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After a year and a half of the lessons, Freddy's maternal grandfather, a wholesale grocer, put his foot down and insisted that Freddy go to work. "My mother and father had to give in," says Lanza. "My pop said, 'Look Fred, at least make the gesture.' So I figured, after all, I never worked in my life, this might be all right. Incidentally, I have a conscience—and neighbors talk, too." But Freddy was on his grandfather's delivery truck only a week and three days when Teacher Williams tracked him down in great excitement. Dr. Serge Koussevitzky was conducting at the Philadelphia Academy of Music that night; Music Patron Dr. John Noble and Concert Manager William Huff, who had heard Freddy, wanted him to sing for the conductor.
Beer in the Berkshires. The audition launched Tenor Mario Lanza. "That's a great voice!" cried Koussevitzky when he heard Lanza do Vesti la Giubba. "You will come up with me to the Berkshires." Recalls Lanza: "I didn't know what the hell the Berkshires was, but I figured it must be something big and great." He borrowed and adapted his mother's maiden name, Maria Lanza, and went on a scholarship to the 1942 music festival at Tanglewood, Mass., where he and Conductor-Composer Leonard Bernstein were Koussevitzky's favorites. There, too, the tenor found beer-drinking with the stage hands more fun than studying, but the New York Times's critic Noel Straus heard him sing and hailed his "superb natural voice." After the festival, Lanza signed up with Columbia Concerts, Inc. In a serious moment he told Teacher Williams: "You've shown me the other side of the tracks. And I like what I see."
What he saw was brusquely interrupted by the U.S. Army, which drafted Lanza. The Army sized him up, in its mysterious way, as good military police material, and packed him off, first to Florida and then to the dusty heat of an air base at Marfa, Texas. By the time Private Lanza waddled into the Special Services offices at the summons of Corporal Johnny Silver, he had been brooding for months over his broken singing career. "His shirt was open, he didn't have a hat, no laces on his shoes," recalls Silver, now a featured player in Broadway's Guys and Dolls. "He hadn't taken a bath in six months. He hadn't even taken his socks off in six months, and the guy weighed 287 Ibs. He just didn't give a damn."