St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 54

F2 ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH EVERYDAY THURSDAY, MAY 31, 2001 Whistling seems to have gone with the wind I (agggiipiimLU H-waauu'ui- 1 njT" eve uttu i pinny hoticio 'fli f'Tt TU HOW RINSO'S SOAPY-RICH SUDS V-A v.W CS GET OUT MORE DIRT JC 7j tT gf 3w 1 ill Jm Y'J ft rStHHggi ne Kids on: If 4 ill A i i I I lfiit. jum ir ofZ, nom 'J "t'? I ill il fmuZoA I A4 growtp my St. HquM ft iST dHI JVI hwtnboW. pf The hallmark of the happy-go-lucky guy doesn't really fit in our world of cell phones and sirens.

ByAnnGerhart The Washington Post People don't whistle much anymore. It used to be so American, so evocative of our rugged individualism and independence, of a certain jaunty happy-go-luckiness. A fella whistled while he worked, whistled a happy tune, then wet his whistle with a cold one and whistled at the girls going by. Jiminy Cricket whistled, and the Seven Dwarfs, and Gene Kelly and Santa Claus and Woodrow Wilson and Charles Lindbergh and Albert Einsteia Musical whistling went with derring-do and dancing in the rain and sauntering down the street, hands shoved in the pockets, hat brim at a rakish angle. The whistled theme of "The Andy Griffith Show" conjured up a small-town coziness mat has vanished, if it ever existed at all Now people march to a different tune, and the street is a horrible raucous mess of jackhammers and sirens and the beep-beep-beep of big trucks backing up.

A piercing trill or two could sound in protest Instead, people lower their voices and mutter into things like cell phones, or silence themselves, trudging along with Top 20 piped right into their inner ears. Whistling is too polka music; too idiosyncratic, like addressing envelopes on a manual typewriter, too stubbornly nonconformist, like the mom at the awards banquet in Frye boots and fringed jacket Whistling is a relic from a less technological time, when folks had to amuse themselves. It's front-porch culture. Ifs loner art It used to float around the school janitor who pushed a broom down workers half to death. They have reduced their dogs to whimpering.

Their obsession makes comrades out of the Toronto college administrator and the woman who keeps chickens way outside Denver and the New Orleans hotel products supplier who also teaches tai chi and the proper retired music teacher from Sedalia. "People tend to be disrespectful," says Herbst, who won the men's classical competition this year. "They liken it to hog-calling, until they hear it" He refuses to demean his instrument, which whistlers call the "puccolo," by whistling any old jingle. "It's like taking your Stra-divarius to play 'Turkey in the "I always thought I was weird, and now I know it," says Ernest Barreto, 32, a physics researcher at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Right now he's nervous.

This is his first competition. His wife combs his hair. He performs the Adagio and Rondo movements of the Mozart Flute Quartet in and you can feel the regulars tighten to alertness. A member of the Washington Chorus, Barreto has very good pitch and intricate phrasing. And a strange style: Instead of puckering his lips, he keeps his mouth almost slack and works his cheeks in and out He cant really explain it; his style is why he came, hoping to find an explanation.

Mitch Hider, who emcees the competition and conducts the Whistling workshop, tells Barreto he's heard that style before, in a Mexican mariachi band. "I wanted to know what the people were like who take this seriously," says women's grand champion Eagan, explaining how she showed up on a lark at her first competition last year and blew away the field with her rich, centered tones. Hider hotly denies that people don't whistle much anymore. "It's just not true," he insists. "What you don't hear is whistling in popular music, because there is less attention to melody.

It's just personal, and private. People do it for themselves, to validate or acknowledge their existence." Whistling is so unproductive. It doesn't accomplish a thing. It has an insouciance that resists commercialization. In all these years, no major corporate sponsor has come around to slap a logo on T-shirts at the whistling contest.

Terry Rappold, who won the men's competition in popular music and dreams of having a whistling band strut through the streets of his hometown, New Orleans, has a theory: "Whistling is a translation of music through the soul, and people are afraid to let their souls out." THE WASHINGTON POST right is a 1920 ad for Whistle soft At left, a mother and daughter whistle the "Rin-So White" drink. Whistling doubles as language in song in an ad for the detergent. At isn't so joyful anymore. Whistler's paradise The American and maybe world capital of whistling is Louisburg, N.C., a town of 3,011 people and many more pigs, north of Raleigh. It's home to the annual spring International Whistlers Convention, 28 years of it now, and the National Whistlers Museum.

"I never met anybody who could whistle like me until I came here," says Steven Herbst, 51, an adman who's had people trail him for blocks in Manhattan, transfixed. Competitors come from as far as Vancouver and Switzerland to wait their turn in front of the microphone in the Louisburg College Backstage, an elderly woman in silver pumps and evening gown coats her lips with Chap Stick. She has been to the beauty parlor. She is one of many whistlers waiting. The seats are filled with families and retirees and men in overalls and CAT caps, flecks of chewing tobacco at the corners of their mouths.

The sound quality is pretty good and miking by Susan luberda Reunions Roosevelt High School's class of 1936 is holding a reunion June 7 at the Junior League Building, 10435 Clayton Road. Classes prior to 1936 are also welcome to join the reunion. For more information, call: Cameron Morrison, 314-822-8104. The Central Visual Per- washday became more sincere." Now she's 25, and the two-time International Women's World Champion Whistler. She has a master's in vocal performance and a Fulbright scholarship to study yoice in The Hague.

"Ifs life-affirming and full of humor," she says of whistling. "There's a sense of joyful insanity." So maybe that's what has stifled the collective pucker. Insanity some nations gently, the handsome head and face uplifted, the rich ruby lips puckered kissably, and a soft, sweet, silvery trill shot forth, at once electrifying the audience and suggesting the presence of an impossibly cultured canary." For a while, whistling was cool. By 1900, the Thomas Edison Improved Phonograph most popular artist was a whistler named Joe Belmont Human But the last time a whistling tune hit the Top 20 was 1967. The song was "I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman" by Whistling Jack Smith.

It lives on in a niche of oddball music, novelty tunes from yesteryear. Bobby McFerrin whistles, and Billy Joel on "The Stranger." Georgia Neese Clark Gray was a bank president who became the first female treasurer of the United States. When she retired, she began to sponsor weekly whistling contests in her hometown of Richland, Kan. "There ought to be whistling sessions in every community," she would tell Mitch Hider, emcee at the Louisburg whistling convention. Somehow, whistling seems to restore confidence and a feeling of well-being." whistlers requires a certain delicacy of acoustical engineering so their music doesn't come out all reverb and shrieks.

Onstage, Oregon rancher Patty Ediger ambles through "Cattle Call" in a cowgirl costume, pretending to lasso an assistant in a plush bovine costume. Dan Brown, from Ohio, uses drumsticks as oars in "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore." The purists don't like these acts. They're like hard-core baseball fans who hate the antics of team mascots. Adult competition is serious, before a panel of music professionals who use standard vocal adjudication scoring. The sounds that pour forth from the whistlers are astonishing: cascading warbles, bell tones, tremolos and trills, syncopated crescendos, octaves of excitement Common ground Many of the same whistlers show up every year, members of a subset so peculiar they're the only ones who understand one another.

They have annoyed their spouses and children and co People to People forming Arts High School classes of 1990 and 1991 are planning a reunion. There will be an informational meeting held June 9. Contact: Rhonda Carter-Thompson, 314-370-2812, or Paula Spell-man, 314-559-2291. The January and June classes of 1941 from McKinley High School will have a reunion Oct. 26 through 28 at the Viking empty halls.

Yet kids still try to whistle, puckering and huffing to no effect. One day, something comes out, and the joy is profound, until they are silenced by modern mores and music videos. Except for the kids who are too stubborn. Emily Eagan was one of those kids. "I went through an obnoxious period, trying to be annoying," she says, "but then my whistling luck.

Goethe found it downright sinful. In his "Faust," the angels sang with heavenly voices, while the Devil whistled harshly. Arrigo Boito wrote this into his opera "Mefistofele," and the need to find a strong-throated whistler sends orchestras into a frenzy every time. And what about whistling women? "Whistling women and cackling hens, both come to no good end" was a common warning, and many a Catholic schoolgirl was sternly reminded that her tweeting would "make the Blessed Virgin weep." Alice Shaw rose above such reproof. A New York socialite, she took to artistic whistling in the late 1800s to support herself and her four daughters after her husband died, and delighted discriminating audiences throughout America and Europe.

Curious doctors determined she owed her musical virtue to the unusually high roof of her mouth. After one of her concerts in 1889, the Des Moines Mail Times composed a rhapsody on newsprint: "All beholders held their breaths as the broad expanse of snowy decolleted bosom heaved ByAnnGerhart The Washington Post Whistling is language in villages in Mexico, Turkey, Africa 1 and Guatemala Natives of La Gomera in the Canary Islands insist their children still learn El Silbo, the whistling language dating to aboriginal times, so it doesn't get drowned out by the cell phone and Internet In China, whistling is used in toilet training, as a mother's sig- nal for appropriate times to participate. Scholars in Mexico reference "the classic work on Mazateco whistle speech." But the academics fall silent when faced with whistling as music, leaving ample room for the form's detractors. "Whistling is an unmistakable sign of the moron," New York University philosophy professor Charles Shaw told the New York Times in 1931. "No great or successful man ever whistles.

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