I don’t know enough about him to write about him. But I want to anyway, because I like him, admired him, respect him, almost revere him, love him.

I so much take joy in the way he and Richard Rodgers found each other and came together. They were both bursting in all directions, and combined in a perfect frontal assault in common cause with irresistible impact.

They each had their own pre-eminence in their separate fields, had worked successfully with others, and didn’t absolutely have to work together. But they were both looking for a partner, and when the best find the best, like my own marriage, yes, they had to work together.

I think especially of Oscar because he had the same burning altruism that has driven me, the vision of a better world, the way things should be, and with a little help and push from him, the way things could be, and you never stop trying, always working toward the goal. Not only did he never give up on us, the world, he kept his own emotional balance so his awareness and insight and commitment were not poisoned by cynicism.

When he and Jerome Kern earlier worked out the details of Show Boat, he found the way to align the audience in agreement against the evils and stupidity of racial discrimination. He and Kern gave us songs we could sing along with, put the words in our mouths, the ideas in our heads, and the point of view became our own. And when he gave us Old Man River and Paul Robeson together, it was a match made in heaven played out here on earth. He gave me that song to sing at the Martin Luther King Community Coalition Awards Ceremony, where I used Robeson’s doctored text because it was more progressive for our now more modern times.

Hammerstein with Rodgers kept hitting his targets. Oklahoma set the standard and changed musical theater from light comedy to deep and full and rich and relevant. He and Rodgers took the old cliché of opera stop-action aria, learned from the best of Verdi and Puccini, and made an integrated dramatic musical experience.

Hammerstein never let go. South Pacific took its stand against racial prejudice at a crucial time when the nation needed to come together. Carousel, Flower Drum Song, The King and I, The Sound of Music, over and over hitting against racism, sexism, classism, the evils made manifest and targeted for destruction.

You don’t have to be Jewish to confront evil. I don’t know my own background well enough to be influenced by it, but I do know that background doesn’t need to control, the foreground of the present is where I live and where I decide, where I try every way I can to help make things better. I taught school for so many years, seeing my students grow beyond me, giving me hope for the future we’re sharing. Now, writing is like teaching still, showing what I’ve learned, where to go, what to avoid.

I think about the little I know about the later Oscar Hammerstein, active always, mentoring Sondheim who chose to spend so much time with him because he also knew, breathed the same air. I think of mentors, Bernstein mentoring Tilson Thomas, Heifetz mentoring Joshua Bell, my wife teaching me everything I know.

I thank you, Oscar Hammerstein, for being such an important part of my life, for teaching me, for teaching so many others as the world reaches its tipping point, to gather a critical mass of sustainable joy achievable in a lifetime. Thank you for not quitting, not letting down, leading the way to the very always.

You never quit. Nor will I.