BY JOEL T. STRAWN

This is the story of a remarkable family in DeLand, which I think is both instructive and of considerable interest to all the residents of DeLand. Indeed, it is important for our current generation to understand what some in the not-too-distant past were able to accomplish while, unlike today, facing truly insurmountable social hurdles!

There have been a number of influential and accomplished people who were born and raised in DeLand, but there are few who surpass the erudite accomplishments of a young African American, Oscar Griffin, whose extended family have been very close to the Strawn family from an early age.

Oscar’s difficulties were, of course, compounded when you take into account that he was a graduate of the then-segregated Euclid High School and suffered the other hurdles faced by African Americans during that early, very unfortunate period of American history.

Oscar’s mother, Grace, served as the long-term, excellent cook for my grandmother, Candace Strawn, who could be a very demanding person for employees. She, however, thought a great deal of Grace, who, within bounds, was uniquely able to handle her remarkably well.

Candace’s home fronted on Woodland Boulevard, at the northwest corner of the Boulevard and Plymouth Avenue, and our home was on Florida Avenue at the west edge of our families’ then-existing orange grove. Because of that proximity, I got to know Grace very well and was cared for by her niece, Ezmer Gibson (always “Apoo” to me), at a time about 84 years ago when she was about 13 years old and I was 3 or 4 — thereafter we maintained a very close relationship during her 94-year lifetime.

I clearly remember Grace calling me when I was in the sixth or seventh grade, saying that, “Your poor ole grandmother is very lonesome and wants you to come over here and play cards with her.”

I told her, “Grace, I can’t stand playing cards, and that is the last thing I want to do.”

She responded, “I am making some cookies, and if you don’t get over here quickly, I am going to throw them out!”

In our family hierarchy, Grace was pretty high and, needless to say, I wound up playing cards.

Grace was a lifelong member of Bethel AME Church in DeLand and had the reputation of having a beautiful contralto voice in their church choir. Grace’s son Oscar Griffin, a tenor, obviously inherited his mother’s beautiful singing voice, and somehow his extraordinary musical talent was brought to the attention of Marian Anderson (1897-1993) and a national audience.

Through the auspices of Marian, he sang with an all-African-American cast, including Bertha Baker and Gala Glenn, at Carnegie Hall on Sept. 11, 1944, where they sang La Traviata. The relationship with Marian led to Oscar being awarded the Marian Anderson Music Award in 1945. Later Candace helped pay for Grace’s expenses and a nice clothing ensemble that facilitated her attendance at his 1947 solo debut at The Town Hall in New York.

In my opinion, that spoke volumes about their relationship since, as one of my uncles tactfully said, “The dollar shines pretty bright in Mother’s eye.”

Candace was, at times, a tough businesswoman, whose very successful husband, Theodore, started with virtually nothing and died at the early age of 55 — thereafter she was a dominant force in the Strawn agricultural business and the family.

In The New York Times the day after Oscar’s debut, its art critic said of his performance: “The reasons behind the award to Mr. Griffin could be seen last night, he is sincere, endowed with feeling, instinctively musical and the possessor of a voice that is frequently fine in quality.”

He later sang at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and other major concert venues around the world — starting initially under the auspices of his mentor Marian and later on his own merit.

Marian was a soprano and the first African American to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House. She, however, is perhaps best remembered for her groundbreaking performance at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday 1939 before about 75,000 people and millions on the radio. That was all arranged by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt after a denial, because of the then-color barrier, by the Daughters of the American Revolution for her to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington. It is with some irony that the first song she sang was “America the Beautiful.”

Marian later was an influential member of Carnegie Hall in New York for a number of years, where she sang many times, as well as at the White House and the fine opera houses around the world. After hearing Marian perform in Salzburg, Austria, in 1935, the legendary Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini said that what he heard, “was what one is privileged to hear once in a hundred years.”

Oscar was indeed traveling in the rarefied air of the classical-music world, and just think of it now: He was a rare product of what was then a rural agricultural community about a thousand miles from the elite musical sophistication of New York — little DeLand!

As you consider Oscar’s life, one of Marian’s more poignant quotes from her autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning, reflects not only on her own life, but is also a very relevant guide to all of us in the troubled world we have today: “It is easy to look back, self-indulgently, feeling pleasantly sorry for yourself and saying I didn’t have this and I didn’t have that. But that is only the grown woman regretting the hardships of a little girl who never thought they were hardships at all. She had the thing that really matters, the drive to excel.”

Speaking of excelling, that extended family’s success appears to be never-ending, and even the present-day descendants of Apoo are achieving a remarkable success; for example, one is currently an academically gifted, four-star receiver on the Oklahoma Sooner football team (jersey #1), one has an academic scholarship to MIT, and one just received a presidential scholarship to Stetson University.