Celebrated Music Professor Had Humble Beginnings

Editor's Note: "Our Neighbors" is a new column at Pleasanton Patch that will feature interesting people — anyone from the movers and shakers in this community to people doing extraordinary things in the quiet of their homes. To nominate someone for this column, e-mail tanya.rose@patch.com.

As a child, Silvester Carl Henderson put cardboard inside his torn up, worn out shoes so he could walk in them a little longer. All around him, gangs fought and kids did drugs. Every day was about survival.

His mom was a woolpresser making $2 an hour and his dad was a naval supplier. Together, they barely made $6,000 a year back in the 1960s in tougher-than-nails East Oakland. They were lucky — at least they had jobs. Many in the neighborhood didn't.

Henderson was also an overweight child. In junior high, kids beat him up in the shower on his second day of school for no reason other than that he was fat.

"That's just how they were," he says.

His self-esteem took a dive, and he looked for escape. He found it in the form of music.

Now, at 51, he is one of the area's most celebrated music professors and choral instructors, and lives in Pleasanton's posh Ruby Hill neighborhood. He had to fight to get to where he is, making choices daily not to get sucked into the hard life that claimed so many of his peers. They didn't know any different, he says. Neither did he, but he felt like there was something better out there and he wanted it.

"My parents instilled a value in us kids — they wanted us to have something better than what they had," Henderson says.

They had both grown up in the South in extremely poor communities, and by the time they were adults, they were caring for Henderson and his brother and sister, along with a niece and nephew.

Music surely saved him, he says.

He started playing piano when he was five years old. He would go to his aunt's house and bang away on an old piano while his mom had her hair done. His mom saw something in him and somehow, the family scraped together $300 to buy a piano when Henderson was eight.

He started studying music with his cousin Larry, and then with a couple of other teachers. He loved playing classical music and decided he wanted to teach someday. Then at church, a woman named Helen Stevens showed up with her choir, the Voices of Christ, for a special event. Henderson was mesmerised.

"I remember begging my mother to let me study with her," he said.

He did for years. When he was 16, he started taking classes at San Francisco State University while working seven different jobs to pay his way. He delivered medical supplies, he cut grass, he cleaned peoples' homes — anything. He also started playing piano and singing at weddings and funerals.

"I was hustlin' all the time," he says, laughing.

"My parents taught me that, and we knew there was a sense of perseverance and hard work inside of us and that was better than any financial gift," he said. "They were just doing well enough to be able to survive on their own, so they wanted us to be independent."

"I'm a composite of good and bad and challenges and all the things that happened in my life and it certainly wasn't perfect. But I'm appreciative and I thank God for blessing me with the ability to be independent. These are the things I teach my students — that it doesn't matter where you come from."

He married his wife Cecile at 22 and had children by 23. Now, he has three daughters — Carlena, Celisse and Charde.

A music professor and choral educator for the last 30 years, Henderson created an accredited Gospel music curriculum that is being used as the model for many of the nation's largest universities and colleges.

He taught at both the University of California, Berkeley (20 years) and San Francisco State University (13 years), and is now the music department chair at Los Medanos College in Pittsburg. He's been in that position for 12 years.

He's also owner of Mr. Gospel Properties, and is an active real estate investor.

Often, he thinks about that overweight child who was surrounded by bad things but never wanted to do wrong.

"I remember telling myself, 'I dont' want to live like this. I don't know what to do, I just know I want something else.'"