Wilberta (Naden) Pickett ’50 recently reflected on her time at Illinois Wesleyan University and the love of music that the University instilled in her.
“[This] photo was taken at home during the Christmas season in 2020, 3 weeks before my husband John died. We were both 92 1/2. See how good he looked as we sat on the piano bench together.
John was a good pianist, too. That’s how we met. When we were both 14, our mutual piano teacher, who traveled to different area schools to teach students there, introduced us when she assigned him and me (from different schools) to play the final two-piano duo on the upcoming spring recital. Our piece was an arrangement of Saint-Saens’ ‘Danse Macabre’ which we later said became our ‘Dance of Life.’ So for many Saturdays we had to travel from our home districts on a bus to her main studio to practice together where there were two pianos. Afterwards we would go to the Rexall Drugstore and get one soda with two straws. Big deal for two Great Depression kids.
We dated off and on in high school, and when I was at Wesleyan, he sometimes came by train from the other Bloomington, from Indiana University, to see me. Sometimes he stayed with other male classmates (called ‘The Four Horsemen’) or at Dr. and Mrs. Lowell Hazzard’s, the home of the Professor of Religion, where students were always welcome.
When we were married, my organ teacher, Lillian (Mecherle) McCord ’27, and Lloyd Pfautsch, choral director for whom I did much accompanying, played and sang at our wedding at the First Methodist Church in Elwood, Indiana. They were the ones who encouraged me to attend Union Theological Seminary’s School of Sacred Music for my master’s degree where they both had graduated. You can see Wesleyan had a big role in my life. Wesleyan School of Music had offered me a scholarship to stay for a master’s degree in piano performance, but I turned it down (the road not taken) to pursue a career in church music which turned out to be right for me.
Actually, as a very small child, my first piano teacher was an IWU recent grad at the time, Luetta May (Zahn) Cummins ’32 (called Peggy). Her new husband, Robert Cummins, Sr., was the new band director in town – St. Anne, IL., and when in our home, she noticed I responded to the music of the male quartet rehearsing there made up of her husband, my dad and two other men, and asked my mother if she could teach me. I was four years old. I loved it and have been playing ever since. After we moved north a few miles to Grant Park, IL., all our public school music teachers were Wesleyan grads.”
