For decades, Northbrook’s Wescott School has started the new year with an open-air assembly, and for 37 of those years, music teacher Bill Vaananen has been there, behind his electric piano.
He was there once more on Aug. 23 — for the beginning of his last year — accompanying the Wescott principal introducing the new kids. Principal Chris Brown, like Wescott principals before him, took part in the event, his every comment set off by a piano flourish from Vaananen.
“They love their moment in the sun,” six-year PTO mom Zivit Blonder said of the 26 new kids. “All the attention, and everybody seeing them. I think it’s nice for new families. It makes them confident and puts them in a good place.”
At the end of the assembly, Vaananen played the school song, “One Big Family,” a piece he wrote in his second year on the job, in 1982.
The first-graders and transfers might not know the words now, but that could certainly change.
“I took my son for a music lesson out near Banner Day Camp (In Lake Forest), and my son, the little one, told the grandma where he went to school,” Blonder said. “And the grandmother, whose kids went to Wescott, started singing that song.”
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It’s not an unusual phenomenon. School board member Nancy Artz, another six-year Wescott mom, said her seventh-grader memorized “Red Tailed Hawk,” a song from “Joe Creek,” a Vaananen-written musical.
Vaananen, of Deerfield, said he’s written 400 songs, including a few dozen for Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit in Lincolnshire, where he’s youth musical director. He has written musicals about the nobility of Native Americans, the rights of women and many other things he believes in, including his love for the people of Mexico.
“Once in a while, you hear national leaders say Mexico is not the ideal country,” he said. “I like to bring a message of idealism. When you’re dealing with school kids, idealism is right there on their sleeves. They still think they can change the world with their actions.”
Vaananen gives them the tools, District 30 School Supt. Brian Wegley said.
“Every kid has a moment when they have to stand and deliver,” he said.
“He’s not only a teacher, he’s a composer, a performer, who gets kids to love music,” Brown said. “He has great energy in the classroom, and has adapted his class every year to make it interesting and exciting, and to respect the things that (the students) like.”
Vaananen started a long way from Northbrook, growing up in Joe Creek, Okla., which inspired the musical he wrote.
He said he brings into his music whatever he – or the kids – might be interested in at the time. After seeing “Cats,” he wrote four musicals for the kids, all on the subject of dogs.
The last lines of the school song are, “We’re the most incredible, extraterrestrial, Wescott, we’re a family.” Vaananen does consider the school like a family, but he said that wasn’t why he stressed that in the song. He was thinking “about socialism, like one big union,” at the time.
But Wescott parents and adminstrators say the concept of “family” fits well.
“A week into school, they’re all friends,” said Blonder, last year’s PTO co-president. “Wescott is a great ‘walk-to school.’ (Almost) everybody walks. When you’re walking next to someone, you create conversation.”
As he begins his last year, Vaananen said he has a list of 28 possibilities of how to spend the rest of his life. Among them, he said, are to publish his songs so they may find life in other schools.
Another is to go back to the places that inspired his music. He plans to visit Jane Addams’ grave, in the spirit of “Free Thinkers,” his women’s rights show. He’ll visit Mexico, and head for the Crazy Horse monument, to air his 30-minute magnum opus, “The Song of Hiawatha.”
“Then, of course, back to Oklahoma, to Joe Creek,” he said.
But first, there’s teaching, which includes a musical for every grade level. Some will be old favorites, some will be new, he said.
“I’m looking forward to a special year with 416 students,” he said.