They called him Stoki, a man who led without a baton. He was the first conductor I saw as a little boy, even if Leopold Stokowski was leading the Philadelphia Orchestra in Fantasia, which amounted to a cartoon.

While in college, in March 1966, I heard the real live deal, the man himself, with the Chicago Symphony. I was seated among the “gods” in the highest reaches of Orchestra Hall. 

The CSO gave him an orchestral “tusch” after the blazing finish of the Shostakovich Symphony #10. This was the highest tribute they could provide to Stoki, an improvised, disjointed fanfare with drums augmenting the brass.

If I wasn’t in the neighborhood of the “gods,” surely I’d been transported somewhere close to heaven.

When the applause died, I went downstairs to the orchestra’s nether region and stood in line for an autograph. When Stokowski emerged from his dressing room, he appeared shorter than I imagined. But he was 83 after all, by which time men diminish in size. 

Perhaps a dozen or two admirers made up the queue I was in, all with pens in hand, holding program booklets we expected the maestro to ink with his name.

He didn’t. Not that he displayed rudeness as he listened to the plaudits each of us expressed, along with our thanks. Instead, he shook our hands. 

I’d seen those hands even after Fantasia, too. Bugs Bunny had portrayed Stoki in a Looney Tunes cartoon, with much attention to them.

Was he now suffering from arthritis? His hands were once the subject of considerable comment as to their beauty. Did he want to dispense with the process faster than multiple autographs would permit? He didn’t appear to be in a hurry.

Stoki’s mitts were uncommonly soft for a man, almost as if he used a hand lotion to produce their tenderness. Nor did he offer manly grip strength. But it was not that so much as something else that brought me back to Fantasia.

Sometimes, you only gather an understanding of events at a distance.

When my youngest daughter was home from school decades later, I got her tickets to hear Daniel Barenboim and the CSO perform the Rite of Spring. She and her fiancé were impressed with the performance, but what she mentioned about Stravinsky’s work itself struck me more.

“Dad, for some reason, whenever I listen to that piece, I always think of dinosaurs.” A few days passed before I realized why. The accompaniment to Fantasia’s dinosaur sequence featured a long excerpt from the Rite. The early experience made a permanent imprint on her psyche.

My mind drifted backward. I thought of Stokowski, the CSO, Shostakovich, and the tusch. But one more thing also occurred to me.

I focused again on Stokowski’s hands and remembered a brief segment in Fantasia when Mickey Mouse extended his hand to a younger version of the maestro.

Then, I recognized how lucky I was Stoki hadn’t signed autographs on the evening some 40 years before. If he had, he’d have gone from one to another of us without physical contact. And it was the hands that counted.

The explanation was simple.

I got to shake hands with the man who shook hands with the real Mickey Mouse.

As my daughter had reminded me, childhood memories have a long reach.

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The pictures of Stokowski and Mickey Mouse shaking hands were sourced from Hi-Fi Writer.com, as originally published in Australian HI-FI, Mar/Apr 2011, v.42 #2.