the goRtons And sLAdes 19
the world a better place. Slade walked out of the assembly and said to
himself, “I want to be a Walter Judd.” He came home and told his mother
that someday he was going to be a U.S. senator.
goLoonRt oKs BAcK on high school as the worst time of his life. “I was
too young. I started grammar school early so I went to high school a year
younger. There were 3,200 kids there and I was lost and unhappy.” The
most formative aspect of his childhood was something most would never
guess. It wasn’t school or sports. It was being a soprano in the all-boy
choir of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, Illinois. “My parents
dumped me in it at the age of 9 or 10 under the tutelage of a taskmaster
whose name was Stanley Martin. If a boy attended every rehearsal and
every service for an entire month and was not disciplined—and you were
very often disciplined—he got a dollar in silver, handed out coin after
coin by Mr. Martin. That was the best discipline I ever had in my entire
life. He was a talented musician and he wanted his boys to be good sing-
ers, but that was not the most important part of the experience, as far as
he was concerned. Most important was whether you cared; whether this
meant something to you and whether you would subject yourself to his
discipline.”
At rehearsals, Mr. Martin presided imperiously from a grand piano.
The boys were arrayed in two rows on either side, the older ones in the
back rows. The mischievous big boys periodically would boot the little
boys in the butt. “If the little boys jumped, they were the ones who got
chewed out. And Stanley Martin could chew you out without ever saying
a vulgar or off-color word better than anyone I’ve ever known. Bang! His
hands would come down on the keys. He’d stand up, waving his arms:
‘That was it! You missed your cue!’ There was almost no praise. Every
now and then on Tuesday he would say, ‘Last Sunday morning wasn’t
bad.’ You absolutely lived for that. Then on Friday nights when the tenors
and basses came for a joint rehearsal, he’d say, ‘Now, when Willie Good-
enough was a soprano this was a decent choir!’ Willie Goodenough and
the others would almost break up. You didn’t really get it until you learned
years later that he’d say, ‘When Slade Gorton was a soprano we had a de-
cent choir in this place!’ I learned very early in life what it was like to be
excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church in the 14th Century be-
cause every now and then there was a kid who couldn’t take the discipline
and was kicked out. They might as well have been dead as far as everyone
else who was there was concerned. They were no longer part of the hu-
man race.”