My great friend David, who died this week, called me "Perry," or sometimes "Chief." You'll get the joke if you're around our age. David and I were born just three weeks apart, at the dawn of the Eisenhower era, so we shared the same cultural reference points.
Like "The Adventures of Superman," which we both watched on black-and-white TVs as boys. I don't think the role model of Perry White is why I became a newspaperman, but I suspect The Daily Planet was the first newspaper David cared about, and he became a lifelong, zealous newspaper reader.
And maybe it was because of Superman that David turned out to be the sort of citizen he did. We heard every Saturday that Superman "fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way." In his own manner, so did David.
I'm speaking, of course, of David Griggs-Janower, the founding artistic director of Albany Pro Musica, which is always referred to these days as the Capital Region's premiere choral ensemble. It wasn't always that. Before 1981, it was just a notion in the head of a young musician. He shaped it over 32 seasons into a potent cultural force, recognized nationally as the model of a mostly amateur community chorus, with a strong secondary mission of supporting the musical education of the region's youth.
I became a member of Albany Pro Musica in 2000. From then until last spring, when David suffered a debilitating stroke during surgery for the cancer that finally took his life, he was my musical guide and inspiration.
But it wasn't only through music that David reached a crowd. His music was in part an outgrowth of a deep humanitarian impulse, which led him to work for causes and speak out on issues relating to equality of opportunity and hope.
Before I knew David, I knew about him from his letters to the editor. He wrote several times a year for a while, mostly on issues of justice and peace, themes that emerged in every aspect of his life, from his musical selections to the many charitable efforts that he supported.
Some members of the Albany Pro Musica board were concerned that his published opinions would offend potential donors. Arts groups need all the friends they can get, and a maestro who doesn't mince words runs the risk of losing the funds needed to, say, hire an extra cello for a big concert. But there were some things David just had to get off his chest.
In 1997, for example, he took aim at people who cited the Bible in opposing equal rights for gays, noting it was common to disregard other Bible passages as outmoded.
"How arrogant to assume that we can decide that the injunction against homosexuality is a great and modern sin, while other laws are no longer valid," he wrote. "How convenient to choose what we like in the Bible to support our arguments and ignore the rest."
Two years later, returning to that theme, he concluded a letter: "I think bigotry is a sin. Hmm, maybe we shouldn't let bigots marry. ... ". It was 14 years later that the state Legislature affirmed equal marriage rights for all New Yorkers.
In a letter two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, he wrote of weeping in front of the TV, and being "surprised at the depths of my sadness, and the depths of my patriotism." Then he complained about vigilante attacks on Muslims. "How can we persecute them?" he wrote. "It makes us no better than the terrorists."
Over the years, he inveighed against prejudice in the Boy Scouts organization (14 years before the Scouts accepted gay members); the invasion of Iraq ("As bad as Saddam is, I'm incredibly suspicious of a war that so few people, and other nations, support."); blue laws (why should people who don't celebrate Sunday as a Sabbath not be able to buy wine on that day?); and in favor of expanding the bottle deposit law ("Do our landfills really distinguish between the glass of a wine bottle and the glass of a beer bottle?).
These expressions of opinion on matters of community importance aren't surprising for a person who viewed music as a vital element of civic life. Music expresses emotion better than it does ideas, but there's no doubt that music can lift the aspirations of people and their communities, and give voice to hopes and dreams.
So David was determined to share music widely. He created a regional high school choral festival that annually draws hundreds of students, brought Albany Pro Musica into city elementary schools and created partnerships with high school choruses. David's music was an expression of his deepest sensibilities, but it was also an avenue for service to others.
"Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve," the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said weeks before his death in 1968. "You need only a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love."
That's where David Griggs-Janower stood on our daily planet. Not a man of steel, but surely a super man.