Just before 12:30 on a Saturday afternoon in early June, six children gathered around a piano 4 miles from their homes in Chester, Pa. They sang a song about how easy it is to go home, written by a man who never had to run a car pool. Associate Professor of Music John Alston’s left hand floated through the air, conducting as his right plinked out a melody on the piano.

“Goin' home, goin' home,” the children sang, “I'm a-goin' home.”

“Mother’s there, 'spectin me; father's waitin' too,” they continued. “Lots of folks gathered there, all the friends I knew.”

After they finished the song, Alston told the children—all around 8 years old—that they had performed well, and he instructed them to exit Swarthmore’s Lang Music Building, where a white 15-passenger van waited out front. By 1:30 p.m., he was supposed to be back in the same place with a whole new group of older children. The kids were part of the Chester Children’s Chorus, of which Alston, 41, is founder, director, and animating spirit. Some days, he is also chauffeur. On this day, he had one hour to drop off the first group at their homes and to pick up the second and take them to the College for an afternoon rehearsal. Alston used to do this as two separate legs, making all the drop-offs before starting his pickups; to expedite this process, which frequently demanded retracing his path across the length of Chester, he recently decided to drop off some and pick up others in geographical sequence.

Alston drove the van off campus, headed south to Chester, a city of 36,000 with remarkable poverty, a history of municipal corruption, and a well-earned pessimism about the American urban condition. Alston had no list of stops, no map, and so the trip had an improvisational quality, as he tried to design an efficient itinerary en route while two of the girls sat in the back, loudly singing along with the hip-hop on the van radio. “The nice part,” Alston says, “is I get to hang out with them and get to know Chester better than any taxi driver.”

Alston has also come to know the members of his chorus better than most conductors. Each child rehearses with Alston on the Swarthmore campus twice weekly during the school year—one after-school session and one on Saturday—and then daily during a five-week summer camp. He is a demanding and intense leader during rehearsal time, scolding the children at the slightest indication of distraction: wandering eyes, slouching posture, unfocused singing.

Alston also spends many evenings and weekends hanging out with members of the chorus—taking them to the movies or out to eat. Many ask him for advice about problems at home or at school; sometimes, they receive it unsolicited. Two of the boys live with Alston at his home in Parkside, which borders Chester, having left homes riddled with family problems.

Alston does not hide similarities to his own youth. “They know my father was a disaster,” he says of the alcoholic who abused Alston’s mother before they divorced. He says he had a mediocre Catholic school education until, in fifth grade, he was selected for the Newark Boys Chorus, a renowned group that traveled internationally for performances. There he was captivated by music—“It was everything to me,” he says—and decided at a young age that he wanted to spend his life involved in it, in defiance of expectation.

“I told my eighth-grade teacher I wanted to be a conductor. She asked if I liked trains.”

Alston received a bachelor of music degree in 1983 from Yankton College in South Dakota and a master’s in music in 1985 from the University of Northern Iowa. In 1995, he completed a doctorate at Indiana University.

In 1994, after he had been hired to teach music at Swarthmore, Alston asked College administrators for support in helping to realize a standing dream. “I just really wanted to start a choir,” Alston says, “so that one day there would be in Chester something like the Newark Boys Chorus.” Chester schools enthusiastically invited Alston to conduct auditions at Columbus Elementary School, where Swarthmore students were involved in an after-school tutorial program. In February 1995, he emerged with 15 boys whose voices impressed him. After a few months, only seven were left in the group. Alston conducted his first chorus camp over the summer, and it was a limited program: rehearsal time, a snack, and a pickup game of baseball afterward. Ever since, he has recruited new members the same way, through grade school tryouts. Now 48 children are in the choir—the youngest is 7 years old and the oldest 17—including 27 newly accepted second-graders.

Initially, the choir was all male. “All I can say is, being a guy, I know how to coach boys,” Alston says. But after a few years, he invited a few of the boys’ sisters to join as well. “They would come after school, hanging out at rehearsal,” he says. “Not to be patronizing, but I would ask them to help serve the pre-rehearsal snack. They would sit with the boys and help keep discipline. All the time, they were learning to sing. There they were, learning everything their brothers would learn.” Now, there are 23 girls among the 48 members.

The chorus does not receive any financial support from the College; it does, however, get in-kind donations, including use of rehearsal space and vans and Alston’s time. He has a special arrangement by which he is given a reduced course load each semester in exchange for forgoing sabbaticals to which he would otherwise be entitled.

Alston estimates that the chorus will need an operating budget of $90,000 over the next fiscal year. When the Chester-Swarth-more College Community Coalition disbanded three years ago, the chorus inherited its assets. Now, that cash is running out, and the chorus has turned to grants and fund-raising to support itself.

Last fall, Alston hired Andrea Hoff Knox ’64 as managing director of the program. Knox, formerly a reporter and editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer, created an advisory board for the chorus and spends much of her time raising money and writing grant proposals to assist Alston. “He’s the guy with the vision, with the musical talent,” Knox says. “He’s not thinking about money or where to get it; it’s not his expertise or where he’s comfortable.”

Alston’s vision includes securing “a beautiful place in Chester to rehearse” and then one day turning the chorus program into a year-round school. Alston has been talking about this idea for a while, but Knox has added momentum. “He could never see how to get from where he is now to the school,” she says, “but now he can see it.” Alston doesn’t find this optimism similarly reflected in all of the children. “I wish I could tell you they’re genuinely excited,” he says. “Some are listening. Some are not.”

Unlike the Newark Boys Chorus—or the most famous of all such groups, the Harlem Boys Choir—Alston has never tried to develop the chorus as primarily a performance group. Most of the group’s public appearances are nearby, at places like the Chester YWCA and the Swarthmore United Methodist Church. For Alston, the pressure of mastering a repertoire for the stage distracts from the real point of the chorus, developing an appreciation for music, the ability to read music, and a sense of discipline among its members.

“There are lessons that traditionally fathers pass on to their children, and for many of these kids, there is nobody to do that,” Alston says. “I don’t pretend to be their father, I don’t pretend to be their best friend. I’m probably a role model. But Michael Jordan’s a role model, too—and I can’t win with that. They want what Michael has.” The unusual rapport Alston has developed with many of the boys—he says he is most comfortable describing it as “an uncle-nephew relationship”—was not by his design. “I think they started it,” he says. “One of the kids—he was tiny at the time, and now he weighs more than I do—just called to see what I was doing. Josh and I are best friends now. He just wanted to know what was up.”

Laurie Daniels says that Alston is “a brother-father type of guy” to her son Nkenge, 12. Nkenge is a small, shy boy who is currently home schooled—in part because he used to get picked on in school. He has been in the choir since he was 8 years old and has begun to take piano lessons as well. He says he likes Christian music and hopes to one day sing in a church choir. “He has become very social. He’s now a social boy; he is outgoing,” Mrs. Daniels says of the choir’s effect on Nkenge. “It has spilled into his schoolwork. I see it in his mannerisms, how he is when he has to do schoolwork. He is more patient and concentrated.”

B y the time Alston makes his last pickup, it is already past 1:30 p.m. Alston concedes that the day’s rehearsal will have to be shortened and apologizes to the boys in the car for forgetting to bring a football, which dashes hopes for a quick postrehearsal game. Hurrying to make it back to Swarthmore—in a van increasingly noisy with the sounds of the radio and teenagers—Alston pulls up to a stop sign and asks Vincent Wilson, sitting to his right, to look out the passenger-side window to see if there is oncoming traffic. Wilson, 14, is one of the two boys who lives with Alston.

“Ain’t nobody coming this way,” Vincent says.

“That’s a buck,” Alston snaps. Since Vincent has been living with him, Alston has developed a system of fines for two major infractions: $1 each time he says “ain’t” and $1 for each time he forgets to turn out the light after leaving a room. “That’s it for now,” Alston explains later. “When he masters that, we’ll go on to noun-verb agreement.”

“That’s three ‘ain’ts’ and the bathroom light on,” Alston says to Vincent, offering a tally of accrued debts.

“That’s a dumb rule,” Vincent says.

“You want to get into Harvard?” Alston asks. Vincent doesn’t answer, but he is one of three chorus members who have progressed enough to be invited to sing with the College Chorus. Alston says he “held his own”in the bass section during this spring’s performance of Brahms’ Requiem.

Before he started the choir, Alston had never been to Chester, never even driven through. Parts of it became quickly familiar to him. “It’s a poor city,” he says. “It feels a lot like Newark, where I grew up.” From behind the windshield of the van, Alston has watched Chester for eight years—and knows plenty about its schools, families, and housing stock. But he refuses to draw any conclusions about the state of the city. “I don’t study economic development in Chester,” he says. “I just want to find the 10 best second-grade singers every year. I just want to see a few kids blossom.”

Sasha Issenberg ’02 is a writer at Philadelphia Magazine.