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Oscar-Winner Urges YSU Graduates to Make Their Own Decisions
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Perseverance is the best way to achieve success, according to Oscar winner and two-time Grammy award nominee Maureen McGovern.McGovern, a Youngstown native, received an honorary doctor of music degree and gave the keynote address during Youngstown State University's fall commencement exercises Sunday afternoon.Her second cousin once removed, Mollie McGovern, producer of "WFMJ Today," received an master's in business administration during the ceremony and served as student speaker.Both women said they learned only recently that the other would also be addressing the class of 2004 and that their selection as speakers was a pure coincidence.Mollie McGovern noted the positive things happening in Youngstown: the Youngstown 2010 planning committee, reopening of Federal Plaza, construction of the convocation center and formation of the Mahoning Valley Professional 20/30 club, an organization comprised of more than 100 young professionals.Maureen McGovern shared her personal experiences with the 650 graduates, urging them to chase their dreams with a vengeance. "It isn't the person with the most talent or the most brains who succeeds, but the person who doesn't give up," she stressed.As a child, McGovern said she'd sit with her father and the other members of his barber shop quartet in the dining room of their Lucius Avenue home and sing along with each member as they practiced their parts. "I couldn't have been more than 5 years old and that was my first lesson in harmony," she said.McGovern accepted her honorary degree in her father's memory. He died last Fourth of July."By third grade I knew that music would be my career," she continued. But learning to read music was especially difficult. McGovern described herself as "being somewhat dyslexic" and by the time she was in fifth grade, her piano teacher had given up and told her she was wasting her parents' money and that she would never be a proficient musician.So McGovern taught herself to play guitar and write songs.In the 1970s, although she was never a student at YSU, McGovern said she performed in the Catacombs, a coffee house at the Newman Center.At 23, a Cleveland producer discovered her and secured her first recording contract. That led to the Oscar-winning gold record, "The Morning After," the theme song for "The Poseidon Adventure.""At the beginning of my career," McGovern told the graduates, "I let others make choices for me."Managers and producers decided how much she should pay them, how the band should be paid and how the records should be produced. "I was treated like a background singer on my own records," she said.Two years later, McGovern was broke and the record company dropped her contract. "I thought my life was over -- washed up at 25," she lamented.So, she took a job as a secretary and moonlighted as a performer in Europe, the Philippines, Japan -- wherever there was work.After securing contracts to sing theme songs for "The Towering Inferno," "Superman" and various television programs, McGovern recorded a second album. It too failed.Allowing her manager and producer to decide how that album should be recorded was a decision itself, McGovern said, and she vowed not to record again until she could do it on her own terms."The Pleasure of His Company," a self-produced venture with jazz pianist Mike Renzi, netted McGovern her second Grammy nomination. She said the piano-voice album, although dismissed by her manager, was a success because she followed her heart, not the directions of someone else."Not making a choice is still a choice -- only it's somebody else's," she told the graduates. "Make the choices in your life with your heart."After releasing that album, McGovern said she replaced Linda Ronstadt as the lead in "Pirates of Penzance" on Broadway and was no longer stereotyped as a singer of disaster-film themes."Believing in yourself is the greatest gift you can give yourself," McGovern said.She also encouraged the graduates to cultivate lifelong learning. At 30, McGovern said she started studying voice. At 45 she started taking acting lessons and at 49 she started studying tap. "It's never too late to fulfill your dreams," she chuckled. "Twenty years from now, you won't be disappointed by what you did, but by what you didn't do."Annual trips to Youngstown to visit family allow McGovern to keep tabs on progress in the Mahoning Valley and she said the "incredible growth" in places like Boardman, where she graduated from high school, impress her most.However, she is saddened by the deterioration of the inner city. Her old house on Lucius Avenue is boarded up and the neighborhood is deteriorating around it. "I miss the center city," she said. McGovern said she hopes to drive over the newly opened Federal Plaza before heading back to New York, where she is playing "Marmee" in the world premiere of "Little Women, The Musical," which opens on Broadway Jan. 20.As a special gift to the graduates, McGovern and YSU made complimentary tickets available to each one for her benefit concert at Stambaugh Auditorium tonight. Proceeds from the concert will benefit YSU's Dana School of Music and the Neil Kennedy Recovery Clinic. Unsold tickets will be available at the door. The program begins at 8 p.m."