2/5 Interview with Ervin Wilson
2/5 Transcript
Ervin Wilson (00:02):What make flutes. We could make little flutes. Yes, we could make flutes from, and we can still make flutes. We use sambuca, elderberry bushes, we have bushes, elderberry bushes going along the ditch banks, and they could be cut double joint, cleaned it down, and you can make very nice flutes out of elderberry. In fact, the Indians of California here, and you have several species of elder berry growing here in California. We're making flutes of that. And the elder berry makes a beautifully lovely breathy tone. And Jim French has been making elderberry flutes and he says that Sambuca nigra, which actually came from Europe and was brought over, has a slightly thicker wall and is somehow better for making elderberry flutes. And so I am going to get some, because I got three bushes from Park Seed Company, I believe it's, and they'll deliver them, cruise off them up there.
Gary David (01:32):What do you remember as your first attempts to create a scale of your own? I mean,
Ervin Wilson (01:43):When I was very young, but old enough to take piano lessons, my parents decided not to give me piano lessons because it'd sent my older brother over to study piano with sister re mark now. And he had learned how to play the games and stuff, and I enjoy very much what he did playing. And it sounded particularly well on that ho that we had installed up there. And when I went, I'd go to sleep on the porch and I would hear what he was playing. It was so beautiful going out to see, isn't this read harmonium? But we just called it a pop organ playing these little melodies. And I realized that the kind of ecs, creative Swift music was the same kind of ecstasy that I felt when masturbating. I mean, they were just one and the same thing. It was just I was having an ecstatic experience at that point. The difference between the two hadn't, they hadn't to segregate into the different paths and, oh, I'm sorry.
Stephen James Taylor (03:21):Here, let's cut for a second.
Gary David (03:22):Yeah, let's cut for a second.
Ervin Wilson (03:24):Reset.
Stephen James Taylor (03:25):You want to put that,
Gary David (03:47):Okay. Okay.
Stephen James Taylor (03:50):You're rolling. Right. Mark Wilson two.
Gary David (03:53):Wilson two.
Ervin Wilson (03:56):And my brother Lyman had,
Stephen James Taylor (03:58):Oh, sorry, one more time. You got to do it. I need to get actually doing it on film. What's that? I need to see it on film. Yeah, that's good.
Ervin Wilson (04:08):My parents had sent my brother Lyman over to study piano with Sister Rene Martin, and he had learned all the, could play them quite well I thought. But my parents decided he had been a complete failure at music, and so they decided not to give him music lessons. He said, why wasting money on Irvin? The Lord moves in strange ways. So I was not forced to take piano lessons. My music psyche was allowed to develop in a very, very natural
Gary David (04:54):Way. Yeah, what path did that take?
Ervin Wilson (04:58):But later on I learned how to play chords. Some of my friends taught me how to play the guitar chords on the piano, just this, this, this, and this. Play. The melody with the other hand that was just, if you knew two or three chords, you could play any melody you wanted. So I would just play things that way on the read organ. And one day over there at Sunday school, a couple of nice young and good singers, young ladies, Monte Wetton and Hazel Roberta Anderson, one of the Anderson girls got up and sang, there's an unknown grave in a lonely spot, et and so forth, the hymn that I'd never heard. And it had quite a, it was a real tear jerky, but it had a little melody. So I went right home and started playing it on the organ using the same technique, the melody, the chords, et cetera. And my mother looked at me kind of strange. He says, was that the first time you ever heard that song?
(06:26):And the Poor Dare was diluted into believing she had a child prodigy on her hands. She says, well, maybe I'd better learn, teach him how to read notation. So she just started with the simplest hand or whatever, little. So once she taught me the notations, she figured I would to read notation. Then she figured I could learn, just learn the hymns by myself. That would be alright. And I thought, well, now if I can read notation, then I can reverse the process and write notation, can't I? And I says, well, let's give it a try urban and see if it works. So I would imagine a picture in my mind's ears and find the note for it and write it down and find it embedded. Little childish, little melody, but not all that background that considering what Mozart could do with melodies like that. And it went C, D and E, CD, E, DE, not F sharp.
(08:21):The F was wrong. It was just wrong. I knew what I awarded was somewhere in between F and f sharp. So my initial attempt at composition was thwarted just awarded years and years later, I learned where I was getting that note. I was passing through El Paso when I got to the train station in El Paso. They were having a great big wedding party in there. A girl from down around the colonies was getting married to a fairly wealthy young man up there in El pa. When they owe the people in there at the train station were just dressed to the tees. And they had mariachis. And I went out at the station waiting for Sonia to come pick me up. I was waiting there. And it was late at night. He came as late as we do. A couple of the mariachis came out and one of 'em was showing you the other one how to make the riff.
(09:43):But he was like in a sea major scale, so to say. And playing a melody that went from C to B2C, B, a, G, and then F to produce that subdominant chord on FAC, B. The B was the 11th harmonic of the F somehow or other. I haven't checked the ing in that, and it wouldn't have been in that key, but I realized that the trumpet was playing that same from the key of F was playing the same note that I wanted and couldn't get. It was from the early trumpet music that was instilled in the culture where you would play this harmonic F anytime you wanted to. You didn't censor it out. That's where I was. It was throughout all Mexican music there. These are very nice skill. I like that. Does that, now that I know where it came from, it's not so mysterious to me, and it's very clearly I can just take and put it in there and a lot of Mexican melodies.
(11:04):And it just worked. And it's an 11th. The 11th Harmonic is embedded right in the folks music down there coming right off the 11th harmonic on the trumpet, which they can't be bothered sensing out because that's what they want to hear anyway. It's that neutral sound that you get on the bagpipes. And a lot of bagpipes made it over, came over to Mexico and a lot of the early religious chants had early pipes that went with them that were not anywhere near equal. The early church chants had a lot of equal type scales in them because they came from Spain and you had the Jewish songs, the Mormon songs, the songs from India all coming through Spain and all using the neutral tones.
Gary David (12:07):So you growing up in a less, well, you said in a more natural way, meaning you didn't have a lot of TV or radios
Ervin Wilson (12:17):Or no tv, no radio. I wasn't born in a hospital with the mood. With the mood music you get in the hospital play incessant God awful music, and the child is indoctrinated before it. The first sound it hears is these unnatural music.
Gary David (12:47):So you were aware that there was something you wanted to hear, it wasn't there.
Ervin Wilson (12:52):Well, I knew that neither F nor F Sharp was the right note. I knew exactly where that note should be.
Gary David (13:00):Right. Well see. But millions of kids grow up thinking that's where the F and the F Sharp should be. You having grown up in a, where you hadn't heard a lot of 12 equal music suddenly heard, were conscious of what you
Ervin Wilson (13:15):Weren't hearing. The hymns were sort of 12. They certainly, the piano was never tuned to the 11th Harmonic. But still, I could hear the 11th harmonic. And that's because if my friend Eduardo Monte, son of Es and her husband Chapel, or Alvin Alvin, he at one point several years ago was hopelessly in love with the girl that was just wrong for him. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And he started writing with a love song to her. He just had them in his ear. And I asked him to sing them for me on the truck going up there. And he sang a couple of them and he sang in a scale that I'd never heard before, but went up there. When he would pass the house, sometimes he would be whistling a tune. And I listened to what he was whistling, and I have a 31 tone set and put it in 31. It would fit fairly good in 31 and F was right. You can do these neutral intervals in 31. And they sound pretty good. So I was able to pick his melodies out of 31, but not out of 12.
Gary David (15:01):So what did Eric, can
Stephen James Taylor (15:02):We just clap thing again? Accidentally? We're out of syn.
Gary David (15:07):You want
Stephen James Taylor (15:08):Your question and then we should put our camera on. Go ahead.
Gary David (15:17):Okay. You got that, huh? Wilson? Three. So you grew up, left your own devices. When did you start to, what was your first exposure, direct exposure to 12 equal in an educational situation? In other words, when did you,
Ervin Wilson (15:48):Okay. When I was about 15, we moved to Oregon and I didn't get any music lessons there, but I was unhappy in Oregon would in the mint fields and so forth. And dad bought a panel for $50, a nice little upright panel piano. And so I bought little books to learn how to play the piano. And I was just buying all of the popular songs of the day. Don't Fence Me in all these songs that back in those days were just
Gary David (16:47):About 1943, somewhere
Ervin Wilson (16:49):Around there going across the river into Kelso and Longview, Washington and picking up sheet music and learning how to, and a lot of them just had chords. You just played the chords and then it gave the melody line there and I learned all this. And so that was my first exposure to equal training in equal piano music. But it was very shortly, well, I became unhappy there.
Gary David (17:29):Yeah, I wanted to know what was the unhappiness about?
Ervin Wilson (17:34):Well, I know you want to know. Let us say, I became unhappy.
Gary David (17:42):Okay.
Ervin Wilson (17:44):I had always been unhappy, and that wasn't the first time I'd tried to run away from home. But this time I realized I could in fact successfully do that and went down to Oakland, Oakland, Oakland, where I heard I could work in the ship guards got there and it turned out it wasn't old enough to work in the shipyards. Well, one thing led to another. I was waiting on the bus for a trip somewhere else, maybe I think I was going to Los Angeles and police came around and wanted to know where I was going and wanted to see my ticket. And his dad asked me how old I was and I told him they thought maybe I was a draft dodge or something. He says, well, you're a true aunt child and you're a runaway child and we're going to have to put you in jail until you cooperate with us and tell us where you're from.
(18:52):So they talked me in jail there, and you just left me stuck in jail there. And after several days they called me and they said, we decided to ship you back to Mexico because that's a mage from Mexico. And that I was, he says, oh, I'm from Oregon and by folks are so and so and so and so. My mother got on the line and called one of my aunts who lived right there near Bai and told her to come and get me. And she came and got me and took care of me for a while. And then she sent me back to Rainier, Oregon and my mother seeing that I was going to be a real problem, decided to send me to Utah where my aunt Emily lived on the McDonald's side of the family, aunt Emily McDonald because Aunt Emily McDonald was good with disciplining children and keeping them under control. Mother just felt that she didn't have me under control, which obviously she didn't. No fault of hers. I had a little problem with my father, it just couldn't be how poor man. It was just unsuccessful no matter how hard he had worked.
(20:35):Anyway, I went back with to study with Aunt Emily, my cousin Isabelle, Emily Carla, my cousin Isabelle was there and she was just an intelligent and charming and beautiful redhead. And she was studying music with Mrs. Perkins piano music. And it was decided that I would go study music with Mrs. Perkins. You were old at this time. 16, 15, 16. I was still in high school. I had taken one year of high school in Mexico, gone up and taken about a year of high school in Oregon, which was very nice. And then, which I enjoyed because I had some good teachers in Oregon, they taught me English. And that's where I first heard the albatros and a good mathematics teacher. And she taught me some real good algebra, algebra, and I was getting good grades, really good grades in algebra. And I respected her and she respected me. And we got along this way, but then my mother decided, oh, maybe Aunt Emily.
(22:23):So I went over and was studying with, I stated Anne, Emily's Isabelle told me, she says, well, changing keys as easily, all you'd do is go around this cycle of fifths. I couldn't know there was such a thing as this cycle of fifths. I really didn't. Once I heard that there was a cycle of fifths, it just opened a whole doorway. I mean, just the whole universe opened before me. But I would go over and study with Mrs. Perkins and I played a few little things using that chord technique. And Mrs. Perkins was just ball. And so she gave me some little etudes to study, just some little things that I could learn how to play and go home and play something when I went to Sunday school that would satisfy the requirements of doing something for Sunday school. And Aunt Emily would go out back, we had a chicken. She, instead of paying, we didn't have money, kill the chicken and pull up some carrots and cabbages and things that would take a package of food over them with his Perkins and made him on. And so I got to study some quite nice things with Mrs. Perkins, and she was amazed how fast I learned. She says several times over, she was amazed at how rapidly I learned. Well, she didn't realize that I had all of this fear training. I could hear things
(24:16):Well, but all I had up to that point really a theoretical information was that Oh yeah. And Isabel was playing all the great classics, all of the great masters reading Bach books to Hoodie and the father. And she belonged to the Doll
Speaker 5 (24:50):Club,
Ervin Wilson (24:54):Believe it or not. So at that point I was getting on, I went back, by that time I was getting close to 18. I went back home for the summer. The second I was 18, I went up to Portland to enlist. I was going to enlist in the Navy. The Navy place was closed. So I went across the street to the Air Force place and they were open and I joined the Air Force and they gave me a physical on the spot and gave me my tests and things. And I noticed as we were about,
(25:50):After I finished the test, I was just sitting out there in the room and one of the officers was pointing at me and the other officer was looking at me doing several. I didn't find out until later that on the one test, which required the rotation of images and saying, this image is the, like this image, you take this image and do strange things inverted. And it took me just a few minutes to figure out a routine where I could trace 'em down. And what I did was intellectually cheated. But I answered the question correctly. The guy was telling his matting officer that I got a perfect score on that test. And evidently I was the first person ever to go through that to get a first perfect score on spatial visualization. That's important. Which I didn't realize at the time that everybody else didn't have the ability to visualize spatially the way I did.
(27:13):And anyway, I went on into the service, just happy as could be, and got over to Japan. But a fluke we got, we went, what we did is I was over in Rainier, Oregon, I enrolled and we went up to by Seattle to airbase up there. And they put us through some initial, gave us uniforms and duffel bags and things like that and put us on a train. And we went on the train all the, down through Los Angeles all the way, if you El Paso all the way to San Antonio, Texas. And there was a Air Force training place down there and went over there and I was in the Air Force there.
(28:11):But we would go into San Antonio and down by the banks, there's a little place there where they would play jazz. And not only did they play jazz, it was just good jazz. I heard good jazz in San Antonio too. Did you? Now I crossed the alley from Anita oday. Yeah. Key Largo Strange Cargo. I wandered. At any rate. So then we were all set up there and I ended up, but in the barracks, I was a bunch of kids from North Carolina and they would always tune up North Carolina bluegrass. It wasn't country, it was hillbilly music. They would always tune it in. And we were getting some very, very good hill building music coming through.
(29:24):And I would go to the radio, pick something out, they say, oh, that's, that's not the right thing to listen to. It's been acidified. We went over to Tokyo finally by the fluke that I had in school up in Rainier, Oregon. I had played the tuba and the drums and so forth. And we had gone on to an encamp near Tokyo there where they had all of these little huts with heater in them. And two guys slept inside of a little P tent that it was called. And they were getting his had all out and ready to ship us to Korea. And somebody.
Gary David (01:32):What do you remember as your first attempts to create a scale of your own? I mean,
Ervin Wilson (01:43):When I was very young, but old enough to take piano lessons, my parents decided not to give me piano lessons because it'd sent my older brother over to study piano with sister re mark now. And he had learned how to play the games and stuff, and I enjoy very much what he did playing. And it sounded particularly well on that ho that we had installed up there. And when I went, I'd go to sleep on the porch and I would hear what he was playing. It was so beautiful going out to see, isn't this read harmonium? But we just called it a pop organ playing these little melodies. And I realized that the kind of ecs, creative Swift music was the same kind of ecstasy that I felt when masturbating. I mean, they were just one and the same thing. It was just I was having an ecstatic experience at that point. The difference between the two hadn't, they hadn't to segregate into the different paths and, oh, I'm sorry.
Stephen James Taylor (03:21):Here, let's cut for a second.
Gary David (03:22):Yeah, let's cut for a second.
Ervin Wilson (03:24):Reset.
Stephen James Taylor (03:25):You want to put that,
Gary David (03:47):Okay. Okay.
Stephen James Taylor (03:50):You're rolling. Right. Mark Wilson two.
Gary David (03:53):Wilson two.
Ervin Wilson (03:56):And my brother Lyman had,
Stephen James Taylor (03:58):Oh, sorry, one more time. You got to do it. I need to get actually doing it on film. What's that? I need to see it on film. Yeah, that's good.
Ervin Wilson (04:08):My parents had sent my brother Lyman over to study piano with Sister Rene Martin, and he had learned all the, could play them quite well I thought. But my parents decided he had been a complete failure at music, and so they decided not to give him music lessons. He said, why wasting money on Irvin? The Lord moves in strange ways. So I was not forced to take piano lessons. My music psyche was allowed to develop in a very, very natural
Gary David (04:54):Way. Yeah, what path did that take?
Ervin Wilson (04:58):But later on I learned how to play chords. Some of my friends taught me how to play the guitar chords on the piano, just this, this, this, and this. Play. The melody with the other hand that was just, if you knew two or three chords, you could play any melody you wanted. So I would just play things that way on the read organ. And one day over there at Sunday school, a couple of nice young and good singers, young ladies, Monte Wetton and Hazel Roberta Anderson, one of the Anderson girls got up and sang, there's an unknown grave in a lonely spot, et and so forth, the hymn that I'd never heard. And it had quite a, it was a real tear jerky, but it had a little melody. So I went right home and started playing it on the organ using the same technique, the melody, the chords, et cetera. And my mother looked at me kind of strange. He says, was that the first time you ever heard that song?
(06:26):And the Poor Dare was diluted into believing she had a child prodigy on her hands. She says, well, maybe I'd better learn, teach him how to read notation. So she just started with the simplest hand or whatever, little. So once she taught me the notations, she figured I would to read notation. Then she figured I could learn, just learn the hymns by myself. That would be alright. And I thought, well, now if I can read notation, then I can reverse the process and write notation, can't I? And I says, well, let's give it a try urban and see if it works. So I would imagine a picture in my mind's ears and find the note for it and write it down and find it embedded. Little childish, little melody, but not all that background that considering what Mozart could do with melodies like that. And it went C, D and E, CD, E, DE, not F sharp.
(08:21):The F was wrong. It was just wrong. I knew what I awarded was somewhere in between F and f sharp. So my initial attempt at composition was thwarted just awarded years and years later, I learned where I was getting that note. I was passing through El Paso when I got to the train station in El Paso. They were having a great big wedding party in there. A girl from down around the colonies was getting married to a fairly wealthy young man up there in El pa. When they owe the people in there at the train station were just dressed to the tees. And they had mariachis. And I went out at the station waiting for Sonia to come pick me up. I was waiting there. And it was late at night. He came as late as we do. A couple of the mariachis came out and one of 'em was showing you the other one how to make the riff.
(09:43):But he was like in a sea major scale, so to say. And playing a melody that went from C to B2C, B, a, G, and then F to produce that subdominant chord on FAC, B. The B was the 11th harmonic of the F somehow or other. I haven't checked the ing in that, and it wouldn't have been in that key, but I realized that the trumpet was playing that same from the key of F was playing the same note that I wanted and couldn't get. It was from the early trumpet music that was instilled in the culture where you would play this harmonic F anytime you wanted to. You didn't censor it out. That's where I was. It was throughout all Mexican music there. These are very nice skill. I like that. Does that, now that I know where it came from, it's not so mysterious to me, and it's very clearly I can just take and put it in there and a lot of Mexican melodies.
(11:04):And it just worked. And it's an 11th. The 11th Harmonic is embedded right in the folks music down there coming right off the 11th harmonic on the trumpet, which they can't be bothered sensing out because that's what they want to hear anyway. It's that neutral sound that you get on the bagpipes. And a lot of bagpipes made it over, came over to Mexico and a lot of the early religious chants had early pipes that went with them that were not anywhere near equal. The early church chants had a lot of equal type scales in them because they came from Spain and you had the Jewish songs, the Mormon songs, the songs from India all coming through Spain and all using the neutral tones.
Gary David (12:07):So you growing up in a less, well, you said in a more natural way, meaning you didn't have a lot of TV or radios
Ervin Wilson (12:17):Or no tv, no radio. I wasn't born in a hospital with the mood. With the mood music you get in the hospital play incessant God awful music, and the child is indoctrinated before it. The first sound it hears is these unnatural music.
Gary David (12:47):So you were aware that there was something you wanted to hear, it wasn't there.
Ervin Wilson (12:52):Well, I knew that neither F nor F Sharp was the right note. I knew exactly where that note should be.
Gary David (13:00):Right. Well see. But millions of kids grow up thinking that's where the F and the F Sharp should be. You having grown up in a, where you hadn't heard a lot of 12 equal music suddenly heard, were conscious of what you
Ervin Wilson (13:15):Weren't hearing. The hymns were sort of 12. They certainly, the piano was never tuned to the 11th Harmonic. But still, I could hear the 11th harmonic. And that's because if my friend Eduardo Monte, son of Es and her husband Chapel, or Alvin Alvin, he at one point several years ago was hopelessly in love with the girl that was just wrong for him. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And he started writing with a love song to her. He just had them in his ear. And I asked him to sing them for me on the truck going up there. And he sang a couple of them and he sang in a scale that I'd never heard before, but went up there. When he would pass the house, sometimes he would be whistling a tune. And I listened to what he was whistling, and I have a 31 tone set and put it in 31. It would fit fairly good in 31 and F was right. You can do these neutral intervals in 31. And they sound pretty good. So I was able to pick his melodies out of 31, but not out of 12.
Gary David (15:01):So what did Eric, can
Stephen James Taylor (15:02):We just clap thing again? Accidentally? We're out of syn.
Gary David (15:07):You want
Stephen James Taylor (15:08):Your question and then we should put our camera on. Go ahead.
Gary David (15:17):Okay. You got that, huh? Wilson? Three. So you grew up, left your own devices. When did you start to, what was your first exposure, direct exposure to 12 equal in an educational situation? In other words, when did you,
Ervin Wilson (15:48):Okay. When I was about 15, we moved to Oregon and I didn't get any music lessons there, but I was unhappy in Oregon would in the mint fields and so forth. And dad bought a panel for $50, a nice little upright panel piano. And so I bought little books to learn how to play the piano. And I was just buying all of the popular songs of the day. Don't Fence Me in all these songs that back in those days were just
Gary David (16:47):About 1943, somewhere
Ervin Wilson (16:49):Around there going across the river into Kelso and Longview, Washington and picking up sheet music and learning how to, and a lot of them just had chords. You just played the chords and then it gave the melody line there and I learned all this. And so that was my first exposure to equal training in equal piano music. But it was very shortly, well, I became unhappy there.
Gary David (17:29):Yeah, I wanted to know what was the unhappiness about?
Ervin Wilson (17:34):Well, I know you want to know. Let us say, I became unhappy.
Gary David (17:42):Okay.
Ervin Wilson (17:44):I had always been unhappy, and that wasn't the first time I'd tried to run away from home. But this time I realized I could in fact successfully do that and went down to Oakland, Oakland, Oakland, where I heard I could work in the ship guards got there and it turned out it wasn't old enough to work in the shipyards. Well, one thing led to another. I was waiting on the bus for a trip somewhere else, maybe I think I was going to Los Angeles and police came around and wanted to know where I was going and wanted to see my ticket. And his dad asked me how old I was and I told him they thought maybe I was a draft dodge or something. He says, well, you're a true aunt child and you're a runaway child and we're going to have to put you in jail until you cooperate with us and tell us where you're from.
(18:52):So they talked me in jail there, and you just left me stuck in jail there. And after several days they called me and they said, we decided to ship you back to Mexico because that's a mage from Mexico. And that I was, he says, oh, I'm from Oregon and by folks are so and so and so and so. My mother got on the line and called one of my aunts who lived right there near Bai and told her to come and get me. And she came and got me and took care of me for a while. And then she sent me back to Rainier, Oregon and my mother seeing that I was going to be a real problem, decided to send me to Utah where my aunt Emily lived on the McDonald's side of the family, aunt Emily McDonald because Aunt Emily McDonald was good with disciplining children and keeping them under control. Mother just felt that she didn't have me under control, which obviously she didn't. No fault of hers. I had a little problem with my father, it just couldn't be how poor man. It was just unsuccessful no matter how hard he had worked.
(20:35):Anyway, I went back with to study with Aunt Emily, my cousin Isabelle, Emily Carla, my cousin Isabelle was there and she was just an intelligent and charming and beautiful redhead. And she was studying music with Mrs. Perkins piano music. And it was decided that I would go study music with Mrs. Perkins. You were old at this time. 16, 15, 16. I was still in high school. I had taken one year of high school in Mexico, gone up and taken about a year of high school in Oregon, which was very nice. And then, which I enjoyed because I had some good teachers in Oregon, they taught me English. And that's where I first heard the albatros and a good mathematics teacher. And she taught me some real good algebra, algebra, and I was getting good grades, really good grades in algebra. And I respected her and she respected me. And we got along this way, but then my mother decided, oh, maybe Aunt Emily.
(22:23):So I went over and was studying with, I stated Anne, Emily's Isabelle told me, she says, well, changing keys as easily, all you'd do is go around this cycle of fifths. I couldn't know there was such a thing as this cycle of fifths. I really didn't. Once I heard that there was a cycle of fifths, it just opened a whole doorway. I mean, just the whole universe opened before me. But I would go over and study with Mrs. Perkins and I played a few little things using that chord technique. And Mrs. Perkins was just ball. And so she gave me some little etudes to study, just some little things that I could learn how to play and go home and play something when I went to Sunday school that would satisfy the requirements of doing something for Sunday school. And Aunt Emily would go out back, we had a chicken. She, instead of paying, we didn't have money, kill the chicken and pull up some carrots and cabbages and things that would take a package of food over them with his Perkins and made him on. And so I got to study some quite nice things with Mrs. Perkins, and she was amazed how fast I learned. She says several times over, she was amazed at how rapidly I learned. Well, she didn't realize that I had all of this fear training. I could hear things
(24:16):Well, but all I had up to that point really a theoretical information was that Oh yeah. And Isabel was playing all the great classics, all of the great masters reading Bach books to Hoodie and the father. And she belonged to the Doll
Speaker 5 (24:50):Club,
Ervin Wilson (24:54):Believe it or not. So at that point I was getting on, I went back, by that time I was getting close to 18. I went back home for the summer. The second I was 18, I went up to Portland to enlist. I was going to enlist in the Navy. The Navy place was closed. So I went across the street to the Air Force place and they were open and I joined the Air Force and they gave me a physical on the spot and gave me my tests and things. And I noticed as we were about,
(25:50):After I finished the test, I was just sitting out there in the room and one of the officers was pointing at me and the other officer was looking at me doing several. I didn't find out until later that on the one test, which required the rotation of images and saying, this image is the, like this image, you take this image and do strange things inverted. And it took me just a few minutes to figure out a routine where I could trace 'em down. And what I did was intellectually cheated. But I answered the question correctly. The guy was telling his matting officer that I got a perfect score on that test. And evidently I was the first person ever to go through that to get a first perfect score on spatial visualization. That's important. Which I didn't realize at the time that everybody else didn't have the ability to visualize spatially the way I did.
(27:13):And anyway, I went on into the service, just happy as could be, and got over to Japan. But a fluke we got, we went, what we did is I was over in Rainier, Oregon, I enrolled and we went up to by Seattle to airbase up there. And they put us through some initial, gave us uniforms and duffel bags and things like that and put us on a train. And we went on the train all the, down through Los Angeles all the way, if you El Paso all the way to San Antonio, Texas. And there was a Air Force training place down there and went over there and I was in the Air Force there.
(28:11):But we would go into San Antonio and down by the banks, there's a little place there where they would play jazz. And not only did they play jazz, it was just good jazz. I heard good jazz in San Antonio too. Did you? Now I crossed the alley from Anita oday. Yeah. Key Largo Strange Cargo. I wandered. At any rate. So then we were all set up there and I ended up, but in the barracks, I was a bunch of kids from North Carolina and they would always tune up North Carolina bluegrass. It wasn't country, it was hillbilly music. They would always tune it in. And we were getting some very, very good hill building music coming through.
(29:24):And I would go to the radio, pick something out, they say, oh, that's, that's not the right thing to listen to. It's been acidified. We went over to Tokyo finally by the fluke that I had in school up in Rainier, Oregon. I had played the tuba and the drums and so forth. And we had gone on to an encamp near Tokyo there where they had all of these little huts with heater in them. And two guys slept inside of a little P tent that it was called. And they were getting his had all out and ready to ship us to Korea. And somebody.