RICHARD CROCKS

Evening Star, Issue 22448, 19 September 1936, Page 20

RICHARD CROCKS

GREAT TENOR’S VISIT Arrangements have been completed for Mr Richard Crooks, leading tenor of the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, to sing under the J. and N. Tait management here shortly. In a recent interview he said: “Today my happiness is bound up with the things that have little to do with my public career—plain'human things that, begin when the final curtain goes down and I can be quietly myself with my wife and our two children. What counts most is the congeniality, the warmth, the never-failing stimulus _of home.” His lovely young wife, Mildred, says that “ Dick has never said a mean thing or done a mean thing in his life.” And she has known him since he was five years old ! They lived next door to each other in their native Trenton, New Jersey, and they have been devoted to each other ever since, t They went through school together. Dick carried Mildred’s books and took her to their first dances. _ To-day she tends his household and discusses his problems with him, and enters into his fun and sees to his clothes. In giving the secret of his contentment hway, he says that he believes home happiness to be dependent upon “ small things that anyone can have; simple living, identity of interests, no shamming or pose, appreciation of the homey things at hand.” Their home is in the country. The world-famous tenor, who could mve a mansion if he chose, and make limsolf the centre of a gay metropolitan whirlpool, prefers the simple at-, •nosphere of a small seashore town. Critics in London, Berlin, Stockholm, New York—all over the world —have ■ommented on _ the fact that Crooks’s singing, in addition to its tonal beauty ind artistic worth, carries with it a certain heart quality ” that aannot easily be defined, but that never fails ;o capture hearts. Here is the reason vhy!_ -Crooks has found the secret of lappiness. When you hear him sing ■’on are getting partly glorious vocalsing and partly the aura that emalates from a clean-hearted, contented niman being. He has made an enduring romance of his marriage and his homo life. Everybody feels that “ certain something ” that emanates' from Richard Crooks. There is an excellent reason why he is called -the world’s greatest romantic tenor! Only one concert is possible in Dunedin, and takes place in the Town Hall on Monday, October 5.