Quiet Holiday Gets a Loud Celebration in Griffith Park

Sunday was National Grandparents Day.

Who knew?

Well, conductor Arthur B. Rubenstein did. He even wrote a song for the occasion.

And on Sunday afternoon, hundreds of grandchildren, parents, grandparents and even a few great-grandparents gathered in a grassy glen in Griffith Park for a concert in celebration of the little-known holiday. A few dozen even came early for a conducting class before the concert.

“This is such a special day,” said Patty Nakamura of Long Beach, one of the few parents out to celebrate the day, who prepared for it with her 4-year-old daughter, Katie.

“My daughter is going to sing [the “Grandparents Song”] in the choir. We’ve been practicing all summer. The maestro sent us the music, and we have been practicing on the piano,” she said.

Grandparents Day is not another invention of the Hallmark greeting-card folks, who have helped propel Mother’s Day and Father’s Day to national fame. Many calendars don’t even mark the holiday.

But in 1978, President Carter designated the Sunday after Labor Day each year as National Grandparents Day.

That was the culmination of a years-long campaign by West Virginia homemaker Marian McQuade, who wanted to promote the cause of the lonely elderly in nursing homes. She had visited senior citizens as a child with her own grandmother, bringing them food and a laugh.

McQuade, now 82, hoped young people would honor their elders, and tap the wisdom and life experience of their grandparents. “Ma” McQuade has 15 children and 40 grandchildren.

When she started her campaign in the early 1970s, she found 60% to 70% of people in nursing homes never receive a visitor.

Current figures from the American Assn. of Retired Persons say the same is true today, said her daughter, Dona Jo McQuade Lancaster, 60, who coordinates National Grandparents Day events across the country from her home in San Diego.

“That’s the purpose of our existence,” said Dona Jo McQuade, who heads a national committee to promote Grandparents Day--made up of McQuade descendants. “To make it as popular as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, without commercializing it.”

In Los Angeles, grandparents and grandchildren gathered in a tent at 1:30 p.m. for a conducting workshop with Rubenstein, music director and co-founder of Symphony in the Glen, a free concert series at Griffith Park now in its sixth year.

Holding chopsticks to serve as batons, the motley intergenerational group of first-time conductors followed Rubenstein’s lead.

“I think the grandparents are picking up quickly,” Rubenstein shouted over the strains of John Phillip Souza’s “El Capitan.” “You look like a bandmaster,” he shouted to one grandfather.

Rubenstein said he wrote the “Grandparents Song,” two years ago when he found out there wasn’t one. The words are sung to the tune of Mozart’s aria “La ci darem la mano,” from Don Giovanni.

He said he came up with the song spontaneously when he found out his 1997 Mozart concert fell on National Grandparents Day. He began singing, “Let’s sing a song to grandma. . . .” under his breath. He went home and scribbled out 10 more stanzas, which were to become the official song. It was performed for the first time last year in Los Angeles.

Still, despite the song, and the presidential designation, most people at the concert stumbled upon Grandparents Day by accident, or after seeing an item or a concert listing in a newspaper.

Kim Zeiss, mother of Jacob, 3 1/2, and Madison, 5, had never heard of the holiday until a few weeks ago, when she saw an ad. But her mother, Margot, 76, was visiting from Daytona Beach, Fla., so they turned out for the concert.

Music lovers Janice Melhorn and Lawrence Sonderling of Tujunga, and their son, Noah, 3, brought Sonderling’s parents after they came to the concert last year and found out about Grandparents Day.

“We didn’t have our grandparents then,” Melhorn said. “But this year we decided to bring them.”

But no one seemed more excited to be at the concert than Virginia “Oma” Crockett--a feisty 85-year-old great-grandmother who claims she is related to Davy.

“This was a surprise to her,” said her daughter-in-law Bobby, who brought Crockett and granddaughter Adelaide, 3. “We told her yesterday and she was thrilled. She doesn’t get out much. There’s nothing I could have done that would have been more exciting to her--except coming down that hill in her wheelchair.”

Virginia Crockett sat and drank it all in.

“I just can’t get over it,” she said, looking out at the people as the orchestra started to warm up. “It’s so exciting. Look at all the people.”