The Williamsons inherited the box from Alyce's parents, Henry and "Dawnie" de Roulet. Warren Williamson is the grandson of the late Harry Chandler, former publisher of The Times; he is chairman of the Chandler Trust and a member of the L.A. Phil's board of directors.
"I can't bear the thought of giving up the box," says Williamson, who attended this year's opening night concert, featuring opera star Kiri Te Kanawa and pop sensation Josh Groban on June 19 with family and friends; for this concert, they sat not in the longtime family box but in a Pool Circle box, so called because they occupy an area once taken up by a reflecting pool. "It used to be when I would go to the Bowl, I knew everybody there, it was big time. And everybody dressed up."
Now, Williamson says, the couple's love of horse racing often keeps her away from the Bowl, but she's still usually in the family box for the Tuesday night classical music series. "I love that -- there's no racing on Tuesday nights," she says.
Physician John Uphold, who lives in Hermosa Beach and has a practice in Woodland Hills, has experienced the Bowl from both the last and first rows. Uphold admits that as a child in the 1950s, growing up in Whittier, he was a reluctant Bowl-goer, dragged to classical concerts by his parents.
"We would go and sit in the benches, pretty far back, because I remember the walks up," he says. "We would picnic on the benches -- everyone was in a long line, so the potato salad would always be about 8 feet away from you.
"I had a paper route, and had gotten a small transistor radio for getting new subscribers," he reminisces. "I'd listen to the Dodger games with a little earphone. I remember it was a very quiet time, and somebody hit a home run and I let out a whoop. I incurred a certain amount of wrath for that; I learned that was not an acceptable way to celebrate during a concert. I got to keep the radio, but had to promise that was never going to happen again."
Uphold went to Texas for his medical education, but when he returned to Los Angeles in 1975, he and his family returned to the Bowl -- and got his first box. "It was in the last row of boxes, the last row of the terrace, off to one side, but I was happy because I got a box," he says. Over the years, he managed to keep moving down to more and more desirable boxes by subscribing to new music series as they were added to the schedule. "There wasn't as much demand for them," he says. He now sits front row center in the Pool Circle.
