WFB HS teacher Robert Chase

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel April 29, 2025

A passion for music plays on in Milwaukee's North Shore

Whitefish Bay High School teacher Robert Chase (1940-2017) introduced middle school violin player Julie Roubik to the viola.

The suggestion shaped her life trajectory.

Violins are instruments often in the spotlight. Violas are more like the middle child — "there but never noticed," Roubik said. She found the instrument meshed better with her personality. Her profile rose in the Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra when she switched to viola. She went from "a nobody in the back of the section to one of the section leaders."

Julie Roubik, right, is pictured with her former high school orchestra teacher, Robert Chase, and her sister, Jill Dizack. The sisters and others who took Chase's orchestra classes in high school returned for a concert held in Chase's honor when he retired from Whitefish Bay High School.

Roubik, of Shorewood, credits her music career to Chase, or "Papa Chase," as his students called him. She earned her master's degree in viola, teaches music lessons for a living and performs locally. She struggled to say what she would have done with her life had Chase not put a viola in her hands and offered two words: "Try this."

— Kelly Meyerhofer

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