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Like any team, the Manhattan Chapter of the Barbershop Harmony Society is a sum greater than its individual parts. In this monthly feature, we spotlight the talents and backgrounds of the men in the Chapter and the Chorus to show what they uniquely contribute to the distinctive and vibrant esprit de corps of the Big Apple Chorus.

This month's featured BACman is not known as one of the quiet voices behind the scene. He is, after all a New Yorker; the rumble of his authoritative natural Master of Ceremonies bass voice, like a subway train, can be heard from the wings of a theater and out to the back of its house. But there's much more than his profound resonant sound that holds you when you're listening to Frank Hendricks.

Frank was born into, what was perhaps the last generation for whom popular entertainment was, more often than not, something people created for themselves, at home, with family, friends, and neighbors. Amusing oneself often involved an upright parlor piano, a ukulele and a lot of improvisation and singing. Television had barely made it to his neighborhood when he was a kid in the 1940's. Playing the radio and listening to big band records was a happy communal activity. It's not surprising that Frank has always been at home entertaining in front of people, leading the band. He learned to have fun the old fashioned way; he created it!

Frank's education in a parochial primary school, with its emphasis on classic literature and oratory, followed by rigorous studies at prestigious Brooklyn Preparatory School clearly laid the foundation for his skill and gift for public speaking. Eloquent as he can be, however, Frank never drifts far from his down-to-earth Brooklyn and Baldwin, Long Island upbringing. "We pounded out an awful lot of English, in Jesuit schooling, " he recalls.

Foreshadowing the sound of his inimitable voice was the fact that by 7th grade, he couldn't sing above a middle C. Frank recalls his grade school music teacher, shaking her head in disbelief as he replicated the full breadth of the left hand notes on her portable piano.

Regarding public speaking, he explains how the bug bit him: Frank was going to Brooklyn Preparatory School, when his dad got a call from a fellow member of the Knights of Columbus, Bob Shepherd. Besides being the famous Yankee announcer, Shepherd was also an oratory teacher at St. John's in Brooklyn and the organizer of the local Knights of Columbus college rhetoric scholarship competition. Two weeks before one of the K of C's annual competitions, Shepherd was pressed to fill one remaining seat in the competition. Frank's dad volunteered Frank.

At the contest, seated and armed with his freshly minted, barely memorized, five-minute speech, Frank and the audience sat through the speeches of 19 girls. Frank finally came to the podium as the last contestant. With the end of the long evening in sight, no doubt Frank's resonant bass was, if nothing else, a welcome change for the listeners. Right from the start he felt he had the audience completely in the palm of his hands. That is, until the last 30 seconds of his carefully timed speech and the most important concluding sentences, when he went completely blank!

Abruptly a deafening void filled the hall. While he silently scoured his memory for those last dramatic words, his eyes fixed on the slow moving sweep hands of a large clock in the back of the hall and he recalls seeing his father's proud and upright head falling into his hands. Frank never finished. He apologized for the lapse and turned to leave the podium. But the audience erupted with a standing ovation nevertheless. " I knew then that I could speak."

Frank attended Fairfield University where his extracurricular activities also portended what is today his style of leadership and the attributes he brings to the Chorus. He was on Fairfield's basketball, track and cross country ski teams. So, like many men in the Big Apple Chorus, he has a vigorous competitive streak, but it's infused with good dose of collegial team spirit.

He also belonged to Fairfield's august glee club. In those years they were particularly noteworthy and decorated as Intercollegiate Glee Club Champions. His free time was also occasionally spent hacking away on the banjo or the ukulele and singing with friends (some of whom journeyed with him to eventually rally in barber shop quartets and chorus singing years later).

Following college Frank became a Naval Aviation Officer and Navigator. Again it's not hard to see his inclination for teamwork and leadership. But he attributes the military with another skill set he has brought to the Big Apple Chorus. "We did a lot of precision drilling and marching". Mix the rigors of precision drills and rhythmic marching with the ballroom dance lessons he also took as a kid and it's not hard to see how it was natural for Frank to become an integral part of our choreography/visual enhancement teaching team.

Frank's fascination with close harmony singing first occurred while he was a senior in high school, visiting his sister at the College of New Rochelle. There he heard the Georgetown Chimes and says, "I was blown away by the bass tones and sang along with their record until I joined the glee club, double sextets and quartets at Fairfield".

His involvement in the Barbershop Harmony Society, however, didn't formally occur until several years after college in the 1970s. A friend and fellow Fairfield Glee Club alumnus (and the club's piano accompanist), Steve Delehanty, convinced Frank to participate in a holiday nursing home sing-out with Westco: the Westchester Chapter of the BHS. It wasn't just the singing, however, that hooked him, "It was the afterglow party at Walter Peek's that sold me on the joy and fraternity of the hobby". He would eventually serve on Westco's Board of Directors and as the Chapter's President.

Westco has always been a strong and creative chapter, and afforded Frank plenty of opportunity for growth and experience. It wasn't long before he earned a reputation as the favored "suitcase bass" de jour, ready to fill in, on short notice, for any quartet in need of a bass. It was as a pick up bass in the late 70s, standing in for Ed Dolan, that Frank joined Roger Payne, Joe Hunter, and Brian Horwath in "Four Under Par."

Surely Frank's tall, stately posture, his dry, august manner, his classical oratory skills and his deep bass voice resounded in wonderful contrast with the rest of Four Under Par's notorious, loony, satirical, antics. Frank played the perfect straight man surrounded by nerdy mayhem. Over the course of 8 years the quartet garnered 32 district medals (including District Champions in 1986) and literally fans around the world.

According to Roger, Frank was the one with good taste and knew best how to read and play an audience, naturally assuming the role as the quartet's "voice" and front man. Frank illustrates: "At the end of a tour of England and at our final performance in New Castle, Roger was very sick. His performance was clearly under the weather. I apologized to the audience and promised, "if we ever return, we won't bring colds to New Castle".

About the team's dynamic, he freely paraphrases Roger: " we could run any company in the country. Joe would be the big picture, "think-tank" guy, Roger would be the technical engineer to see the operations though, I'd be the front man as the face to the public and Brian would be the only one we could trust with the money." How true this picture holds together today when one looks at the seminal roles these four play in the Big Apple Chorus.

Frank's contributions to the Manhattan Chapter and its performing arm, The Big Apple Chorus, have been substantial since joining early in the chapter's charter. He has spearheaded special projects including riser and uniform procurement, visual enhancement team coordinator, and wisely handled special financial endowment management. Yet with his years of experience and leadership he remains first and foremost a humble (though sometimes wonderfully outspoken) team player and riser man.

Professionally his training and expertise is the field of investments and finances. He worked his way through the ranks of Merrill Lynch, Kidder Peabody and A.G. Edwards and has since 2001 been successfully entrepreneurial and self employed in investments.

For a guy who has plenty on his plate professionally, and has a past he can lean on, it's the new activities and leadership responsibilities that keep him engaged in our Manhattan Chapter; it's "the warm memories of fine glee club singing and the opportunity to return to that environment -- being a part of that fraternal masculine sound" that keep his big low voice, wonderfully ringing in our halls.

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Steve Adams	Dan George	Gabe Butler	Glynn Fluitt	Jim and Michael Steiner

Scott Brannon	Gary Ford	Brad Verebay	Vinny Haynes	Frank Hendricks	The Patricias

Bob Kovach	Joe Husstege	Gordon Harrison	Roger Payne	Dick White

John Gouveia	Pat Kelly