Conductor Leads Grandparents Day Celebration

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

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

But in 1978, President Jimmy 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 housewife Marian McQuade, who wanted to promote the cause of the lonely elderly in nursing homes.

McQuade, now 82, hoped young people would honor those elders, up to 70% of whom never receive a visitor, and tap their wisdom.

“That’s the purpose of our existence,” said Dona Jo McQuade, head of 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, a few dozen grandparents and grandchildren began pre-concert celebrations by gathering 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 in its sixth year.

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

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

Most people at the concert said they stumbled upon Grandparents Day by accident, or after seeing an item or a concert listing in a newspaper.

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.

But no one seemed more excited to be at the concert than Virginia “Oma” Crockett--a feisty, 85-year-old great-grandmother.

Brought by her daughter-in-law Bobby and granddaughter Adelaide, 3, the elder Crockett sat in her wheelchair, taking in the scene.

“I just can’t get over it,” Crockett said. “It’s so exciting. Look at all the people.”