One of the better names we`ve seen recently belongs to a group that will be performing at noon Tuesday in the Daley Center Plaza. A barbershop quartet whose members all are senior citizens, the group good-naturedly calls itself Sounds of Senility.
According to Stanley Myers, 73, the quartet`s lead singer and a former teacher at Arlington Heights High School, the name was suggested by one of his former students who also became interested in barbershop singing.
”Kinda insulting,” recalls Myers with a laugh. ”No, we didn`t think it was insulting. It`s fun. We all have fun together.”
Sounds of Senility (whose business cards, incidentally, bear the motto
”When in distress, call SOS”) got together four years ago. Myers and the other members–tenor Dan Krebsbach, 70; bass John Roberts, 71; and baritone Clarence Johanson, 89–had been longtime members of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America and met during the course of society activities.
The quartet performs ”standard old-time barbershop stuff,” says Myers. It apparently has no trouble finding work.
”We did 87 performances in 1984,” says Myers, ”most of them for senior citizens groups.”
Do other senior citizens ever have a negative reaction to the quartet`s name?
”If there has been,” says Myers, a chipper conversationalist, ”we haven`t sensed it. Most of them smile, too. If they don`t have a good sense of humor when we start with them, they do by the time we`re through.”
