Love in four-part harmony

Picture Valentine’s Day, a year ago, in a police department in Orange County.

You’re already starting to get a bit weepy, aren’t you?

Dispatched as part of the Singing Valentine program, the barbershop quartet crooners arrived and started singing to the cop whose wife had hired them. They began, “Greetings from Jennifer we bring / Here’s what she asked us to sing . . .”

From there, they began belting out “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”

Within seconds, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. But not for the reasons you might think.

They had the wrong cop.

Turns out the department had two officers with the same name. As the quartet serenaded the one downstairs, the one actually married to Jennifer was upstairs meeting with the chief.

Knowing how sensitive cops are, you can imagine the reception the poor guy downstairs got, as his fellow officers (not to mention the man himself) wondered who in the heck Jennifer was. “All the cops were giving him a bad time for having something on the side,” says Art Clayton, who had dispatched the singers.

Ah, who said love was easy?

It is nearly lovebird season again, where Clayton for the 16th year will assemble singers from the Orange Empire Chorus at his Fullerton home and send them out to deliver singing valentines. Clayton’s operation is one of many in Southern California that provide the service, but he’s got one of the biggest stables of barbershop singers -- 44 guys that he’ll use for 11 quartets.

For $45, they’ll show up in schools, hospitals, offices, homes, beauty parlors, bowling alleys -- or anywhere love can be found. The idea is to surprise the recipient, and they almost always like it, except for the occasional woman under a hair dryer who isn’t thrilled to meet four men with her hair in curlers.

The singers, who come from various barbershop quartet chapters in Southern California, tend to stick to the standards. No hip-hop Valentines from these guys, most of whom are middle-aged or somewhat north.

Last year, Clayton booked about 280 gigs, he says. The height of the season starts a few days before Valentine’s Day, but peaks, of course, on Feb. 14.

And while the recipients like it, so do the singers. “They love to come back to the house and tell us how tired they are,” Clayton, 76, jokes, “but it’s like after a good game of basketball. You’re beat from the exercise, but you’re also stimulated. Of course, they like to sing, but there’s nothing like having an audience with smiles on their faces and knowing you’re getting across to them and they’re enjoying what you’re offering.”

But it’s not always a smile that they get. They’ve shown up on doorsteps where the recipient was a cancer patient, so sick that the guys had a tough time getting through the song, Clayton says.

Another year, a woman bought the service for her mother in a convalescent home. The ailing woman’s husband showed up, too, and listened as the quartet sang its two-song package and gave her a rose. Later that day, Clayton says, the husband died unexpectedly, meaning that listening to his wife being serenaded was the last time he’d seen her.

The couple’s daughter who’d arranged things later wrote to Clayton that the moment in the hospital “was the most touching presentation of love that could have been given to her mother,” he says. To mark the day, the woman hired the singers each year after, Clayton says, until the year the daughter wrote that her mother had died.

Usually, though, it’s fun. The singers donate their time, and in the last two years Clayton’s nonprofit operation has donated $10,000 to Fullerton schools for an arts foundation, he says.

With the season fast approaching, Clayton is a one-man booking agency. Business looks a bit lighter this year than last, he says.

Still, he assumes things will go well. Then, again, there was the year when the singers had gathered in the morning at his home before fanning out in the county. “A guy comes out of the bathroom and says the toilet is backed up,” Clayton says. “So I’ve got 40 singers full of coffee and doughnuts, with no place to flush.”

No problem. He called the plumber. “While he was fixing the sewer lines,” Clayton says, “I sold him a singing valentine.”

--

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.