“For the first four years of his life, Richard Antoine White slept on a piece of cardboard … in Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood,” writes Mary Carole McCauley in Sunday’s (10/3) Baltimore Sun. “He … still has a small scar … where … rodents’ teeth pierced his flesh. White sees that scar … every time he puts on his tuxedo for a performance with the New Mexico Philharmonic, where he is principal tubist. White, who has a doctorate in music in tuba performance, is also a professor at the University of New Mexico. Richard Antoine White’s … memoir, ‘I’m Possible: A Story of Survival, a Tuba, and the Small Miracle of a Big Dream,’ is being released Tuesday…. In seventh grade … he developed an affinity with the oversized and comical-looking instrument that, like him, was easily underestimated…. [At] Baltimore School for the Arts …White began showing up early at school to practice the tuba…. At Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute … and at the University of Indiana … teachers and friends volunteered free music lessons, a spare room, plane tickets to symphony auditions. ‘It really does take a village,’ White said. ‘I could not have gotten here by myself.’ ”
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