We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Richard Drews a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Richard , really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
I was raised in a very positive home environment with a loving family in a very small farming town Hebron, Nebraska, population 1,920. There were several churches, two hardware stores, a thriving Chamber of Commerce, a very Active Lions Club, and from the time I was in grade school I recognized that neighbors and friends were synonymous. There was always support, sharing and kindness in that dynamic; from that my parents instilled in me those values, which as I ponder back with gratitude and I recognize how I nurtured those values, leaned on those values, and in fact to the best of my abilities passed those values on to our own children. As I relish being a grandfather, I am so blessed to see many of the same values from our children passed on to their children. Please and thank you, help those that may not or cannot help themselves, be humble, be charitable and be kind.
These values in my opinion were instrumental in finding my purpose. That journey was filled with many challenges,
many setbacks, and required diligence, fortitude and resilience which now I am able confidently to attribute the successes I have been blessed to enjoy in my life to the values that my parents, by siblings, and my extended family lived and shared with me while I was young. I am not so sure I “found” my purpose, as much as my purpose was in large part determined by luck, fate, divine intervention, and my dogmatic application to the values mentioned here.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself? I knew from the very early age of 5 or 6 that I wanted to be an opera singer. That sounds outlandish and it is. My mother owned a fabric store in our hometown of Hebron, Drews’ Fabrics. My father was a plumber a business owner and eventually Thayer County Treasure a position he held for nearly 30 years. I am the youngest of four children and was raised in a family filled with music. My maternal grandmother Dora loved music. She played the accordion, the piano, the fiddle, danced and sang with a clarion soprano that would soar (good bad or indifferent) above all the other parishioners in Sunday morning Grace Lutheran Church services. I loved sitting next to her as very young and restless child and listened to her sing while standing on the pew next her. Further, Dora loved opera and together we would listen to the Texaco Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, and on many Saturdays she would care for me and I would listen with her. I learned very quickly the power of opera through her belly laughs in Il Barbieri di Siviglia and her tears which would flow at the end of La Traviata or La Boheme. I have few regrets in my life and one at the top of the list is that Dora did not hear my performances of those broadcast operas (and there were many more) during my international singing career. Many opera singers have routines, and superstitions that they follow. Before every performance of the many operas, recitals and oratorios I performed over my 30 year career, I would spend moments before I hit the stage to say “A prayer of gratitude and a special “Thank you grandma for helping me to get here.”
I received my Bachelor of Science in Education and my Masters of Music from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln during most of the 1970’s. It was there that I honed my craft with the amazing music faculty, and in particular, Prof. Earl “Pete” Jenkins with whom I studied not only then but throughout my singing career until his passing. Pete built my voice from the very beginning and throughout my career; our 25 year relationship was indeed a blessing. He taught me how to breathe utilizing my abdominal strength, how to vocalize to maintain an even scale top to bottom, how to adhere to vocal health measures by among many items, sticking to the strengths and the limitations my voice contained. I rarely ventured outside of the roles that fit my lyric tenor sound. Rodolfo in “La Boheme”, Riccardo in “Un Ballo in
Maschera”, Tamino in Die Zauberflote,. Count Almaviva in “Il Barbieri di Siviglia”, Alfredo in “La Traviata” (a role I performed on a Metropolitan Opera Texaco Broadcast), The Duke of Mantua in “Rigoletto”, Nemorino in “L’elisir d’Amore”, Faust in “Faust” and “La Damnation de Faust”, and Chevalier de Grieux in “Manon”, to name just a few. The decision not enter into roles that were too light or too heavy, I believe allowed me to sing for over 20 years without a single cancellation often in very high pressure situations. During those years I would travel 190-230 days a year and I was often in the right place at the right time, and was booked years in advance. Once we began our family I had many conversations with my dear late manager Martha Munro about curtailing my singing, and specifically my traveling, so that I could be with my family. I recognized opera may very likely be there for me if I choose to return; but, my children are young once. I do not regret the decision to curtail my singing career to be with my wife and children.
I was able to accept a position teaching voice and opera in the Chicago area for nearly 14 years, and during that time I was present to be with my family. After my teaching career and in 2012 we established Dinky Delights, Inc. a family-owned, owner-operated business selling hot and fresh cake donuts throughout the Chicago Metropolitan area and suburbs, out of our pop up booth. I had never made a donut in my life, nor had I owned a food business in my life. Indeed, I had experience as business owner as
my throat helped pay the bills for those nearly 20 years I performed and it was my boss. Now, I am my own boss and although I disagree with my boss on occasion, I must say that we have gotten along very well over the last 12 years selling well over 1 million Dinky Delights Donuts throughout that tenure. I used to perform on an opera or concert stage with a proscenium to often audiences of 3,000 or more. Now my stage is our 10’x10′ pop up tent and my proscenium is the point of sale. I interact with my audience one happy customer at time. We sold our 1 millionth Dinky Delight Donut in and around October 2022. The smiles over the years, that are shared by our customers who are handed a bag of hot and fresh made to-order Donuts with the sugar spice topping of their choice is not lost on this business owner. To each and every one of them, in some ways similar to the curtain calls of my opera days, I say a most gracious thank you.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Number 1. Faith: not only in yourself, in your venture, in your risk taking and in your spiritual belief. This quality is absolute. My experience with the many auditions I sang and was not given the job, made me more determined to
get better so that I would earn those jobs. I had and have faith in myself.
Number 2. Perseverance: as my high school football coach used to chant “When you get knocked down, you are up and running”. I have had more than my fair share of knock downs in my life, and some of them were not immediately “up and running” but because of my perseverance that I was taught very early one, they eventually were overcome.
Number 3. Surround yourself with successful people: I have been most blessed to have in my life a partner with whom we have raised two amazing children, who has motivated, supported and understands me better than anyone on the planet. She is the most successful person I know; and by all means not because she accepted my proposal of marriage in 1985, but often in spite of the challenges this partnership has faced, her success and her guidance has been the driving force behind my successes.
If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that although it is a hot button issue these days, as we hear it so regularly: aging. My father who lived to his mid 90’s used to say that growing older is far better than the alternative. The challenge I face is the acceptance that my younger tenor voice is not the agile, free flowing, even scaled instrument
it was. Because my instrument is finite and with age comes wear and tear, the current challenge of learning new roles has become particularly challenging.
I continue to learn new opera roles knowing full well once learned I will not put butts in the seats. Rather, I am facing these upcoming decades head on and am so thankful that
my body can still support the breathing technique Pete Jenkins taught me and that my scale is somewhat even. However, hearing the result of my singing reminds me when I play back my rehearsal recordings that the challenge of age, which one cannot reverse (hello!) must be faced head on.
The decade will also be spent to continue the day-to-day activities of Dinky Delights. Our business requires lots of physical demands: loading up equipment, setting it up, selling, and tearing it all down…and repeat. That process was much easier 12 years ago than it currently is. I am facing that challenge head on. Fortunately, over the years we have younger staff members who on occasion are there for the heavy lifting, not always, but nonetheless very helpful in my addressing this decade.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.DinkyDelightsChicago.com
- Instagram: DinkyDelightsInc.
- Facebook: @DinkyDelights.Inc
- Twitter: @DDelightsInc
