She spent a summer working at Bear Mountain Area Summer Camp for children from
Harlem in NYC. She had to be slightly creative about her real age in order to get the job.
Her future husband, Hal, was program director at the boys’ camp which was across the