A community, a life in music
He is a folk singer, Mark Dvorak is. He has been since his teenage years when, growing up in a Cicero house with three brothers (two older, one younger), their parents and grandparents nearby, he read Anthony Scaduto’s 1971 book “Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography.”
In its pages, he met not only the compelling title character, but such other colorful giants as Pete Seeger, Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. He also discovered, though he didn’t realize it at the time, a way of life that has been filled with rewards beyond riches and fame.
It started with that book and, oh yes, there was soon a guitar involved.
“I was the last of my brothers to get a guitar and I used the money I was making working at a xylophone factory to buy one for $40,” he says.
His father worked for a chemical company and his mom was, with four active boys to care for, more than a mom.
“Oh, she worked very hard,” he says, a smile crossing his face. “It took her a lot of work just getting us all through high school.” He and his brothers and many neighborhood pals were all creatively inclined, one brother forming a band that played such clubs as the Kingston Mines.
Dvorak and a friend spent a summer riding their motorcycles around the country and when he returned home, he walked into the Old Town School of Folk Music.
“I didn’t really have any thought of being able to make a living with music. I just wanted to learn how to play better but the minute I walked into the school it felt so right,” he says. “What I found was a community, a life.”
His job unloading trucks and stocking shelves at a Jewel grocery store was paying the bills then. He worked the night shift and during the days began offering lessons at his apartment. “I didn’t charge anything,” he says. “It was sort of a leave anything you can arrangement. I did not have a lot of self-confidence in those years and didn’t want to feel the pressure.”
He began teaching formally when hired at the Old Town School in 1986 by the great banjo artist, teacher and composer Michael Miles, one of many that Dvorak admires, as I do. He has tender memories and words for Win Stracke, the co-founder of the Old Town School and one of the city’s most influential if largely forgotten artists. Though Dvorak did not meet Stracke until he was aged and living in a retirement home in Evanston, he became a friend and writes that he feels , walking around the Old Town School today, that it “is difficult to imagine you are someplace other than inside Win Stracke’s dream.”