In Kenai Peninsula, an unlikely institution - Renee Henderson, choir director

Since the 1970s, Renee Henderson has conducted choirs in Alaska. Choirs that won awards. Choirs that toured internationally. But when she takes the podium at the West High School Auditorium to conduct Handel's "Messiah" on Dec. 4, it will be the first time an Anchorage audience has ever heard her lead an adult chorus.

Henderson is an institution on the Kenai Peninsula. An estimated 17,000 students have taken her music classes. Her chorus programs at Kenai Central High School have been among the most popular classes year after year, attracting sublimely talented singers and some who weren't sure they could sing at all. The school auditorium, the biggest performing arts venue on the peninsula, is named for her. When she retired in 2014 she was given the keys to the city in a ceremony that packed the stage and hall with students, alumni and citizens.

At that ceremony Kenai Peninsula Borough School District Superintendent Steve Atwater recalled noting her name on the auditorium when he first arrived in town. He said he was flabbergasted to learn that, rather than a politician, city founder or deep-pockets donor, the name was that of a regular teacher who, at the time, was still working.

"I quickly realized that the KCHS choir is one of the more unifying pieces to this high school and likely in the Kenai community," Atwater said.

From cows to chorus

Henderson was born in 1945 in a remote part of northern South Dakota. Her folks were cattle ranchers who loved music. Their three daughters and one son were all expected to take piano lessons. "I'm the only one still playing," Henderson said.

The nearest store and post office was in the hamlet of Lodgepole. The kids attended a one-room school with about 18 students grades one through eight.

"It was the finest life you could imagine or dream," Henderson told Alaska Dispatch News. "I just assumed everybody had families like ours. You did a lot of work, but it wasn't work. It was just what you did.

When the time came for high school, she and her sisters rented an apartment in Hettinger, just across the state line in North Dakota. She was 14.

"There were about 75 of us from the farms on the south side of the border," she recalled. "We all walked to school together every morning."

In high school she picked up the trumpet. Upon graduation she attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota, one of the premier music schools in the country, where she earned a degree in music education. Her first job was in a company town, Gilchrist, Oregon, "A very rough town. We averaged one student a month going to the penitentiary."

After two years she went back to the Midwest and taught in Hutchinson, Minnesota. She was on break visiting her family when her mother told her, "I think you had a call from Alaska, but that can't be right."

But it was. Dale Sandahl, principal of Sears Elementary School in Kenai, formerly of Minnesota, had heard good things about Henderson from friends and family and offered her a job. Henderson drove up the Alaska Highway in a Pontiac sedan and arrived in the fall of 1971.

"It was beautiful, but I was appalled at the mess," she said. "I really couldn't stand all the trash in so many yards. I told him I'd take the job for one year."

The horror of high school 

Shortly after she was hired, she was ordered by the superintendent to take over the chorus program at the high school. "I didn't have the money to quit and go home, so he knew he had me," she recalled.

"The next day I was in the classroom. It was not a fun hour. They'd put two classes together. There were 17 in the choir and another 34 who were just sitting around listening to rock 'n' roll on 45s. I sat at the piano and listened to them shout for an hour. I was totally unimpressed," she said. "But it's where you're put for some reason, and that's where I was. Eventually I loved the job, but the first year was terribly difficult."

Some of those students, now in their 50s and 60s, came back to sing with their children and grandchildren at her retirement. After the chaos of that first year, choir became one of the most in-demand classes in the school. Superintendent Atwater described his "marvel at seeing some pretty tough-looking guys singing" in a program.

"I saw all types of students on the stage proudly wearing the traditional choir robes and not for one minute showing the least bit of concern for whether it was cool to sing in a choir," he said. "As you know, this is not always the case with 16-year-old boys."

Henderson spent many additional hours recording individual singers to get them into statewide and national competitions. But she didn't just pay attention to the fine voices. Her motto was "Everybody can be in choir."

She told the Redoubt Reporter about one boy who "couldn't carry a tune with five buckets … but he tried every day of the class, and the kids were wonderful, they would stand by him. And to see the look in his eyes when we were performing, feeling as wonderful as the kids singing their very best, that's a magical moment for me."

Singing at the Vatican

In the 1960s basketball players and wrestlers from peninsula high schools traveled. Musicians did not. Henderson changed that in a big way. During her tenure the choir toured Europe and Japan a total of 14 times. They sang at Notre Dame in Paris, Westminster Cathedral in London, St. Mark's in Venice and St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

One of her favorite memories was when the choir sang at the International Sacred Music Festival at the Vatican in 1975. She had prepared the beautiful "Alleluia" by American composer Randall Thompson, a piece she greatly admires. The choir that preceded the Kenai group announced it, too, was doing the piece. But as they prepared for the session she saw a pianist go on stage with them. This seemed unusual in that the "Alleluia" is a piece of unaccompanied voices. But the pianist proceeded to accompany the singers all the way through as they sang the work.

"The people running the recording apparatus were in a little window about 40 feet above us," Henderson said. "When it was over there was a voice over the loudspeaker like the voice of God. He said, 'What have you done with my piece?' Randall Thompson was one of the judges! It sent a shiver up my spine. And he was angry. 'Surely you don't want me to judge you on that piece,' he said, 'so do your next piece.'

"Well, they weren't ready with a next piece. It took awhile for the director to find something else and they didn't do well. I think following them made us sound better than we might have. We took second place."

She may be short-selling her own talents. Henderson has made conducting a serious realm of study, taking choral study and conducting classes in colleges from Tampa, Florida, to Tallinn, Estonia. It's shown in the results she has regularly achieved in a high school located in a place that, in any state except Alaska, would be considered a small town in the sticks. (In Alaska, let it be noted, Kenai is the seventh-largest city.)

A lasting honor

The greatest moment in her life undoubtedly remains having the high school auditorium named for her.

"It was in 2001," she said. "I didn't know anything about it. They told me they wanted to celebrate my 30th anniversary with the school and invite my old students to join in. They asked me to pick the music, so I did. Then they sat me in a chair in the middle of the stage and rolled out something behind me. I wasn't aware of what it was until I turned around and saw it was my name. The name of the auditorium. I was shocked. It still makes me embarrassed. I still don't feel worthy about that. But it's a wonderful honor."

She still visits family in South Dakota each year, she said. And last summer was full of travel to weddings of former students in the Lower 48. Such students and their parents continue to visit her and her two English labs, Bixby and Bella. It's not about grades anymore, but a deep level of friendship between student and teacher that may be vanishing in the modern world. Throughout her teaching career kids and families have known they could stop by her house with concerns or just to talk.

Since her retirement there have been suggestions of starting an adult choir in the Kenai area, but nothing has come of it yet. "I did have a choir through the college," she said, "through 1983-84, but by then my job at the high school had grown too much to handle both."

In years when the choir didn't head overseas, she arranged "mini-tours" of Alaska venues each spring, everyone sleeping on the floors of the gyms of hosting schools. The choir sang in Valdez, Fairbanks, Healy and Anchorage.

But in all those years she never led a nonschool group in Alaska's largest city. Until now. Rehearsals for "Messiah" began in early November. "I feel privileged to work with those people," she said, "but I'm paranoid with only four rehearsals. There'll be one orchestra rehearsal on Nov. 30, then the dress rehearsal on Dec. 3, then the concert on Dec. 4.

"It's a wham bam. But in the two years that I've been retired, I've missed music. It's been part of my life every day since I was born."

MESSIAH, the 70th Anchorage performance of Handel's oratorio hosted by the Anchorage Concert Chorus, will be presented at 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 4 at West High Auditorium. Adult tickets are $10 at the door.