The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 220

miiummmMmai Avon Long to Jtiicstasy 1 Broadway i 7 -sf 1 3 Baltimore native Avon Long sings "Nobody" in the Broadway smash, Brown Sugar," in which he is one of the leads. Harlem is a lot like Harvard. It may cost you a bundle, but you get a real education. From "Bubbling Brown Sugar" Hv J. WYW KOUSICK I HAVE never felt more fully contained he credits Miss Buchanan with encouraging his potential.

William Llewellyn Wilson was his music teacher. Walter Fisher, history professor at Morgan State University, attended Douglass High School for part of the time Avon Long was there. He remembers him winning a medal for his recitation of the poem "The Creation" by James Weldon Johnson. "He probably had the lead in every high school drama club production," he says. "He was the Flying Dutchman in the production of the Wagnerian opera." In "The Pied Piper" he played opposite Anne Wiggins Brown, who later played Bess in "Porgy and Bess." Douglass High School produced several distinguished musical alumni.

In the 1920's the tenor role in Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's "Hiawatha" was played by Bill Kenney, who later became the lead tenor in the Ink Spots, and in the next decade Cab Calloway had the part. "I could never say I was the most talented," Mr. Long says. "Fellows and girls in our group could far surpass any vocal effort on my As in most neighborhoods, singing and dancing was more of a cultural thing than something you aspired to as a career. My mother dreamed of my being a minister." a dance hall where his grandfather was janitor, on Lexington street, near the Lexington Market.

Mr. Long's family and his seven aunts and their children lived in the building. His mother was a seamstress. "She wasn't just a seamstress," he says. "She was the best seamstress in Weis's factory.

I was always so proud of that. She always tried to instill that in me, to be the best." His father played the piano for the silent movies at the Carey Street Theater. "He was a sporty type of man. He did that as well as other precarious things I learned as I grew up. "I was never conscious of prejudice as a kid.

I had no need to venture past the wholesomeness of our environment. My memory of Baltimore was living in ecstasy," he says. "I suppose when the ecstasy was wearing off, that's when I left it, so I still remember it, you see. I don't remember not acting. I was always encouraged by folks in the church and people in high school." Mr.

Long went to Douglass High School, which, at the time, was the only 12-year high school for blacks in the state. The other schools stopped at the 11th grade. He studied with Nellie Buchanan, Latin teacher and drama coach who headed the Mask and Wig Club. In the Playbill The closest Mr. Long came was singing in the choir of the Grace Presbyterian Church for the Rev.

John E. Colbert, for which he was paid every Sunday. Cab Calloway's mother was the choir director. Calloway by this time was the lead in the New York revue "Hot Chocolate." "In my family I was the least talented," Mr. Long says.

"My brother sang, my sister danced, and my mother while ironing would sing a spiritual that would put Mary Addison to shame. I remember my house as being one of laughter, singing and dancing and waiting for Saturday night when my aunt would get Chinese food. "I've never decided I want to go into show business to this very day. It's an extension of high school activities. If someone would pay for it, that's their business.

I would do it anyway. It's the only job I've ever had." As a youngster Mr. Long was a devotee of the Horatio Alger stories and biographies of "all the black men who became something." "To this day I've never known poverty," he says. "From reading these biographies I've been waiting for hard times. What would be accepted as hard times to others is experience to me." He ran away when he was a teen-ager.

He paid 80 cents to sail from Baltimore to THE SUN MAGAZINE, DECEMBER 19, 1976 in expression than when I was in Baltimore as the Pied Piper. It's been my ambition in life to go back to Baltimore and be the Pied Piper again before I die," says Avon Long, who is 66, and has one of the leads in the Broadway smash, "Bubbling Brown Sugar." Mr. Long sat in the living room of his eight-room Washington Heights apartment wearing a three-piece beige suit and blue turtleneck, nursing a brandy and soda and smoking a cigarette. The Longs have just moved into the apartment, which has sparse furniture, including a red chaise lounge in the living room. A portrait over the mantel is titled "Avon Long as Sportin' Life in 'Porgy and Bess' at the Majestic Theater," by Lee Haynes.

A young man is finishing bookcases in the next room. Mrs. Gretchen Long is making fried chicken in the kitchen. The spry actor is telling his life story. The story begins in the Good Hope Hall, 12.