Joe Stern
JOE STERN – THE MAN AND THE AWARD
This highest HOA honor has been presented only a half-dozen times since its creation almost 20 years ago. I suggest it's only appropriate to begin with a look at how the Kansas City Chapter named its Lifetime Achievement Award.
Joe Stern was president of his own Kansas City real estate company, a prominent business and civic leader, a World War I veteran and legally trained. Among his many interests, he published a quarterly market bulletin for lawyers, judges and other professional subscribers. That's of interest to us for two reasons: part of that bulletin was printed in the Kansas City Star, so Joe's name was in the public eye. And one of his subscribers was a personal friend in Tulsa – a tax attorney by the name of Owen C. Cash. Yes, the same O.C. Cash whose name is on that plaque in the lobby of our Muehlebach Hotel.
So when Cash's brand-new gathering of barbershop singers in Tulsa suddenly grew from 26 into more than 100 and attracted the attention of the press, the ever PR-minded Cash said, “Oh, yeah, we got clubs forming all over the country.” Then he called Norm Rathert in St. Louis and Joe Stern in Kansas City and...you know the rest.
Our Kansas City Chapter history is inexorably linked to Joe Stern. In the earliest days of the chapter, he moved guys away from gang-singing around the piano and became the first real director of the Heart of America Chorus. He served as chapter president four times between 1938 and 1945. When HOA established what became the BOTY award, Joe was the second recipient.
More important, Joe was one of the first installed in the Society Hall of Fame, because of the indelible influence he had on the administration and musical leadership of the international organization. Joe suggested we needed some kind of dues, like a dollar a year, and in 1940 he became secretary-treasurer – then as we grew, he served seven more years as Society treasurer.
In 1941, he wrote, edited, paid for and mailed a publication called “BarberShop Re-Chordings” to all Society members. That was soon taken over by the new SPEBSQSA office in Detroit, and by the fourth issue, the name of the newsletter was changed to The Harmonizer.
Joe is even better remembered for what he did in our contest system. At our first international competitions, quartets were judged by celebrities and folks picked from the audience. The Oklahoma lieutenant governor chose the Bartlesville Barflies because he liked their red ties. Joe first provided some judging guidelines, then categories and helped write training programs for judges in four categories. He was certified in all four of those, and with three other giants of the day, they judged our early contests while the C&J system was being formed and refined. Through all of this, he remained active in helping grow Kansas City to a chapter of almost 200 members.
We presented the first Joe Stern Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 to two-time international president Gil Lefholz, not long before his death.