Pay It Forward, With Music

Fernando Pullum studies the faces of band students at Washington Preparatory High School in South-Central Los Angeles. In their eyes, he sees reflections of himself long ago, before he understood the hope in music, before he made his promise.

It was a promise that went back decades, linking Pullum to two other music teachers, one now deceased, one still teaching. From one to the other, it was handed down like a torch, and as Pullum stands before his students, he passes the flame to them.

You pay back those who have helped you, the promise goes, by helping others. Based on that concept, Pullum has built one of the most successful high school music programs in the city.

Through a program he founded, Kids Helping Kids, Washington Prep band members spend Saturday mornings giving free lessons to younger children, the youngest just 4 years old. About 100 children participate, and they pay back the favor by performing at convalescent homes around the city.

“If each one of my students helps 10 people, and if they help 10 people, and then they help 10 people, look at the numbers,” Pullum says.

As in the movie, “Pay It Forward,” good deeds have grown, touching hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives beyond the three men, all graduates of the University of Michigan.

Like his predecessors, Pullum is demanding. If students are late to class or fail to do homework, he will have them run laps. If they hit a wrong note, he will have them “celebrate”--drop to the floor and do push-ups.

Such stringency, he says, does not come naturally. He pushes because he feels he must, because he teaches at a time and place in which tragedy seems to lay in wait for the young and because malaise ignites him. At age 44, he has attended the funerals of too many who died too young.

His students live complicated lives. About 40% are in foster care or live with relatives other than their parents. An equal number of students are from families in which no one has gone to college. So Pullum gives them music and his home telephone number. He writes it on the chalkboard next to his name on the first day of class, and it doesn’t take long for the phone to start ringing.

He is, says his wife, Akilah Bakeer Pullum, constantly working to solve his students’ problems, most of them having nothing to do with music. Two years ago, he drove every morning to Glendale to pick up a student and drive her to Washington Prep, a magnet school, so that she could graduate.

“You don’t want any of them to slip through your fingers,” he says. “So you do whatever you need to do to help them, and when you do lose one, you cling a little tighter. You try harder.”

If there is a bottom line to his work, it might be this: Of 163 band members who have graduated during the past 10 years, 161 have gone on to four-year schools. One opted for culinary school, and Pullum is still working on the other student.

For Pullum, music is important only when it enters the soul and becomes a part of something greater. It is a means of communicating important ideals, he says, among them hope and love and determination. It is a way to give, a tool to foster change.

He knows music is powerful because as a young man growing up in Chicago he held a gun in one hand, a horn in the other and, ultimately, it was the horn that saved his life.

Although he has played on “The Tonight Show” and “Saturday Night Live” and with artists including Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald and the Temptations, his most important gig is here, in a room with tiles missing from the walls, in front of young musicians.

“Who can explain why we are here?” Pullum asks. “What is it we’re trying to do?”

Students, with instruments in hand, look at him from behind music stands containing “Allegro Barbaro” by Bartok. Paulette Oubre, a ninth-grader seated in back, speaks out clearly, softly.

“We’re trying to change the world,” she says, “a little bit at a time.”

“Good,” says Pullum.

And then the music begins.

It started in the mid-1960s in Detroit, where a teacher named Anderson White taught band, at various times, in elementary, junior and senior high schools. White was a big man, 220 or 230 pounds, and according to one of his students, not opposed, if a student had a problem with him, to step inside the gym, close the doors and settle differences.

He also would reach into his own pocket if a child needed clothes or food, and on weekends he would load students and instruments into his station wagon and drive them to concerts, workshops and competitions.

Bonita White, his wife of 14 years, says it was not unusual for several of his students to be seated with them at the dinner table on any given night. One of their more frequent guests was a student at Durfee Junior High, Marcellus Brown.

For Christmas 1965, White gave Brown the sheet music for the Haydn Trumpet Concerto. “I want you to listen to it,” he said. “You should learn this piece.” Brown, now a music professor at Boise State University in Idaho, is still working on it. He has performed it throughout his career, most recently with the Boise Summerfest Orchestra. He teaches it to his students.

“Andy White made me believe I could do whatever it was I wanted to do in music,” says Brown, one of many former students now teaching music all over the country who mourned White’s death a year and a half ago at age 66.

“If you expose people to great things and help them understand and see the greatness in it, you help them become successful,” Brown says. “That’s what Andy White did, that’s what I have tried to do, and that’s what Fernando is doing.”

Brown was teaching at Chicago State University in the late 1970s, when he met Fernando Pullum, who was working in a shoe store at the time. As a child, Pullum lived with his great-grandmother for the most part, but there were times when he stayed with his mother, and that is when he would knock on strangers’ doors to ask for food.

His early role models were the drug dealers and pimps on Chicago’s Madison Avenue, in their fancy cars and fine clothes. He bought his first gun in seventh grade for $5. People told Pullum he was destined for prison or early death. Only one, a neighbor, Miss Pearson, would look at him and say, “You’re going to be president one day.” He remembers to this day her words and the feeling of having someone believe in him.

He had an uncle who played the drums, and one day Pullum, while listening to him play, picked up a bugle that was lying on the couch. No one had been able to get a sound out of it, but when Pullum lifted it to his lips, he made it play. That one note, he says, changed his life.

“Everybody started clapping. I got a positive response from people. Before that, everything had been negative.”

Three years later, when he was in the sixth grade, he took up the trumpet and played in the school band. He gave it up in high school, but then one day he carried his horn to school in a paper bag and played for the band teacher. He received more positive reinforcement.

He started playing in the band, in street alleys, in a salsa band, but he never considered going to college until one day when he visited a friend who was attending Chicago State University. His friend introduced him to one of his teachers, Marcellus Brown.

“He was desperately serious about making music,” says Brown. “He was very talented and needed someone to point him in the right direction.”

Brown helped Pullum receive financial aid and enroll at Chicago State. Then a year later, just as White once had done for him, Brown helped Pullum into the University of Michigan.

“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” Pullum says. “The pressure for me was that Marcellus worked really hard to get me into college, and he told me to make sure I made room for someone else after me. I wasn’t just doing it for me, I was doing it for the next person Marcellus sent to Michigan. I couldn’t let him down.”

Pullum received his bachelor’s degree and, in 1983, his master’s at Michigan. Before moving to Los Angeles, he went to Brown to discuss how he might pay him back for all he had done.

Brown, now 50, told Pullum he couldn’t pay him back with money. Using words that could have come out of Anderson White’s mouth, Brown said, “Help 10 other people, and we’ll be even.”

Pullum couldn’t stop at just 10.

When Pullum came to Los Angeles, he thought it was to become a musician, but over the years it is teaching that has settled into his heart.

“I had some friends ask me when I first started how many musicians I was going to create, and I said I didn’t care. What I’m trying to do is create a whole person. Music is a tool. Yes, we have some professional musicians now. That’s icing on the cake. It’s exciting to turn on the television and see one of my kids play, but it’s more exciting to see a kid become a father, get a job.”

From the beginning, his students have found success through music. They became good musicians, but Pullum felt something was missing. Too many of them, he says, were thinking only of themselves.

That’s when he started building his program around the concept of giving back. Corey Hogan, who graduated from Washington Prep in 1997, is a senior at UCLA. During his first three years of college, he returned to Washington to tutor students as part of the UCLA Music Partnership Program, which pairs college musicians with students in six Los Angeles schools.

“It’s not enough to be successful on your own,” he says. “Mr. Pullum taught us we had to give back.”

Other former Washington students also tutor students, who then, through the Kids Helping Kids program that Pullum has run for years, give free lessons to young children, who perform at convalescent homes.

“I want them to be accountable for their own community,” Pullum says. And when the old people in the homes hear the music, he says “you see them become energized, young again. It humbles you.”

Although Washington Prep is a magnet school for math/science, communication arts and the performing arts, performing arts are not funded by the Los Angeles Unified School District. A foundation known as Friends of Washington Prep raises more than $200,000 a year to pay for those programs.

In 1995, the music department suffered a blow when the building housing their instruments burned down the night before the citywide marching band competition. No arrests were made, but arson was suspected. The following day, using borrowed instruments, Washington claimed its third city title in four years.

But as director of the Performing Arts Department, Pullum, father of two, says he doesn’t want programs to focus on competition; he wants them to focus on young people.

“Music is a device to raise someone’s self-esteem. I try to convince people that the skills you learn here you can use across the board. You have to be organized, dedicated, persistent, no matter what you do.”

For Nichol Luebrun, a junior at Washington, music is both an escape and an opportunity. “It makes me feel like a whole different person,” she says. “Before I got into music, it was horrible. I was hanging with gangbangers ... I was in the principal’s office all the time.”

She and senior Lorenzo Johnson Jr. hope to attend UCLA. Both want to become teachers.

Johnson says he wants to make music in public schools his mission. “The government talks about how education is first, but where do they put all their money? Not in the schools. ... The arts are the only means of expression for a lot of kids, especially in the inner city, in our community, and I want to make sure all kids have an opportunity, a way out, an escape.”

Luebrun sees teaching as a way to allow her to continue a legacy--one that began in Detroit with a man named Anderson White, traveled to Chicago through Marcellus Brown, then came to Los Angeles through Fernando Pullum.

“Somebody helped me become a better person,” Luebrun says. “I want to give that gift to somebody else.”