It makes the most sense to begin near the end. In 1985 John Kirkpatrick (1905–91) celebrated his eightieth birthday at the Graduate Club at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. The scholars Vivian Perlis and H. Wiley Hitchcock organized a gathering of Kirkpatrick's friends and colleagues from across the country for an event that included dinner and an exhibition of photos, printed music, and ephemera at the Yale Music Library, and unofficially marked Kirkpatrick's retirement from the position of executive editor of the Charles Ives Society.

Everything about the event reinforced what the attendees would have already known about the guest of honor. Kirkpatrick was the benevolent patriarch of the Ives revival, a position he had earned through decades of commitment to the composer's music. Kirkpatrick had become a hero of American musical modernism when he gave the first New York performance of Ives's Second Piano Sonata (the Concord Sonata) in 1939, and the music critic Lawrence Gilman christened him an “unobtrusive minister of genius” in his review of the performance. After Ives's death in 1954, Kirkpatrick became one of the most important shepherds of Ives's posthumous legacy. Kirkpatrick catalogued Ives's music manuscripts (resulting in the Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue); edited Ives's autobiographical writings (published in Memos); recorded his works (including an important first recording of some of his songs with Helen Boatwright, as well as a second recording of the Concord Sonata); and served as both curator of the Ives Collection at Yale and executive editor of the Ives Society.