Three Decembers ago, middle school band teacher Ron Wakefield brought his 35-member orchestra to a homeless shelter in Santa Ana, Calif. They performed a Christmas concert on a concrete slab in the backyard where some of the families slept.
Tiffany Zoller, a skinny girl with stick- straight blond hair and a crooked smile, listened to them play “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “What Child Is This?”
“I’d give anything if I could do that,” said Tiffany, then 9.
Wakefield, a teacher at North Park Middle School in Pico Rivera, was so moved by Tiffany’s comment that he began buying musical instruments for the shelter’s children, spending $800 of his own money. He also rounded up volunteers from his band to tutor the children weekly.
The Isaiah House Music Club was born. This year, the Music Club made Wakefield, 50, proud beyond expectation, in a concert setting leagues from the shelter’s backyard.
Each night, the privately funded house overflows with more than 120 homeless mothers and children who can’t afford rent at seedy motels or who have overstayed their welcome at short-term shelters. At Isaiah House, they can stay as long as they want.
The first visits by the North Park volunteers were jarring. Some adolescents, teased for joining the band, balked at rehearsing. Two flutes were stolen. Neighbors called police when the ragtag band practiced on the front lawn.
The transient nature of homelessness meant dozens of children filtered through the band. Some disappeared for weeks, often to another shelter or motel, only to return. One girl snapped her clarinet in half after her father failed to visit on her birthday.
But week after week, the volunteers, adolescents themselves, returned.
They taught the children to read music and to understand rhythm. Their students learned to play notes, then measures, then phrases, then compositions. The Isaiah House Music Club members practiced on their own nearly every day. They started with “Hot Cross Buns” and worked up to more challenging works.
During a recent rehearsal, North Park clarinetist Inez Franco, 13, helped Tiffany practice scales. A clarinet case, dotted with pink and purple hearts and stenciled with her nickname, Tiffers, sat at their feet.
The band is about more than music, Wakefield said. It’s about giving the children a constant in their unstable lives.
“They have this treasure in their hearts forever,” Wakefield said. “They’ve learned there are people in this world that can be trusted, that can be counted on.”
The North Park band had a long- standing invitation to play in April at Carnegie Hall from the National Band and Orchestra Festival, a performance of student musicians from across the country. The band invited six of its homeless friends to join.
The North Park band and the Isaiah House Music Club performed for nearly an hour in front of hundreds of people.
When they finished, Wakefield held back tears.
“There are no words to describe that beautiful joy and love that was on that stage,” he said. “Some things are best unspoken.”
