On issue after issue—safety, neighborhoods, growth, race relations, and traffic—I learned this lesson: symbols and ceremonies very much matter because they establish the tone for all of the work we come to do in the public square. And so, one May evening in 2015—some three years after wishing that we had a royal family to do things like this so I wouldn’t have to—I smiled with sincere pleasure with a glass of champagne in my hand. From a stage on the concrete island behind the Century Center, amid the rushing waters of the St. Joseph River, I addressed a crowd of thousands and led a toast to the city’s 150th birthday.
THE IDEA OF A MAJOR CELEBRATION in 2015 had begun during my campaign, four years earlier. Zoned out from too much call time one day, I was staring blankly at an image of the city seal on some document on my cluttered desk. The seal features a rising sun amid a field of puffy clouds, an American flag, and the word PEACE. I’d never really paid much attention to it, but now I wondered why the city fathers had chosen this imagery for our seal—nothing to do with corn, or machinery, or the river, or anything else native to our city. Then my eye fell on the bottom of the seal, where it read: 1865. I went to look up the precise date of the city’s incorporation, and found that the city was given its present legal form in May of that year—just six weeks after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.3
Now the seal made a lot more sense. The American flag was not some generic symbol of nationalism—it was the flag of a republic whose very existence had just been gravely threatened and freshly vindicated by the grievous and mortal test of the Civil War. The word “peace” was not a vague blessing or pleasantry then, it was the fond desire of a population traumatized by its opposite. What a hopeful act it would have been, to draw up paperwork and formalize the presence of a city in the aftermath of that dreadful conflict, deep in prairie land that was, in those days, still considered the West.
And then, instinctively, I did the math. Incorporated in 1865. That meant the city was 146 years old. It followed that the winner of the 2011 campaign would be in office to preside over the 150th anniversary of the city in 2015. Remembering this while on my journey toward recognizing the power of the ceremonial, I came to realize that a major celebration of this date would offer the perfect occasion for something badly needed: a chance to consolidate and celebrate the psychological gains of our present comeback, and to offer a decisive reply to the decades of gloom that had culminated in the stinging mention of our hometown in Newsweek’s “Dying Cities” article.
I asked my staff to organize a committee, and we began raising private funds to help mount a sweeping celebration of the city’s past, present, and future. Everyone was invited to celebrate in their own way, from a restaurant creating a special dish for the occasion to the library hosting a “scan-a-thon” for historic family photos. We decided the celebrations should last all year, but the events would hinge on the actual birthday of the city, which happened to fall on Memorial Day weekend. We would close major streets downtown, create a citywide festival with everything from a technology expo and food trucks to a three-on-three basketball tournament and zip lines installed over the river. It would all kick off with a party and fireworks show downtown.
Of course, if the city hadn’t actually been coming back, none of this would have worked. Like an anniversary party for an obviously failing marriage, it would have drawn half-hearted crowds and murmuring behind the scenes. Responses would have been tepid or even sarcastic. Thus, the celebration would function not just to assert, but also to test, my claim that the city was on a roll once again. For any of this to work, the contention that South Bend’s decline had ended would actually have to be true.
But by 2015 there was no denying the real comeback under way. When I had taken office in 2012, the aftereffects of the Great Recession had compounded our half-century-long economic slump and brought us to a miserable unemployment rate of 11.8 percent, three full points above the national average. Now unemployment was down to 5.6 percent, a mere half point from the U.S. rate. We had cleared or fixed most of the thousand vacant and abandoned houses at the center of our neighborhood redevelopment strategy. The number of restaurants opening in our once-quiet downtown had doubled, deals were under way to add two major hotels to the city center, and investment was up in our industrial areas. Safety was improving, and at last the national coverage of our city was more likely to be about innovation than post-industrial ruin. Whether by statistics or intuition, you could feel that South Bend was trending in the right direction.
And so the banners and fireworks of this birthday party for the city, just the type of civic ceremony I had once dreaded, embodied a kind of propulsive civic energy that was self-fulfilling. Though the effect was beyond quantification, we all sensed that evening an advance in the psyche of our city, which would unlock further investment and growth to come. As I raised the glass and said, “South Bend is back,” the roar of the crowd at once reflected, certified, and caused it to be so.
3 A historically minded reader may note that South Bend must have existed in some official form prior to this date. It is true that the community went through more than one early form of incorporation, reaching back as early as 1835, but 1865 seems to be the consensus “official” foundation date because it was then that South Bend incorporated as a “second-class city” under Indiana law, taking its present form. Of course, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians had a presence here long before any European-style municipal administration at all.
9
A Plan, and Not Quite Enough Time
Only later did I grasp the connection between two hundred hours of piano practice and those thousand vacant houses in South Bend. Some things like this only become visible with the benefit of hindsight—along with a paper coffee cup with a quote by Leonard Bernstein printed on its side: “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”
It was Bernstein who conducted the authoritative recording of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and he was on my mind as I took a bow, exhilarated and relieved, on the stage of the Morris Performing Arts Center, in front of about two thousand people on a February evening in 2013. I’d been a mayor for thirteen months, and a concert pianist for twenty minutes. By briefly becoming both, I had found a way to support the arts and to demonstrate how our city can punch above its weight class—all thanks to a chain of events that began with a Soviet defector, a Chinese maestro, and an ambitious music school dean.
Indiana University has long boasted a very strong music program, and so does its South Bend campus. At its center is Professor Alexander Toradze, a Georgian pianist who defected from the Soviet Union in 1983 while on tour with the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra—and somehow wound up in the Hoosier State. The circle of professionals and students who grew around him, known as the Toradze Piano Studio, perform around the world and win prestigious competitions. As if a prerequisite to study with him, his students have magnificently complicated names, like Vakhtang Kodanashvili, one of Toradze’s star students who also plays with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra, or Maxim Mogilevsky, whom I once saw attack a piano with such vigor during a performance of Mussorgsky that they had to give it a quick retuning at intermission.
The presence of so many gifted graduate students meant that South Bend had an abundance of talented and willing piano teachers. They were available at very reasonable rates to parents like my mother, who figured out quickly that I was not destined to be a Division I athlete, and instead developed the hope that I might fund my college education with a music scholarship. She lined up piano teachers starting when I was five, and continued patiently taking me to lessons every week for years. After my childhood teacher, Kayo Tatebe, moved out of town, Mom began to deliver me every Friday to a basement practice room in IUSB’s Northside Hall for lessons from a Singaporean student, May Lin Ding, whose name was a rare exception to the polysyllabic norm around the department.
When May Lin moved on, my mother started taking me half an hour up the road to Ber
rien Springs in Michigan, where Dr. Sandra Camp lived and practiced her twin passions of music education and cat showmanship—her split-level home containing both a piano studio and a breeding operation. As I became a teenager, the weekly commute ensured a little quality time with one or the other of my parents. We might talk, or not, as we crossed the state line, either in Mom’s giant blue Buick LeSabre listening to NPR news, or Dad’s two-door Chevy Cavalier listening to what might have been his sole cassette, the Creedence Clearwater Revival masterpiece Cosmo’s Factory, looping permanently in the tape player for about as long he owned the car.
In a wall-to-wall carpeted room at Dr. Camp’s house, full of sheet music and Persian longhair cats, I labored under her no-nonsense gaze, which in retrospect was itself a little cat-like. She taught me technique and theory, tempo and musicianship, until I became a pretty good pianist, skilled enough to play Rachmaninoff’s C-sharp minor prelude in competitions.
Good, not great. I rated honorable mentions here and there, but by the time I was a teenager I was practicing less faithfully and getting more interested in guitar, teaching myself those Creedence songs, then graduating to Jimi Hendrix solos and Dave Matthews acoustic licks. A capable guitarist, I wound up occasionally gigging with a garage band that we called “Turkish Delight” for some reason I can’t remember. While a scholarship wasn’t going to happen, music would stay with me as a discipline and a retreat.
When I left for college, the “Peter 2000,” a Stratocaster-type guitar I’d built from a Carvin self-assembly kit, joined me on the trip to Boston. The piano, of course, did not. I stopped playing almost completely, until I moved back to South Bend in 2008. Not yet having bought a home, I was renting a carriage house out back of a professor’s house farther down the river when my mother—ever the champion of my fleeting music career—overheard a stranger on a bus in Chicago lamenting that he couldn’t get rid of his old piano. Having once heard me say something about wanting a keyboard, she sidled up to him and asked if he was selling a piano.
“No, I’m trying to give it away! No one wants it. I’m about ready to put it in a Glad bag and drop it out the window,” he told her.
What did my mother say to him next? Who knows? But soon after that, I found myself standing among knickknacks in this gentleman’s carpeted apartment in Chicago, looking at a rather neglected antique grand piano. The pianist in the household had been his wife; she had passed away years ago. The instrument was not in great shape. It hadn’t been tuned for years; some keys were broken and others didn’t move at all. But it looked like something that could be repaired. So I called Steve Merriman, a neighbor of my parents who seems to embody one of South Bend’s defining characteristics: a knack for salvage and reuse.
Some years ago Steve and his wife, Mary, launched a piano-tuning business, which developed into piano reconditioning and more. Over time, the business escalated into a kind of mission. Whenever Steve hears of a piano on its way to the landfill—someone passing away, a church moving, a school upgrading its instruments—he intervenes and commences a rescue. He recently moved his operations into a disused dry-cleaning facility with all the space he needed both to store and fix them. But back then, he was constantly negotiating with someone to get more space to park the pianos he had caught and saved, unwanted and unplayable. At his pleading, someone’s garage or storeroom would become a foster home for his wayward instruments until he could get them repaired.
Like a devoted volunteer at an animal rescue shelter, he is always on the lookout for potential owners, anyone who will fund him to fix an instrument. He’s not really looking to sell or “flip” the pianos, just seeking someone to cover the cost of his time to restore them. In fact, he’s not even a pianist—he’s a jazz drummer—but he has a compelling vision that a good instrument belongs in every home. As he once told me in his gravelly voice, his eyes at once smiling and piercing, “I just believe that every house oughta have a furnace, it oughta have a toilet, and it oughta have a piano.”
So, standing in the living room of a bemused elderly gentleman in Chicago preparing to leave his wife’s possessions behind and go to a second retirement somewhere in Mexico, we called Steve back in South Bend, describing the piano to him and asking if he thought he could fix it. A couple weeks later, the living room of my modest quarters had been converted into a sort of piano workshop. The black hulk of an instrument now dominated the room, surrounded by little pieces of wood, scraps of felt, and a mysterious arsenal of tools as Steve took the piano apart and put it back together. And soon after that, for about as much money as I had saved to spend on a good keyboard, I was the proud new owner of a working 1920s Conover grand.
I noodled on it every now and then but didn’t play that much, until one day in 2012 when I heard from Dr. Marvin Curtis, dean of the School of the Arts at IU South Bend. He was looking for me to do something with the symphony orchestra, some gimmick to show my support for the arts and help drive up ticket sales. Occasionally, for example, they arranged for a community leader to guest-conduct a piece. Would I be up for something like that? Sure, I said. Anything to support the symphony. Then I thought, aloud, what if I actually played something? Could I perform a serious piece of music with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra?
Marvin embraced the idea so readily that I now think he hatched the idea before I did. Maybe he had heard from someone around town that I used to play. He promptly sent me to meet the orchestra’s maestro, Tsung Yeh, at his house for what began as a social cup of coffee but ended up more like an audition. The maestro had presided over our South Bend Symphony Orchestra for more than twenty years—I could remember school trips to see him conduct educational concerts—and was known for squaring a genial demeanor with an exacting command of a symphony several notches above what you might expect for a mid-sized city in Indiana.
I hadn’t played consistently in more than a decade, and never with an orchestra. But after hearing me play some things I could still remember, the maestro concluded I might be up to it. What better way to send a message that the arts were vital to the city than for the mayor to perform with the local orchestra?
I thought of the blue-jacketed solo arrangement of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which came into my underused sheet music collection when my grandmother, herself a piano teacher, had passed away. Even when she was still living, I used to find it on her bookshelf and try to tap out Gershwin’s familiar passages. My hands not yet big enough, I tried to reach the octaves of its soaring final theme, known to a generation of commercial-watchers and frequent fliers as the official music of United Airlines. Considered by many to be Gershwin’s masterpiece, Rhapsody is a rollicking ecstasy of jazzy piano and symphonic interplay. To me, it is the most American piece of orchestral music ever written. I’d always loved it, but never actually learned it properly—nor even reached the skill level needed to play it.
But Marvin had a plan. “We just have to get some Russian in you.” And by Russian, in this case, he meant Georgian. He arranged a course of lessons with Edisher Savitski, one of Toradze’s star graduate students. A genial man with a cloud of wavy dark hair, Edisher would spend an hour with me every week, patiently coaching me into becoming a concert pianist—with not quite enough time.
We had six months. I practiced every day, usually early in the morning, on my old grand piano, which probably hadn’t been played two days in a row since Ronald Reagan was in office. On this ambitious time line, daily practice was a must. A famous pianist (the Internet can’t agree which one) once said: “If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it.”
The quotation became my mantra. If I was traveling, I found some way to get access to a piano—at the home of an acquaintance, perhaps, or an unsecured hotel ballroom where the night maintenance staff could be relied on to look the other way. Once, around five-thirty in the morning, I found myself in O’Hare Airport on my way to Miami to see Notre Dame play for the BCS
title, aware that I might not see a piano for three days. I found one by Gate C16, alongside a deserted bar, a discreet rope around it, no bench. The concourse was almost empty. I gingerly moved the rope, and wheeled up my roll-aboard bag to sit on. And I began to play. Pretty soon I had a couple listeners, then a small audience, and at the end there was applause—and, awkwardly, a couple of dollar tips.
If I was running with Tim and Joe in the morning, then I’d fight exhaustion and practice before bed. Once, after a near-all-nighter coming home from the Democratic Convention in Charlotte in time to host Mitch Daniels, our Republican governor, for a lunch with business leaders, I hurried home for a lesson in between the airport and the restaurant. Standing as Edisher demonstrated a passage for me, I felt my knees go out from under me and grabbed the side of the piano. He looked over, alarmed, and asked if I was all right; I had fallen asleep standing up.
As I got to know Edisher I learned more of his story. He had come from the Republic of Georgia at Toradze’s invitation, with no money and no English. He was already emerging as a world-class pianist—he once won a grand piano at an international competition—but had to start from zero financially. While enrolled at IUSB, he got a job making submarine sandwiches at a Blimpie in a strip mall on South Bend Avenue—he described to me once covering a sandwich in garlic powder after misunderstanding a customer’s emphatic and repeated demands to have no garlic on his sandwich. He’s since become a professor, a fitting outcome for a classically American story of opportunity, but when I think about his journey I can’t get past the thought that it was a crime to allow such talented fingers so near to a meat slicer.
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