2006
Living Legend
Sally
Eggleston
By
Maggie Ryan, Greater Harrisburg Chorus, Region #19
Sally
Eggleston is finding this whole Living Legend thing a heavy burden.
It’s big stuff, being a Legend in Your Own Time, not to mention
being one of the wittiest women ever to grace a Sweet Adelines stage.
Not everyone can carry around such a lofty title with humility,
gratitude and a charmingly irreverent wink that asks, “Who’re
you trying to kid?”
But seriously now, Sally, quit fooling around for a second and take
this plaque. We don’t just hand them out at malls like sample
spritzes of perfume. No, this requires a presentation. Bite your
lip and keep a straight face. This is serious stuff. You are the
2006 recipient of The Lifetime Achievement Award.
Why, it’s enough to make Sally laugh.
But wait, almost everything makes Sally Eggleston laugh. She can’t
say a sentence without a raised eyebrow, a knowing nod, a perfectly
timed pause for effect. Take, for instance, her reply when asked
what went through her mind when she learned she had been chosen
for Sweet Adelines’ highest honor …
“I kept thinking somebody’s going to walk up to me and
say, “You’re dead.”
Far from it. Sally joins the short, select group of Sweet Adelines
International’s standard bearers. Then again, she’s
been there all along.
At international convention in Las Vegas, Sally stood tall and smiling
on stage as International President Pat LeVezu scrolled through
her lengthy list of accomplishments. Pat scrolled and scrolled,
and Sally began to slump. The more Pat talked, the more Sally withered.
It was vintage Sally Eggleston, milking the laugh but not mocking
the moment.
“I’m a lifetime member,” she said. “I can’t
get away from it now.”
Sally’s award came 48 years to the day from her first meeting
with Cedar Rhapsody Chorus in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“It looked like a nice little hobby,” she said
She kept the job for 42 years and led the group to nine regional
championships, a third-place finish in the first international contest
in 1973, and the 1991 Harmony Achievement Award at international
in San Antonio.
“I couldn’t spell barbershop when I started,”
Sally said. “I was a music major in college, along with drama
and speech.” What Sweet Adelines didn’t provide in those
days, Sally helped invent. She was appointed as the first female
faculty member for Sweet Adelines in 1964 and has traveled the world
delivering more than 300 music schools from Alaska to the Panama
Canal, in Canada, Europe, Scandinavia and Australia and New Zealand.
Of those 300, she missed only one.
“I’ve learned more about music in Sweet Adelines than
I learned in college,” Sally said. “Nowadays, you really
have to know your stuff.”
Along the way she tried her hand at judging and discovered she had
a bit of a flair for that, too. First she became certified in showmanship
(a natural fit for this perpetual ham), then expression (to prove
her serious side, apparently) and then sound, which she maintains
to this day. In the early days of satellite regions when Sweet Adelines
could only send two judges, she would juggle two categories at once.
“It’s hard to judge showmanship and sound at the same
time,” she admitted.
Of the 100 contests she has judged, perhaps the most memorable was
the year that brought the demise of lowering and raising a curtain
between each contestant.
“We always had curtains and we were … somewhere,”
she said, waving off the location for the sake of a good yarn. “I
was chair of the panel and the curtain caught on fire. I jumped
up on stage and asked (the crew) to have it fixed and they said
‘Sure, on Tuesday.’ ” It was curtains for curtains.
“Sometimes it can be a rough road,” she chuckled, “but
if you stick it out, it’s worth it.”
Sweet Adelines leaders knew a good woman when the saw her and in
1971 hired Sally as the first female Director of Organizational
Activities. One of her first official acts was to change the job’s
name.
“I didn’t like the title – Sally Eggleston, D.O.A.,”
she said. She became Education Director instead, and barnstormed
the globe, children in tow, to spread the Sweet Adelines gospel.
“All our family vacations revolved about Sweet Adelines,”
she said. Trips to headquarters in Tulsa, Okla., became routine.
A little too routine for Sally, who convinced the organization to
hold its 1977 convention in London, England, a monumental challenge
that took her to Britain for months. She coordinated the whole thing,
even organizing chapters in Europe after a few rowdy all-nighters
of singing.
When she got back and the bills rolled in, she discovered a clerical
error that delights her to this day. Sweet Adelines’ flights
had been billed to “Swede Airlines.”
Finding those nuggets of fun is what sets Sally apart from so many
immensely talented organizers, planners and musicians in Sweet Adelines.
She admits she’s always been funny, but insists she isn’t
a joke teller. She’s an observer and a great storyteller,
and sees life through an ironic lens. Not much eludes her, and few
are spared a gentle ribbing.
“I’ll write a novel when they all pass away,”
she says.
As Education Director, she directed many a mass sing, and her most
memorable was in London in 1977.
“We were to have the mass sing in Hyde Park, and it rained,”
she says with a no-kidding shrug. She had done massive publicity
and drawn a crowd, including London media. "Everyone scattered.
“I looked up, and buses were arriving, one after another.
I climbed up on Prince Albert – the statue -- and just then,
the sun came out. We came to last song, ‘Battle Hymn of the
Republic,’ they got back on their buses and the skies opened.
It rained the rest of the day."
“It was like God was saying ‘You’re doing good,’
” she said.
It’s a message everyone needs to hear now and then, and for
Sally it hit home tragically in 2000, when her 37-year-old son,
Jeff, was killed by a hit-and-run drunken driver. She retired from
Cedar Rhapsody Chorus and scaled back some of her activities. But
it didn’t last. The phone rang, and she answered. Folks needed
her.
She has since taken two choruses to regional contests and each has
earned most-improved scores. She’s directing her third now,
Cedar Harmony in Cedar Falls, Iowa. It’s so much more than
friendship. Her daughter Paula has been on those risers for 16 years.
Sweet Adelines, she says, pulled her through.
“Life hasn’t been without its ups and downs,”
she said, but “Sweet Adelines are there when you have a problem.
“It starts out with the music and then it becomes about the
friendships,” she said. “Music never leaves. It gets
in your heart. We stay because we like to stay; because we like
each other.”
Almost predictably for a woman with such a passion for living, Sally
turned her tragedy into action as an educator on the dangers of
drinking and driving.
“I work endlessly with drunken-driving offenders,” she
said. “I go to schools and prisons and work as a victims advocate.”
She has become active in MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a
nationwide organization whose mission is to stop drunk driving,
support victims and prevent underage drinking.
“I tell everyone, be careful of the choices you make.”
Sally Eggleston is a survivor in the best sense of the word. She
has seen the darkest side of a woman’s life and found her
way to its brightest. She doesn’t just go there, she turns
up the wattage and warms the room. There will be more, she knows,
struggling from the dark into the light. Sally will be there, quick
with a quip and a steady, understanding gaze.
“Live in harmony,” she says. “It we just spread
harmony, it’s bound to have an effect.” The world is
chaotic enough.”
