Catching up with the Green Music Center's founding father
Seated at a patio table overlooking the pool at his estate, nestled in the hills east of Windsor in a classic patchwork of grass and woods, Donald Green had no cause to apologize. Still, the former singer said he's sorry that it is difficult for others to hear him speak.
'My voice has left me,' said the 83-year-old Telecom Valley pioneer and father of the Green Music Center at Sonoma State University, his head involuntarily bowed. Green's upper body and neck are bent forward by Parkinson's disease, which has forced the British transplant out of the choir rehearsals and performances he so long cherished.
His voice has lost its wind, but lean in a bit and he's perfectly easy to hear. Green is still eloquent, passionate and funny as he speaks over lunch of his westward migration, of the memoir he's writing, of the pride he feels in the Donald and Maureen Green Music Center, of his worry about the performance center honoring its mission as an educational resource, and of loss.
Maureen, his wife of 63 years, wasn't with him at the table. They fell in love and married young after meeting as teens in their native England. Now, she sat quietly in the kitchen, charmed by her two little dogs and tended by a daughter-like assistant. Alzheimer's disease has, for close to four years, stolen the person Maureen used to be.
Don Green sat with that for a moment. 'Life goes on,' he said.
He was unstoppable through all the years that he hatched telecommunications startup businesses, most notably the successful Advanced Fibre Communications in Petaluma. He and Maureen raised four children, who in turn brought them seven grandchildren, and the couple found time — made time — to sing.
He cultivated a studious devotion to choral music fairly late in life. Music was largely absent from his childhood in the grimy port city of Liverpool. His was a lean existence disrupted early on by World War II bombing raids that targeted the strategically valuable city.
'The war started for me in September of 1939,' Green recalled. 'The British government evacuated 800,000 children from the target areas of the German bombers. I was one of the 800,000 children.'
For more than two years, he hunkered in the countryside with no school to attend and taught himself with encyclopedias. Drawn to engineering, he apprenticed at the telephone-service branch of the U.K. Post Office. He'd found his work passion.
Green's initial job with the phone service, a predecessor of British Telecom, was quaintly low-tech. 'I delivered distilled water to the (48-volt) telephone batteries in each home,' he recalled.
He and Maureen left England for Montreal in 1956. They stayed four years, and Don worked in the engineering lab of the Canadian branch of RCA. In the early 1960s, they were living in San Francisco, where Don had taken a job as a telephone-system design engineer. By 1968, he was hatching plans for his first telecommunications firm, Digital Telephone Systems, which would be located in Novato, and he and Maureen sang from the pews at San Francisco's All Saints' Episcopal Church. The Bach and other Baroque music resonated with him.
'I was 37 years old in church and, as Maureen called it, bellowing the hymns,' he said. 'The woman behind us tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'You've got a nice voice. What don't you join the choir?' '
He and Maureen joined the All Saints' choir, and choral music became their creative outlet and chief shared avocation.
'I missed surprisingly few rehearsals,' Green said, considering that through the 1970s and '80s, he led the burgeoning North Bay telecommunications industry that connects homes and businesses to high-speed networks.
The Greens left Tiburon for Santa Rosa in 1987. They found the community chorale they wanted in the Sonoma State University Concert Choir, created by the small music faculty's Bob Worth.
'Maureen had a very, very pure soprano voice, a very good memory. Wicked smart,' Worth said. And Don: 'A nice, natural baritone.'
By 1987, Green had co-founded his second company, Optilink Corp. in Petaluma. Worth remembered asking Green why, with all he had going on, he invested so much time and effort in the choir.
Green replied, 'I really like to do it because it's so different from what I do, and I'm not the leader.' Still, leadership came naturally, and when the Greens, Worth and other members of the SSU chorale founded a Bach Choir, Don Green served as its founding president.
The Bach Choir made do on a campus with no hall truly suited to vocal music. Green knew that what they sang would sound better in a hall built for the purpose.
'We were always going off campus to find decent acoustics,' Worth said.
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