"Why did you drink that vile
stuff?"

The Maestro said: "The poor fellow meant well, and I didn't want to
refuse. A man can do anything."

XXIV

LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI

Many years ago this reporter was traveling, as a non-fiddling,
non-tooting member of the Philadelphia Orchestra, on a train that
carried the organization on one of its Pennsylvania-Maryland-Ohio
tours.

It was 2 o'clock in the morning, Mr. Stokowski, the conductor, was
secluded in his drawing room, perhaps asleep, but more likely trying
to digest three helpings of creamed oysters in which he had indulged
at the home of an effusive Harrisburg hostess. Mr. Stokowski in those
days couldn't let creamed oysters alone, but neither could he take
them.

In the Pullman smoker sat the handsome gentleman who was then manager
of the orchestra and your correspondent. "Tell me," said the reporter,
"just between you and me--where did Stoky get that juicy accent?"

The manager removed his cigar to reply:

"God alone knows."

Mr. Stokowski then had been in this country nearly twenty years. He
has been here now more than thirty years, and still no one on earth,
with the possible exception of Mr. Stokowski himself, can tell you
where he dug up his rich luscious accent that trickles down the
portals of the ear as the sauce of creamed oysters trickles down the
gullet.

Surely he didn't get it in London where, on April 18, 1882, he was
born. Nor did he learn it in Queens College, Oxford, where he was
considered a bright student, or on Park Avenue, New York, where he
landed in 1905 to play the organ at St. Bartholomew's.

Mr. Stokowski's dialectic vagaries are among the mysteries in which,
for his own good reasons, he has chosen to wrap himself. Another one
concerns his name and origin. Is he really Leopold Antoni Stanislaw
Stokowski? Was his father one Joseph Boleslaw Kopernicus Stokowski, a
Polish emigre who became a London stockbroker? Was his mother an Irish
colleen and the granddaughter of Tom Moore, who wrote "Believe Me
If All Those Endearing Young Charms"? Or is Stoky just plain Lionel
Stokes, the sprout of a humble cockney family?

Nobody knows. But everybody knows that Leopold Stokowski is one of the
world's really great orchestra conductors, a true poet of the stick
(though he has dispensed with the baton in recent years), and that he
has made the name of the Philadelphia Orchestra synonymous with superb
singing, beauty of tone and dazzling bri