Me! I appear to be about three here, so this would be around 1946. This picture ain't half bad, if you'll excuse my rather high grip on the bow. It looks like I'm playing something in about fifth position, too!

This scene is the result of wishful thinking on the part of my father, who would have loved to raise a string quartet. However, of my parents' four sons, only Dale became a string player. (A cellist.) I did practice viola for a couple of hours a day for a month or two when I was twenty years old, the year I was home from school, just to get the feel for the instrument and to learn more about string instruments as a composer.

As a side note, notice the white radio behind me to the left hand side of the picture. (It was actually vanilla colored.) I became addicted to that thing, and today am one of the youngest persons to have a good memory for the era of radio. I wrote about this in one of my Frags , entitled Radio Days.