Arts Worker's 'Can-Do' Spirit Inspired Many (washingtonpost.com)

This article originally appeared in The Washington Post, 3/14/2004 and on-line at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56710-2004Mar13.html

She talked a famous jazz musician into donating untold hours to teach schoolchildren about music. She arranged for a papal intervention that resulted in a donation of land for a school playground. She even persuaded children to pass up trick-or-treat candy to campaign for her election as precinct chairman.

"She was like a Mother Teresa. She wants something done, she doesn't yell, she just comes and talks to you and bam, it gets done," said Keter Betts, the renown bassist, laughing at the memory of how Ordman sweet-talked him into volunteering. "These type of people are very, very rare. They come in and see the world and they see where deficiencies are, and they plug the holes."

Ordman, who died Feb. 21 of complications from cancer at age 90, spent most of her life convinced of the importance of the arts. In 1937, shortly after graduating with a degree in literary interpretation from Emerson College, she took a job as a traveling theatrical producer and director, the dramatic equivalent of Professor Harold Hill of "The Music Man." She was sent to Maryland's Eastern Shore and landed in Willards, halfway between Salisbury and Ocean City. To drum up interest in a show, she decided to stage a parade. She had animal costumes for the children but had no clown outfits for the adults. Her son, Edward Ordman, recounted her tale on his Web site.

"Then one of the men spoke up. "Look, we get the idea. You want a big, fancy, parade, with lots of costumes, and you want everyone in town to come watch the parade and have a good time, right?"

"Yes."

"OK, you leave it to us. We know what to do, you don't worry, just come tomorrow, and we'll give you a real nice parade.

"The parade the next day was, by later reports, the biggest in that part of the Eastern Shore for a long time. It had all the circus costumes except the clowns, quite a few children dressed as midgets and animals, six fire engines constituting the entire fire departments of four nearby towns, and, in place of the clowns, what looked to Evelyn like 50 Ku Klux Klan members in full Klan regalia and carrying a large cross."

The KKK joined a parade staged by a diminutive Northern woman, who was Jewish.

Ordman married a few years later, and after World War II, she and her husband, Arnold, settled in Montgomery County. She became involved in the Montgomery County public schools, first as a volunteer and later developing cultural enrichment programs for children with federal money. She noticed that African American children rarely saw successful black professionals at their schools. So in the early 1960s, she invited Betts, who has a home in Montgomery and had children in several local schools, to give a performance. He tried to say no, but she kept solving the problems he raised.

"She kept after me for about two weeks, in that little Katharine Hepburn style," Betts said. When he finally appeared at Washington Grove Elementary in Gaithersburg, the students' response hooked him: "I went up to the school, and it was amazing. It just floored me."

It's unclear whether Ordman knew that she was twisting a world-famous arm, one that played with Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, Woody Herman, Charlie Parker, among others. Nevertheless, Betts did about 100 performances a year just for schoolchildren, and with the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts started a program to bring preschool children in Head Start to special performances at Wolf Trap in Vienna.

He was not the only one who launched a new career after meeting Ordman. Gail Humphries Mardirosian, now the chair of the Performing Arts Department at American University, was recruited to help teach arts in the schools and credits her career to Ordman.

"She could see the value of the arts and necessity of the arts in lives of children," Mardirosian said. "Anyone in her life was part of her family. She remained a source of inspiration throughout the years. She changed my life."

Other lives were changed, too. Ordman was searching for a piece of land for a properly equipped school playground for children with disabilities. A developer had the perfect parcel nearby, but he was reluctant to donate it. She learned that the developer, who was Roman Catholic, had a daughter whose marriage had fallen apart.

The only hope to end the nuptials in the good graces of the church was an annulment from Rome. Ordman started with a call to Georgetown Law School, and after a series of calls to ever-higher church officials, the daughter got an annulment and the school got a playground, according to her son.

And then there was the time in the late 1960s when Ordman decided to run for Democratic precinct captain in Wheaton.

"She recruited my brother and his friends to go out campaigning for her on Halloween night, which fell just a few days before the Nov. 4 election," her son said in an article for the Christian Science Monitor report. "They were organized so that one of them would knock on the door of each house in the precinct, and say, 'No, I don't want candy, the treat I want is for you to vote for Evelyn Ordman for precinct chairman on Nov. 4.'

"Some voters told my mother later that they were really impressed when the kids actually politely declined to take any candy. (Later that evening, of course, they had a Halloween party in our basement, complete with all the candy they wanted.)"

Her interest in the world did not stop with herself. "She was very enthusiastic, extremely supportive and had a tremendously can-do spirit," said Gary Ratner, who discussed his Bethesda citizens-based school reform organization with her. "When she took an interest in somebody, it was like having a one-person cheering section."

Evelyn Ruth Ordman with jazz musician Keter Betts, who recalled how she sweet-talked him into volunteering in schools. "She wants something done . . . she just comes and talks to you and bam, it gets done," he said. (Family Photo)