Theadosia Johnson Stokes remembers growing up in Baltimore during the 1930s, and dressing in her Sunday best, to attend concerts of the old Colored Symphony Orchestra and Chorus that were held in the auditorium of Frederick Douglass High School.

"I also remember walking down a long path in Druid Hill Park, with long rows of benches on each side, that ended with a bandstand, and that's where the Colored Park Band played during the summer," Stokes, now 86, recalled the other day.

"It seemed to me that it was behind the conservatory and not far from Auchentoroly Terrace. People enjoyed going there to listen to the music," she said.

Stokes, who was born in Baltimore into a musical family, grew up in the famed Sugar Hill neighborhood near Druid Hill Park.

"In those days, black people were born at home and not in hospitals," said Stokes, who was raised in the 2300 block of McCulloh St.

Her father, Harvey Johnson, a postal supervisor who worked at the old main post office on North Calvert Street, was named for the noted civil rights advocate and pastor of Baltimore's Union Baptist Church.

Stokes' father was a cellist and her mother, Theadosia Jenkins Johnson, a singer. She and her two other sisters played the piano.

"He loved playing the cello. Every night at 6 p.m., he'd close the kitchen door and practice. He also sang with the Post Office Glee Club," she said.

Her father found another musical outlet when he joined the Colored Symphony Orchestra, which had been founded by the city with a $1,500 appropriation in 1930, and two years later, the City Colored Chorus began giving concerts.

"He loved playing with the orchestra," Stokes said.

The Colored Symphony Orchestra and the City Colored Chorus, which brought classical music to the city's black residents, joined the Municipal Colored Band, which had been established in 1922, and gave one concert a week in the city's black neighborhoods.

The symphony orchestra and its 300-voice chorus were under the direction of W. Llewellyn Wilson, who headed the music program at Douglass High School, lectured at what was then Morgan State College and wrote a column for the Baltimore Afro American.

Among Wilson's proteges were band leader Cab Calloway and Anne Wiggins Brown, who performed the role of Bess in the original George Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess, and performed in 1935 with the symphony orchestra and chorus.

"Llewellyn Wilson played cello with my father, but when they were on stage, he was the orchestra's conductor," Stokes recalled. "During concert practice, he'd invite the students from nearby schools to come and listen to the music, and they really seemed to enjoy it."

Stokes, who was a student of Wilson's at Douglass, described him as a "jolly man who could become quite serious when he needed to be."

Wilson apparently had a low tolerance for students chewing gum in his classroom.

"If he caught you chewing gum, he'd tell you to get up from your seat and put it in the trash can, and as you walked to the front of the class, he'd play a march on the piano," Stokes said, laughing.

"He caught me one time and I quickly pulled it out of my mouth. He knew who my father was, of course, and stared at me. I said, 'Mr. Wilson, I took the gum out of my mouth and I don't want to walk up while you play a march,' and he just laughed," she said.

The orchestra presented its initial concert at Douglass "before a packed house and with all the eclat that might have attended a gala concert at the Lyric Theatre," wrote Kenneth S. Clark in his 1941 book, Baltimore: Cradle of Municipal Music.

"Baltimore thus stood forth again as a musical trail-blazer, being the first city in the country to present a Negro Symphony and Chorus, both supported entirely by the municipality," Clark wrote.

"Those concerts were always well attended and the auditorium at Douglass was crowded. Even a few whites came," Stokes said.

"A tremendous ovation from a crowded auditorium greeted each selection of the City Colored Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in their fourth annual combined concert," wrote Violet Banks, a Baltimore Afro American reporter.

"W. Llewellyn Wilson displayed excellent qualities in his conducting. He has aptitude for creating a sympathetic relationship between himself and his chorus and orchestra and is able to imbue them with his thoughts and feelings relative to the compositions," she wrote.

Johnson, who began to suffer heart problems, stopped playing his cello in the late 1940s, his daughter said.

"But he still kept it in a special purple velvet cover that had a pocket for his bow," Stokes said.

Her father was 72 when he died in 1962.

fred.rasmussen@baltsun.com