Palouse Writing Project - 2. The Background Story

Between 2002 and 2005, A Northwest newspaper ran a series of articles on a boy, an adopted, mixed-race teenage boy who was a cello prodigy.

At age 13 in 1999, this boy was the youngest player to win a national contest for African American and Latino musicians. By age 16, he had met and had had private lessons with Yo Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, was invited to play all around the country and was recognized as a prodigy. He played a solo piece at Isaac Stern’s 80^th birthday celebration.

From age 5 when he received his first cello from his piano-teaching mother, he had practiced hours and hours daily to perfect his playing ability. By age 8 he had won several medals for his playing. He had gotten lessons from some of the finest cello teachers in the Northwest, often having to travel many hours for his lessons. When young, his motivation came from within; his mother had not had to push him. A music-shop owner in Portland loaned him a 125 year old, fine French cello that he had restored especially for the boy.

The family that adopted him had adopted eight other children. They were very religious, belonging to the Seventh Day Adventist church, and believed in a tightly regulated family life. They lived on a farm outside Milton-Freewater, a small eastern Oregon city. The boy was home schooled during his early years.

Things changed for the boy, though, after he was featured at age 16 as a soloist at a concert in Charleston, SC. Two nights before the concert he had been entertained by some local teenager girls. The night before the concert he had gone to a party at a Charleston home, had probably gotten drunk on spiked punch, and had been “worshiped” by these girls. The concert went very well, but after the concert the boy asked his chaperone if he could stay in Charleston and return later to Portland—an indication that something had changed in the boy’s attitude toward life. The chaperone refused his request, and the boy spends 24 hours getting home to eastern Oregon, including a final five-hour bus trip.

That trip to Charleston seemed to be a turning point in the boy’s life. It was as if the absence of a “normal” childhood caught up to him. After the trip, all the boy wanted to be was a “normal” teenager, with girlfriends, fast cars and parties. He let his cello practicing slide, to his mother’s distress. He started to stay out late or all night. He no longer wanted home schooling but to go to a local school. He wanted to play basketball for the school team He clashed with his parents, his school and authority figures. In particular, he clashed sharply with his mother—a love/non-love relationship developing.

His work habits became so poor that he had to cancel a recording session with the Oregon Symphony and a gig with Bill Cosby, to the terrible disappointment of his mother. He ended up returning the special French cello to a very disappointed Portland music-shop owner who had loaned it to him.

The boy’s general anger and attitude grew to the point that his parents decided to send him to a wilderness trek for troubled kids. They didn’t tell him they were enrolling him in this wilderness program; they simply drove him unbeknownst to the gathering place in Albany, Oregon, where the teenager was thrown in with a number of unsuspecting other troubled kids.

For a while after the wilderness trek, the boy returned to his cello and studies, but that period of peace fell apart, with the boy’s rebellion increasing to the point that apparently all he wanted to do was marry his 16-year-old girlfriend, which distressed his mother enormously.

The strain on his family was so great that his parents signed him up for a boarding school in Idaho. To get him to go, they told him they were going to a dentist in a city about 60 miles away, LaGrande, Oregon. Before the trip started, his father gave him some pills to “relax him,” but the real reason for the pills was to knock him out as his father took him to the boarding school—a school away from any towns and that had hourly bedchecks and strong supervision.

The boy spent 13 months at the school and returned home, seemingly more responsible but having lost the drive to take up the cello in earnest again.

The final story appearing in a Northwest newspaper series three years after the first story, in 2005, describes a(now) young man at Walla Walla College, where he was a freshman and the object of an ABC Good Morning America television show on former child prodigies. He has dropped all pretense of serious cello playing, letting his college days be filled with playing basketball, enjoying friends, going to parties and “not missing out.”