Make the most out of life

Joseph Shore

I wrote a partial autobiography named Good Dreams for many reasons, among them, to encourage people who are born with deformities not to give up on their dreams. I am such a person. I was born with coarctation syndrome. Until recently, most people born with this defect died young. This is a deformity of the heart and the blood vessels which affects the circulation system, the immune system, and the functions of the heart, lungs, and kidneys. When I was born, so long ago J, this condition was not even well understood. The country doctor who delivered me did not have the instruments to detect the condition. My childhood doctor in small-town Missouri, likewise could only hear a heart murmur, but he wondered why little Joe-boy’s immune system didn’t work very well. He tried giving me monthly injections of bicyllin to boost my immune system. That seemed to keep me from getting sick as often. For his next trick he gave my mother an enormous jar of tetracycline and said, “Whenever he starts to get sick, give him a few of these.” That helped a little bit, but soon I was immune to tetracycline and my teeth were permanently yellowed. We look back at the primitive nature of medicine in the early 1950’s and wonder how any of us survived.

I grew into my childhood as a little boy with an undiagnosed, untreated birth defect. I was just “different.” I could not do things that other boys could do. I had ability in all sports which I played in sandlot. I was a good baseball player. I could hit really far, field and throw well. I could even run fast if it was just a short distance. I was good in basketball, had a good jump shot, and could jump really well. What I couldn’t do was keep pace running up and down the court. I was good in football, could throw the ball a long way and could place kick the ball really well. Nevertheless, when I would try out for any team at school, the doctor would get one listen to my heart and say, “Sorry Joe, I just can’t let you play.”I grew up feeling sort of like a leper. I couldn’t do anything that “normal” boys could do. I wanted to play sports so badly that I found ways to get around the doctor. I played intramural sports and excelled. I took physical education in high school and excelled in all areas except long-distance running. I was running the 60 yard dash one day and the coach was watching. I ran it really fast and it caught his attention. “Wow, Shore is really fast.” Then he let me run the 880 relay, and I couldn’t keep up the pace for the longer distance. But that one little bit of praise for my 60 yard dash meant so much to me. It made me feel almost normal.

I had a very kind coach in high school who noticed some of my frustrations, even if he didn’t know what was physically wrong with me. He saw that I wanted to play organized baseball but couldn’t because I had failed the physical. He had been a professional baseball umpire after WWII and he still umpired area baseball. He took me under his wing and gave me free instructions on how to be an umpire. I worked at it with full diligence, like this was my chance to be near the game and be “normal.” He took me with him to umpire college ball when I was still a kid in high school. Then he took me to the “big time,” to semi-pro baseball. I was a good umpire and I loved being in control of the game I wanted to play. My endurance was not a problem for the limited mobility required of an umpire. It seemed like I had found a niche in sports. The next step was to go to umpire school and get a placement in the minor leagues. That hope was stopped however by my need for glasses. In those days umpires were not allowed to wear contact lenses. If you didn’t have 20/20 vision uncorrected, you could not be a professional umpire.

By the time I was 19, my family doctor finally got around to telling my parents, “There is something wrong with Joe-boy that I can’t understand. You should take him down to the Houston Methodist Hospital and let Dr. Debakey examine him.” So off we went. In 1967 heart surgery was still primitive by today’s standards. But they found the coarctation in the aorta and removed it. But even then the full details of coarctation syndrome were not well understood. They sent me home without explaining what I could and could not do and what I should expect my health to be like in the future. The reason is that even Debakey didn’t know back then. In reality all they had done was to fix the aorta. The stenotic aortic valve was still left in place. They could not change the fact that in 19 years, the blood vessels in the lower part of my body had grown small because of the coarctation. They could not change the fact that in 19 years the condition had made my lungs and kidneys weak. When we talk today about stem cell research, we are envisioning a future when the developing fetus within the womb can be scanned for genetic birth defects, and when found, those defects can be eliminated during fetal development by the insertion of stem cells. We are envisioning a future when nobody has to be born with birth defects. Today, had I been born with coarctation syndrome, it would have been detected at birth and surgery could have corrected it before its effects rampaged through childhood growth. When modern doctors today hear my story they ask, “Why didn’t they detect this at birth.” I answer, “Because in 1948 in small-town Missouri there were no instruments to detect this at birth.” They are always amazed at this as if they cannot remember such an era.

When I went to college I didn’t really know what I wanted to do since sports was out of the question. My grandfather, Vernon Shore, had been a well-known Baptist preacher during the depression and afterwards. I felt pressured to move into his shoes, not knowing just exactly where my shoes were at the time. I graduated from high school in 1966 and headed to Southwest Baptist University the next year.

Southwest Baptist University was a beautiful place, situated in rural Missouri near rivers and lakes, in a small town. I liked it right away. I had this funny idea that I wanted to take voice lessons as well as study theology. After all, I had always sung in choirs and it had been a great joy in High School. I drew a voice teacher named Nathan McCallister who was a bear with a very little brain, a Baptist church choir leader with a voice that sounded just right for the job. He heard me sing in the first lesson and announced that I had no talent. Instead of assigning me the standard early Italian songs that all singers cut their teeth on, he let it be known that I was not even ready for them. He assigned instead, "Stand-in' on the corner watchin all the girls go by." After one semester I decided voice lessons were not for me.

I still had music in my life. Even though I had given up on voice lessons, I had been accepted into the choir. I was happy but a bit timid because there were a lot of music majors in it with "real" talent. To make matters more intimidating, the director, Dr. Cowan, was a star. He had sung with the famous Robert Shaw Chorale. He let us hear his rich, bass-baritone voice from time to time and we were all convinced that only Ted Harris had a better voice in all of Missouri. Ted Harris was a Professor of Voice who had sung with Jerome Hines of the Metropolitan Opera. Mr. Harris commanded respect and more than a little awe. The year that I arrived at SBU, Mr. Harris was preparing a role in Jerome Hines' sacred opera on the life of Jesus called I Am The Way, which was going to be performed in Los Angeles. I sat outside Mr. Harris' door listening to the indescribable sounds coming out of his office as he rehearsed. I had never heard anything like those sounds. I just wanted to sit there on the floor and listen, and hope he would continue to sing. Later Jerome Hines himself told me that Ted's voice was tremendous at Los Angeles, sounding, in Hines' words, "like a canon." No small praise coming from Hines!

A lot of good things happened at SBU. One of them was that I was elected to Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities for my work in Drama. I wandered why I had never experienced a “call” to the ministry. My colleagues in theology could point to a specific “call” they had to the ministry. I tried to put it out of my mind. I was a scholar and scholars had things to do in the world. I would go to seminary to the most scholarly seminary Southern Baptists had to offer, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at Louisville, Kentucky. There I would find happiness as a great scholar, or so I thought! I graduated from Southwest Baptist University in 1970 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Theology and Drama.

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky was the jewel in the crown of the Southern Baptist Convention. As I packed everything into my 1961 Buick LeSabre and set out on the interstate, I knew I was going to more than a seminary. I was going to the best the Southern Baptist tradition had to offer. That's what I thought then.

The campus was Southern beauty itself, situated in rolling, Louisville green. This was the Yankee Stadium for a Baptist theology student. This was the House that A.T. Robertson built. Scholars taught here, great men like Dale Moody, Professor of Systematic Theology. He had studied with Barth, Tillich and Brunner, actually lived with Brunner. His academic robes were from Oxford. When the faculty donned their caps and gowns, Moody looked like the Pope himself, proudly clad in his bright red Oxford finest. Of course, the Southern Baptists wanted no Pope and they certainly would not have wanted a scholar like Moody, if they had. For these were the McCarthy witch hunt days. Fundamentalists were rising in numbers like a hundred year flood that no one could stop. There were not enough theological sand bags in all the country to hold back these flood waters. The Southern Baptist Convention was teetering on the edge of Civil War, and like any Civil War, it would be very unholy.

The fundamentalists within the denomination were fearful of all that Southern Seminary stood for. They distrusted modern scholarship. They wanted the old time religion where everyone knew his place! And they wanted every modern professor and student OUT of the denomination. As much as anything, the war was about political power.

The one student who always competed with me for top grade was an interesting fellow named Lynn Fann. Some might have called Lynn an odd duck. He played opera in the dorm, morning, noon, and night and drove everyone crazy. He had no real, serious voice but would fancy himself an operatic tenor as he sang along to the records. He essentially introduced me to Grand Opera. The only kind of opera we knew in the Ozarks was the "Grand Ole Opery." Still, as a university student I had been introduced to some great singers and this experience whetted my appetite for more. I listened to records of most of the great singers of the second golden age of singing there in the seminary dorm, including one great bass from the Metropolitan Opera named Jerome Hines. He stood out not just because of his wonderful bass voice, but because he was also an evangelical Christian who witnessed on skid-row in New York when he wasn't singing at the Met. These great voices I heard spoke to me. There was something about the sound of their voices that grabbed me and I began to listen to opera in my room while I studied theology.

I grew more and more empty inside in seminary. I wanted desperately to be a minister but I felt very much out of place, like I didn’t really belong there. It was 1972 and while I was at my most desperate I cried out to God for help. I actually heard an inner Voice say to me, "Your sermons can be your characters on stage. The stage can be your pulpit. The audience can be your congregation. Now go put feet to your faith." I had absolutely no reason to believe this Voice. Baptists do not hear voices. Maybe Pentecostals do but not Baptists! I had taken no voice lessons. Nobody heard any special singing talent in me of this magnitude. Remember my only teacher in university, Nathan MacAllister, had even refused to teach me because I was so untalented. I had no reason to think that I could ever get on a professional stage and sing Grand Opera. It sounded like a stupid idea! But at some level deep inside of me I must have believed it. I wondered why I had never really felt a “call” to the ministry. But this experience definitely fit the description of a “call” to sing opera. Eventually, after fighting seminary another semester, I left, got an apartment across the street and a job in a pizza restaurant. When I wasn't working I was listening to opera. One day in 1973 I opened my mouth to see if I could make a sound like one of those guys on the records and out came the essential sound that I have today. A couple of weeks later a friend heard me singing as he came for a visit and said, "Wow, you've got quite a voice. You ought to enter the Metropolitan Opera Auditions." I didn't know what they were but I said. "Ok." I sent off and got an entrance form. The first level of the competition was in Tulsa where I was supposed to sing five operatic arias. I knew none of course but I had records. So I picked out what I thought were the five hardest bass arias on the records and learned them by listening! Four were in Italian, and one was in Russian. Both languages I learned phonetically by listening. I can admit all of this now because the whole affair was such a miracle. In 1974 I went to Tulsa without a care in the world, sang without any nervousness and was easily named one of the winners. I seemed to be stepping into something that was very comfortable to me, something that I had done before.

People from Tulsa Opera were there and offered me beginning roles with their company as well as a scholarship to Tulsa University.

One of the judges was from The Santa Fe Opera which was also hearing singers audition for Apprentice Artists. Later I discovered that ten thousand singers across America were auditioning to become one of forty apprentices chosen for that summer season. An apprenticeship with The Santa Fe Opera was one of the most highly sought plums for a young opera singer trying to turn professional. The Artistic Administrator came back stage and said to me, "You haven't applied to us but would you like to be an apprentice?" I didn't even know what that was but I said, "Yes," and my career in opera had begun. "This opera business is a snap," I thought. Before going to Santa Fe, I made my debut with The Tulsa Opera singing a small but important part in Madama Butterfly alongside stars from The Metropolitan Opera. At Tulsa University I sang scenes from The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, and Don Giovanni, then packed up my old car and drove to Santa Fe in the summer of 1974 for a high profiled new beginning. I was determined to have the athletic career I had been denied. It was a strange form of sports, not baseball, basketball or football, but extreme sports for the voice.

The next year, 1975 I was one of the ten winners of the Met National Auditions and the following year I won The WGN Auditions. I was off to a flying start. I had no intention of telling anyone that I had heart disease. When you are competing with thousands of good singers, the last thing you want to announce is some major heart problem you have. I didn't want to give the business an excuse to get rid of me. So I tried to put on an act that nothing was wrong with me and I was as strong as an ox. My voice was as strong as any Verdi baritone of my day. But my heart and lungs were weak. I would be in the middle of rehearsals for heavy roles like "Rigoletto" and my body would just break down from the stress. I would have to lay out of rehearsals for a few days and come back in. But I can honestly say that I always came through in performance, and out of over 300 reviews there may be only two or three that are not just glowing--like your manager wrote them himself. But I pushed myself relentlessly to be able to perform in this high environment. If you look at all the Rigolettos I did, all the big roles like Macbeth, Telramund, Amonasro, Boris Godounov, Barnaba, Scarpia, I literally had to draw on my will in order to command my body so that I could do the role. The great basso, Martti Talvela, had heart disease and he dropped dead at his daughter's wedding. A diseased heart and lungs are not well suited to opera. This is what I had to overcome each performance, without anyone knowing about it. I was determined to make as much out of my singing life as I could. I sang the greatest roles for baritone in the best opera houses in the United States, among them, Rigoletto, Germont, Amonasro, Renato, and Falstaff, among the Verdi roles, as well as for Alfio, Tonio, Scarpia, Barnaba, Telramund, Boris, Pizarro, and Salieri. I achieved my dream of moving an audience with great singing and acting and shared the stage with some of the greatest singers of my day: Jerome Hines, James McCracken, Lucine Amara, Carlo Cossutta, Ezio Flagello, Gilda Cruz-Romo, Frances Yeend, Lucia Evangelista, Sherrill Milnes, Paul Plishka, and many others.

Some people complained that I was difficult to work with. My combination of heroic vocalism and fragile health was confusing. Perhaps I erred in not telling the truth about my heart from the beginning, but I was afraid they would not cast me in the big roles if they knew. Instead I got a reputation of being difficult to work with---which I am not really. I really pushed my heart and body hard in some roles, Telramund, Barnaba, et al, and finally it all caught up to me. In 1994 I had to have another heart surgery. I recovered from that one quickly and was back on the stage in three months. Then in 2006 my artificial heart valve cracked and I began drowning in my own blood. It took the Canadian medical system almost a year to give me a new surgery. By that time my lungs were damaged. Now my heart is too weak to sing and my lungs hold enough air for about four tones. Singing, my art, my greatest joy, my calling, I can do no more. But I made the most of my life. My sadness now is a part of the joy then. That's the deal. If in 1974 when I debuted in opera, a psychic had told me that I could play it safe with my voice and sing less demanding roles and have a longer career, or sing the greatest roles in opera and wear my heart out early, I would not change a thing. I would still sing Rigoletto, Macbeth, Amonasro, Renato, Falstaff, Boris, Pizarro, Telramund, with a mind possessed of a dream to unite legitimate acting with world-class vocalism. Of course I am sad now that I can no longer sing, but the sadness now is a part of the high times then. That's the deal.

For all of you who were born with a birth defect: I know how it feels to be different. I know how easily one can feel like a prisoner inside your defective body. My message to you is this: Whatever limitation you have been given in life, make the most of your life. Don’t let anyone define for you what you can do or can’t do. YOU make the call. There is something you can do with your life even with the limitations you have been given. When you find that something, give it all you’ve got. Don’t hold back. Play the game as hard as you can. Life is too short to hold back. Go for it on fourth down. Don’t punt. Swing away for the fence. Don’t slap at the ball. Shoot that three point jump shot. Don’t pass for the lay-up. Go for that knock out. Don’t win on points. Sing with all your might and with all your heart and soul, and be grateful for the chance to live and make the most out of your life. That’s what I have learned this life-time.