In Learning a New Tune, Students Discovered Harmony

When 21-year-old Jean Shaw arrived at Benjamin Stoddert Junior High School in Prince George's County in 1966 to teach music, the first question her students asked her was "Are you 'block' or are you 'collegiate'?"

If you were collegiate, you were preppy. If you were block, you were a hoodlum in training.

"The school basically was divided into those two factions," Jean -- now Jean McHale -- told me.

"I had this class of boys, 45 in one class," she said. "Half they would not put in shop class because they would kill each other with saws and hammers. So what do they do? Put them in my class and have me teach them 'do re mi.' "

Jean taught them a lot more than that. From her classes she plucked 15 students who became famous: Benjamin Stoddert's own teen singing sensations, the Peppermint Pipers.

If you were at a Prince George's Kiwanis or Lions Club meeting, or at the county fair, or if you watched such local TV shows as "Wing Ding" or "Ranger Hal," you might have seen them: a group of freshly scrubbed students in matching red-and-white outfits singing their little teenage hearts out.

"We were kind of like little Marlow Heights celebrities in a way," said Sue Lyons, then the drummer in the Peppermint Pipers, now 55 and a private investigator in Massachusetts.

The Pipers played everywhere. They went to San Antonio, singing at the HemisFair exposition. They spent 10 days one summer performing at an amusement park in Cincinnati, competing with Up With People to see who could draw a bigger crowd.

Along the way, they learned about a lot more than music. "Some places we couldn't sing 'I'm in Love With a Big Blue Frog,' " said Tim Allwine, 54, who played banjo and guitar in the Pipers and now lives in California. Peter, Paul & Mary's integration song included the line "They think the value on their property will go right down/If the family next door is blue."

Jean thinks that if it wasn't for the Pipers, kids like Tim -- a football player leaning toward the "block" way of life -- never would have met kids like Ron Duncan, the group's main emcee, a little dynamo who was plainly gay at a time when that couldn't have been an easy thing.

"These kids would have killed for each other," Jean said. "Under normal conditions, they would not have spoken to each other."

Years later -- after Ron had done theater in New York, contracted AIDS and moved to Bangor, Maine -- he called his old music teacher and said "Jean, I'm dying and I need you to come up and be with me."