- Next on our place, our time, we'll follow a pied Piper who sings.

We'll show you Norfolk's best kept historical secret, and we'll look at a splendid antiques collection in Williamsburg.

Welcome to our place our Time.

I'm Vian Webb.

Our first story is about a young man who is obsessed with the sound of the human voice and its potential for beauty.

Donald McCulloch is one of the most versatile and accomplished young musicians in Hampton Roads.

We know him best as the conductor of the Virginia Symphony Chorus and of the Virginia Pro Musica.

But whether it be children or adults singing Donald McCulloch can be trusted to seize upon the chance to make an artful sound.

Tim Morton tells us about this pied Piper who sings - Future needs in - He composes and arranges music.

- Okay, but how do you know that?

How do you know?

It's obvious?

It's right there on the page.

- He teaches, he conducts.

Andy organizes and manages music making Don McCullough when not in a phone booth.

Changing clothes leads a busy life in music.

Now, let's see, what all are you doing?

Run, run down the list.

- Well, I am the director of music at First Presbyterian of Norfolk, where I'm the organist for service music and those kinds of things.

But primarily my, my responsibility is to oversee the music ministry, which involves the adult choir and the children.

I'm the conductor of the Virginia Pro Musica, the Chorus Master of the Virginia Symphony Chorus, the chorus director at the Williams School.

And I do a fourth and fifth grade chorus and a sixth, seventh, and eighth grade chorus there.

And I have a private voice teaching studio where I limit that to about 10 students, and that is the bulk of, you know, what I do to feed myself.

- When do you sleep?

- Well, actually usually from about one to eight if I, that's my preference.

I wish the whole world were on that schedule.

- 15 - Replies.

- Are these, are these - Don I'm sorry.

Can I can interrupt for a second?

- Sure.

- And we need the suffer the funeral tomorrow, downstairs.

Okay.

- McConnell says his dream in life is to have a secretary concerned with all the things he's concerned with, as it is he has two part-time assistants who work with different concerns.

- Yeah, the, the left hand has no idea what the right hand are doing, and neither of those hands have anything, have any idea what the feet are doing.

I mean, it's, so if one calls me and gives me something to do that's going to require all day long and it has to be done, the next one thinks nothing of calling me the next day and asking the same thing or even overlapping them.

And that's just the reality of the situation.

- A good deal of McCullough's negotiating with singers and musicians goes on between answering machines.

- If possible, gimme a ring.

If you think there's any possibility that might work out, we could really use you.

Thanks, Mike.

I'm sorry, I had the other line ringing.

I love that.

I love being on the go like that.

Put me behind a desk and 30 minutes, you know, I'm bodying my fingernails, believe it or not, that motivates me and keeps me able to, you know, gives me the energy to do what I need to do.

I think - Born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida.

McCullough studied at Stetson University and then obtained his master's degree at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

In 1982, fresh out of graduate school, he applied to the First Presbyterian Church in Norfolk for the job of Choir Master.

The reverend Mr.

J Shepherd, Russell pastor of the church remembered the 24-year-old McCullough.

- He was so young looking, you know, he looked like just a high school, a young man.

And when we did offer him the position, he, one of my elders came in and said, Shep, what in the world are you doing?

Said you've hired a boy.

You are replacing a man who's been here 18 years.

You're replacing him with a boy.

Are you outta your mind?

And I said, well, no, I don't think so.

I said, I, among other things, I've had a call from the dean at the Sacred Music School at SMU telling me that we missed Don McCullough.

We were missing one of the most brilliant students, finest musicians that the school had turned out in years.

So I took the risk.

And the elder, interestingly enough, came back three or four months later and said, you made a wise choice voice, - You're still too important.

With - That McCullough's in Innovativeness very quickly reached into the community.

He created the Norfolk Pro Musica, now Virginia Pro Musica specializing in a type of music then mostly unheard in Hampton Roads.

- The reason I chose early music is because one, I was basically raised as an organist, and so I have a real love for the broke music, but it's a clean sound.

It's a sound that you can really focus on.

Blend and ensemble and those kinds of things, which I think are so important.

Even in romantic music, - The pro musica now sings music from all periods on the night.

We heard it in Sacred Heart Catholic Church.

The Pro Musica was preparing a recording of new works by Adolphus Hail Stork, the nationally known composer and professor of music at Norfolk State University.

- I was in a retreat with the Norfolk Commission one time when we were supposed to pair off and go talk about books we had read recently, and it just hit me like cold water that the last three books I read were all about the vocal mechanism and the workings of it and et cetera, et cetera.

I'm just fascinated by the voice.

And then, but I then this lady that I was talking to had this funny look on her face and I said, but I'm not obsessed by this.

And so then we were supposed to go around the table at the end and report on what we found out about the other person.

And she very jokingly says, but he says he is not obsessed.

And I think since that moment, I guess that I realized that I really am zip on this.

So in other words, it'll be z zip, that's the end.

Okay, so let's do the end.

- Even with all the adult professional things he does, McCullough says he enjoys teaching once a week at the Private Williams school in Gantt.

- It's a strain sometimes that there's something and I, and, and don't ask me what, but - That - Somehow keeps my feet on the ground to, to be working with the kids and hearing that vocal quality and then hearing the vocal quality of, of an ensemble like prayer, musica and a church choir.

And then, you know, symphony Chorus.

- Dr.

Fred Walker is the headmaster of the Williams School.

- And the thing that I liked about him was the fact that he included everybody there.

The, and any teacher who can get seventh and eighth graders to both sing and dance at the same time in spite of all the peer pressure and everything.

And yet at the same time, two weeks later, go off with pro musica and do this very sophisticated, what old English music or something like that, and look for that quality in the voices, which he certainly doesn't get with junior highs, but he gets enthusiasm and excitement.

- I very much enjoy gardening.

I have a very large yard and I love to go away and do nothing, be the be the perfect couch potato.

I take no music with me, none of that.

I don't listen to classical music.

I watch tv.

I sit on the beach.

I eat junk food.

I just, and I, I think that's great fun.

But that, how often does that happen?

Once a year, maybe - What you are hearing is Purple Haze, a rock classic by Jimi Hendrix, but it is being performed by the Cronus String Quartet.

Traditionally, string quartets are known for their classical music, but this group is not exactly traditional.

The Tidewater Performing Arts Society is bringing the quartet to Norfolk and Karen Swift explains their musical appeal - Because they take chances with, with their work and they're very good at it.

They take what may be normal things and make it unusual.

- The San Francisco String Quartet is made up of two violin players, a violist and a cellist.

Cronus breaks tradition by performing classical rock, jazz, and contemporary works by composers from around the world.

The group won a Grammy for the best contemporary composition in 1989.

Their latest released Black Angels contains classical as well as contemporary compositions.

Radio announcer and music teacher Jay Sunnet describes a cut from Black Angels, which explains why he considers the group adventurous.

- The beginning of, of, of the latest release Black Angels, that that first piece of music, what, what, what is it?

Flight of the Electric Insects and it, it sounds like a bunch of bugs flying around.

The di dynamics they're using makes it appear like when you're laying in bed at night and you hear the mosquito coming close to your ear and then buzzing away.

But imagine 50 mosquitoes all of a sudden coming to your and then flying away a, - The Krones Quartet will perform Thursday, February 7th at the Center Theater in Norfolk.

I'm Holly O'Neill reporting.

- It just may be Norfolk's best kept historical secret.

Asked even some of the old timers about Fort Norfolk and you're likely to get a blank stare lying near downtown.

Fort Norfolk was built in the 1790s and it's considered one of the best preserved forts from that period.

Mike Sinclair captured for us the story of Fort Norfolk.

- Fort Norfolk sits in a bend of the Elizabeth River flanked on either side by boat yards and warehouses at the front of the fort.

Two civil war cannons aimed their sights across the river, guarding against possible invasion poised as silent sentinels for a fourth.

The time has passed by Fort Norfolk was built in 1794 to ward off a possible British invasion of Norfolk.

In the war of 1812, the British attacked, but they were stopped at Cranney Island and Fort Norfolk never fired a shot.

In fact, the guns of Ford Norfolk have never fired a shot in anger unless you consider the execution around 1812 of Army Deserter William Proctor.

Other than that, the guns of Ford, Norfolk have stood silent.

The Ford has been occupied by the US Army, the Navy, the Confederate Army, the Union Army, and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Much of the original fort remains intact with a few modern additions.

However little is known about the fort and remains to this day a puzzle.

The Ford is currently maintained by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Jim Melcor is chief of the environmental planning branch for the Corps and an expert on the fort.

How much of it do you actually know as fact and how is it that you know what you know about the fort?

- Well, there's very little formal information on the fort.

We've had to get most of our information from architectural features and a little bit of archeological work that we've done around the fort.

You can interpret based on the styles of the buildings when they were built, some of the fasteners that are used in the buildings.

You can tell that gives some dating ideas on it.

You can look at early drawings.

There are few early drawings of the bu of the buildings of the fort that shows the layout.

So you know how the fort was used at different periods.

- The fort has changed little since it was built from these plans in 1794.

As evidenced by this blueprint from the 1920s and an aerial photo taken in the 1930s, the fort is considered by some to be the best preserved 1812 site in the country.

Its design is unique among coastal defense forts.

- We're walking along the curve section of the wall right now.

The the fort is unique in its design.

It has a very large curve section and then there are a number of sharp angles and straight sections.

There's no other fort with particular design around an interesting feature of the wall of the fort.

When we built our new building and moved into it about seven or eight years ago, we were having some pretty severe drought conditions during the summer and I was up in my office up on the fourth floor, looking out over the wall and I noticed lines along the grass in here that were green.

The rest of the place was dried out, but there was lines in the wall and they looked like little cells and in fact, that's what they are.

The wall was built in cells and they were more than likely brick petitions in there.

So if the fort came under heavy gunfire and there was a section of failure, then you would've a massive section of failure of the whole wall.

It'd be just that small area.

- At the center of the fort is a large powder magazine.

The magazine has remained unchanged by the years and is an excellent example of military architecture.

Jim, tell me, when was the magazine constructed and by whom?

- The Navy built the magazine in during their tendency here about 1850.

They built it as a naval powder magazine.

The building is a powder magazine and it was built heavily to contain an explosion or try to contain an explosion if there were were one.

The building has a vaulted ceiling, as you can see above you, and you can see some of the vaulting behind us here.

The vaulting is all brick heavy brick.

The flooring in the building would be wood.

The columns that you see here and there are stone cut stone, the fasteners in the floor and all the other metal fasteners in the building would be copper or brass to prevent sparking.

The hasp on the doors are copper, the sheathing, copper and brass.

All that would be prevent sparking, which you wouldn't want in a powder magazine.

- The magazine now houses outdated computers, phone books, and old office equipment.

But tradition holds that this magazine once housed the powder used by the CSS Virginia in its battle off Hampton Roads with the monitor, and also held the powder used by the Confederates during the battle of first Manassas.

Above the magazine is a Civil war era time capsule that has remained untouched for over a hundred years.

Jim, I'm sitting here in a hundred years of dust.

Where am I - Right now?

We're in the loft of the magazine built by the Navy about 1850.

It's over top of the vaulted brick Vaulted magazine itself.

- I see these huge pine beams that support the this.

It's a very cavernous room.

How are they put together and assembled?

- Alright, these are roof trusses.

We have 10 sets of trusses up here.

They're massive timber trusses, all hand fitted with mortis and tendon joints and then pinned in place.

- Most of the artifacts found at Ford Norfolk are typically what we would consider trash, old buttons, broken chamber pots, and in the loft, the things that the builders felt too trivial to bend over and pick up.

- We found up here shavings from where they actually fitted the tendons into the mortis.

We found cutoff pieces of the pegs that pegged the tendons into the mortis.

We've actually found some of the copper roofing nails that were used in pieces of the slate that have just left, scattered around in the loft that we've collected and and set aside as to preserve them.

- Most of the artifacts from Fort Norfolk are on display at the War Memorial Museum of Virginia.

Little serious archeology has been done at the fort, and in fact, time and space considerations have caused many of the artifacts to be documented and then paved over.

John Stein is the administrator of the museum and has drawn up proposals for creating a museum at the fort.

- There is basically a lot of information on the war of 1812.

You just have to go and look for it, and I think one of the problems is, is that Fort Norfolk being hidden away on Front Street.

Nobody seems to be aware of it once, and also I think the war of 1812, half the people.

If you asked any student graduating from high school and you mentioned the war of 1812, they might say, when was that?

- Fort Norfolk is one of the city's best kept secrets.

It is on the Virginia and the National Register of Historic Places and is open to the public.

Many proposals have been brought forth for the future of the fort, everything from a parking lot to a museum.

However, for now, the fort remain under the care of the US Army Corps of Engineers and under the watchful eye of these cannons.

- There's an exhibit right now at the Dewitt Wallace Gallery in Williamsburg that tells us a great deal about 18th and 19th century American art and history.

It's an exhibit that tells us also much of what we think and value as Americans today.

It's an exhibit of furniture, silver ceramics, maps and toys, all of it designed and made by leading craftsmen from Boston to Charleston, South Carolina.

Mike Sinclair reports - In the nearly 40 years that they have been collecting 18th and 19th century American antiques.

Joseph Henig and his wife June, have amassed one of the finest private collections of antiques in this country.

Currently.

They have moved over half their collection more than 100 pieces from their Williamsburg home and placed them on exhibit at the Dewitt Wallace Decorative Arts Gallery.

This is only the second time that the DeWit Wallace Gallery has exhibited a private furniture collection that was not property of the museum.

The strength of the hen's, collection of American antiques prompted Colonial Williamsburg's, director of Museums, Larry Henry, to assemble the exhibit.

- The exhibit is here because the, the objects in the exhibit are significant in their own right.

They are important pieces of American decorative art as a collection.

It's also important and one of the reasons it's important is a collection is because of the collectors.

June and Joe Henge over the years have gathered these particular objects among other objects that they've acquired, and it represents their own taste and their own desires as collectors.

- The collection itself is so good because the hens have consistently sought out the very best objects of their kind.

They, they aren't interested in any antique that comes along.

They only want things that are really in good condition.

They look for original finishes, original brass minimum repairs and things that, that are the creme de la creme, not just the average Connecticut high chest, but the best Connecticut high chest that they can find.

- Joseph Henig is a printer and publisher from Washington dc He became interested in antiques reluctantly at the urging of his wife June.

Once Henge began collecting however he was hooked three years ago, he and his wife built a home in Williamsburg specifically to house their collection.

I spoke with Henig at his Georgian style home on South England Street.

- The first piece that we bought was the Thomas planer clock, which is at the entrance to the exhibit.

Thomas Planer was admitted to the clock Makers Union in 1702 built a terrific reputation.

The the case of the clock, we don't know who the maker was, but at the market tree, if you ever look at that, when I was in London in 70, I asked a curator at the Prince Albert, how long with 18th century tools would it take a man to, to make that case?

And he said, A year to 15 months.

- You use these pieces every day.

Why the choice to make this a living collection?

- We expect if you come to our house, that you will sit on the sofa and you will eat at the table and do it just like you would with modern furniture.

And we have a lot of fun because most of our friends took a long time for them to discover that we were collecting furniture.

It, it was only to, I guess, about 10 years ago that they just started listening to some of the, I started lecturing and they started paying a little bit of attention and going to the deal.

Oh, yes, you know, the hennas, they have a nice collection so that we would observe 'em coming into the house where they would flop on a sofa before.

Now they would gently go down and they'd look at it.

- Henna and his wife June, have become students of 18th and 19th century antiques.

They are continually studying and hen frequently lectures around the country when hen approaches buying a piece.

He has done his homework and has his eyes set on quality.

- Quality.

I think oftentimes today is defined as far as the antiques are concerned by pieces that are really elaborately carved and well shaped.

In the 18th century, there were often different ideas from one place to another.

For example, in Virginia, the the taste was for very plain and undecorated furniture.

In the 18th century in Philadelphia and in New England, that wasn't the case.

And so that's where the real strength of this collection is, is is from northeastern centers like Boston, New York, Rhode Island, cities like Providence and Newport and of course Philadelphia.

- The first thing we want to know is the, the provenance of it and the history of the, of the piece as far as the construction, the proportion of it, the restoration, if any, and when all those things come to a point that, that we should seriously consider it.

Then we look at the marketplace and find out the values that have been around.

And antiques are like paintings there.

It's, it's amazing that there's no real price tag - When acquiring pieces.

Henge works very closely with his friend and primary dealer, Harold Sack of Israel Sack Incorporated in New York.

The hens are trying to acquire antiques from each of the 13 original colonies and the major colonial centers.

They're very near completing their goal and are waiting for a few more pieces.

The scarcity of antiques and outrageous prices makes building a collection, an art form in itself.

How do you approach acquiring a piece?

Do you buy it because you, you like the way that it looks?

Or are you looking for a good investment?

- One, I never buy anything for an investment.

I, I think that's a fault concept Below a lot of people are successful.

I, I buy a piece because it, it triggers the emotions.

I can walk into a Dior and, and enjoy being there or I can be very excited.

- Hen is an active supporter of Colonial Williamsburg donating his expertise and his money to the collections.

Recently, henge bequeathed his entire antique collection to Colonial Williamsburg.

- Immediately after this exhibit, these things will be going back to the Henig's home, but Joe and June have made no secret of the fact that they plan to, to leave the entire estate, including this incredible collection to Colonial Williamsburg.

The foundation is, is indeed very fortunate to be able to acquire these things in that fashion because objects of this kind are often beyond the means of most museums.

Today, - The hen collection of antiques is one of the finest private collections of 18th and 19th century furniture in the country.

Their collection of high chest tea tables and bureau tables not only reflect the taste of the original colonists, but a little of the lifestyle and the taste of Joseph and June Henig.

- I think that people, regardless of what they collect, if they're sincere about it and if they'll study, I don't care if it's a collection of buttons, I think that they can find a lot of joy in life.

It isn't collecting isn't and shouldn't be based upon how much you pay for something.

You don't necessarily have to be a millionaire to be a collector.

You can have a lot of joy and fun.

- On Monday, February the third, colonial Williamsburg will open its 43rd annual antiques forum.

There'll be many lectures, workshops, and programs throughout the week.

The theme this year is new looks at the arts of the 18th century.

Next week on our place, our time, we want to update you on Norfolk's plans to build a $53 million National Maritime Center on the downtown waterfront.

We'll also profile for you the artist John Allen stock, and we'll bring you a story showing how Colonial Williamsburg is reinterpreting the history of blacks in the old capitol.

I'm Vian Webb.

We hope you'll join us then for our place, our time, partial funding for our place, our Times made possible by grants from the Arts Commissions of the cities of Virginia Beach and Chesapeake.

From the Virginia Commission for the Arts and from the Arts Commissions of the cities of Newport News, Norfolk Hampton, and Williamsburg.