09/24/2026
She Gave Us the Baton, remembering Jeanette Cowan.
By Mark Spencer
Some people enter our lives so early that we do not immediately understand what they are giving us. We understand later. Sometimes much later. I have known the presence and influence of Jeanette Cowan since I was a boy.
My first window into her world came through my older brother, Calvin. I was the younger brother watching. I watched the young people he sang alongside perform before thousands in the Emerson auditorium, appear on television, and represent Gary beyond the walls of their school as young cultural ambassadors. And I watched the woman helping to prepare them.
I did not yet have the language to call what Jeanette was doing arts education. I could not have imagined that the arts would eventually become the central work of my own professional life. I simply knew something extraordinary was happening.
There was a standard in that room. Jeanette Cowan had one. And you knew it.
She was not preparing Gary's children merely to get through a song. She was teaching them to become musicians. Sight-reading mattered. Technique mattered. Preparation mattered. Spirituals mattered. Great sacred works mattered. The breadth of the musical world mattered. And excellence mattered.
She exposed young people to music and artistic traditions that could enlarge a child's understanding of the world and of themselves. The finest arts educators do more than teach children how to perform. They enlarge the room in which a child imagines a future.
Long before Emerson School for the Visual and Performing Arts formally opened in 1982, the artistic soil at Emerson was already being cultivated. Educators, parents, administrators, and community members understood that Gary's children were capable of extraordinary things when extraordinary things were placed before them.
When Emerson School for the Visual and Performing Arts opened, that belief found a remarkable home. Those of us who experienced Emerson have spent years trying to explain it to people who were not there. It is difficult, because Emerson was not simply a school. It was an experience.
Some found their voices there. Some found confidence. Some discovered gifts they did not know they possessed. The arts were the vehicle, but the deeper lesson was learning who we could become. Jeanette Cowan belonged to the generation that made such a belief possible.
She was a pillar, but even that word feels too stationary for Jeanette. She was a force. She communicated through music, expectation, and the particular authority of a teacher who had already decided what you were capable of and therefore had very little interest in your excuses. There was love in that. Not always the soft kind.
Sometimes love sounded like: Again. Listen. Watch me. You can do better. That kind of teaching leaves fingerprints.
I recognize them now.
For 30 years, through the West Side Theatre Guild and my work with young people, I have tried to create opportunities for children to discover what happens when talent meets discipline, imagination meets preparation, and an adult cares enough about a young person's potential to refuse to accept less than that young person can give.
For many years, I thought of that simply as the way I taught. Age gives you perspective. I understand now that some of it was handed to me.
I inherited pieces of my philosophy from Jeanette Cowan and from an extraordinary generation of Gary educators who taught us that our children were entitled to excellence. Not near excellence. Not good enough for Gary. Excellence.
They believed our children deserved the entire artistic vocabulary, not a reduced version of it. They believed a child from Gary could stand on any stage, enter any room, encounter any repertoire, and belong there. And they prepared us accordingly.
There is particular poignancy in losing Jeanette during the 30th anniversary year of the West Side Theatre Guild. Thirty years makes you look backward. You remember beginnings. And eventually you confront a humbling truth: very little begins with us.
Somebody taught us. Somebody corrected us. Somebody opened a door. Somebody saw something in us before we could see it ourselves. Somebody carried the work before we ever arrived. Then, if we are fortunate, they place the baton in our hands.
Jeanette Cowan was one of those people.
Perhaps the greatest measure of a teacher's life is found in continuation. A student becomes an artist. An artist becomes a teacher. A teacher reaches another child. That child discovers something previously unimaginable. And the original teacher's influence travels into rooms she will never enter, through students she will never meet, into generations she will never see.
That is how a teacher defeats time. That is legacy. And I am grateful that, in Jeanette's case, we did not wait until now to say thank you.
In recent years, Ms. Cowan attended our production of The Wiz. We stopped. We acknowledged her. We stood. We applauded. We gave her flowers. And she was there to receive them.
That memory means more to me today than it did then. Too often we wait until someone has left us to assemble the words we should have spoken while they were sitting among us. Jeanette heard the applause. She saw us standing. She received her flowers. She knew.
So these words are not flowers offered too late. They are simply another bouquet.
To her family, I offer my deepest sympathy and gratitude for sharing Jeanette with generations of us. To the Emerson family, I know this loss reaches deeply. And to the generations of students who can still hear her voice somewhere inside themselves, I suspect the assignment has not changed.
Do the work. Know the music. Respect the craft. Raise the standard. Then raise it again.
Ms. Cowan, thank you. Thank you for the music. Thank you for the discipline. Thank you for the exposure. Thank you for the insistence. Thank you for showing children from Gary that excellence was not owned by another city, another school, another neighborhood, or another people.
Thank you for helping a little boy watching from the edges recognize the power of the arts before he understood that they would become his life's work. Thank you for being part of the creative lineage from which Emerson's performing arts tradition, and eventually the West Side Theatre Guild, would draw strength.
And thank you for the baton.
Thirty years into this journey, I understand its weight differently. Carrying it was never simply about producing another show. It was about carrying forward an expectation. And when our turn is finished, we are supposed to place that baton into somebody else's hands.
In one of her final messages to the Emerson VPA family, Jeanette Cowan left her students with a simple instruction: "Now go be Great!"
Ms. Cowan, we heard you. We have the baton. We will keep carrying it. And somewhere, another child from Gary is waiting for a turn to take it from us.
Rest well, Maestro.
Mark Spencer
Founder/Director, West Side Theatre Guild
Director of Performing Arts, Gary Community School Corporation
Indiana State Senator, District 3
