Writer honors famed doo-wop dad with play about love, family, and organ donation

Ray Quick's father, Clarence, made a name for himself as a founding member of the Del-Vikings, a pioneering, Pittsburgh-based doo-wop quintet that was among the first racially integrated singing groups of the 1950s.

Clarence Quick penned the group's biggest hits, including "Come Go With Me" - the tune John Lennon's band the Quarrymen was playing at a Liverpool church in 1957 when Paul McCartney first noticed him, according to Beatles lore.

As magical as those moments are, they are not why Ray Quick most remembers his father and devotes his life's work to his memory.

Quick, 51, a College Park, Md., self-employed graphic artist turned playwright and screenwriter, is driven by another memory: the painful liver cancer death his father suffered at age 46 in 1983.

While liver transplants were evolving from experimental treatment to definitive therapy for end-stage liver disease during that era, Quick said, his family members knew nothing of organ transplantation as they watched his father wither and die inside a Brooklyn, N.Y., hospital.

"I don't know why we weren't asked" about the possibility of an organ transplant, he said.

"I just completely knew nothing about it at the time. I just watched him getting more ill," said Quick, who was 17 when his father died.

Today, with two stints as a recording artist behind him, Quick spends much of his professional time working to raise awareness about organ transplantation and the need for organ donors - living and deceased.

The centerpiece of his efforts is Eight Parts of Life, a dramatic play for which he serves as writer, director, and producer.

The play is scheduled to make its Philadelphia debut at 3 p.m. Saturday at the 3,000-seat Church of Christian Compassion, on Cedar Avenue near 61st Street. Tickets are available.

The title refers to the eight organs that can be donated for transplantation: heart, both lungs, both kidneys, pancreas, liver, and small intestines.

Featuring a cast of 10 actors, the play tells of a struggling blended family that includes a young son afflicted with severe kidney disease and in need of a transplant.

"This is not your typical relationship drama. There's no cursing, no sexually graphic material, and no buffoonery," said Quick, the father of an adult daughter.

"This is about real-life circumstances," he said. "Kidney disease is a national epidemic."

National and local government statistics confirm that ground zero for that epidemic is in the African American community, the result of high rates of diabetes and high blood pressure, experts believe.

Kidneys are by far the organs most in demand for transplants, according to the Gift of Life Donor Program, the federally designated organ procurement organization for the region that includes Philadelphia, eastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and Delaware.

Of the region's 5,662 patients waiting for organs, 4,864 need kidneys. Of those, 43 percent are African American, despite blacks' comprising just 14 percent of the population that Gift of Life serves, said Gift of Life president and CEO Howard Nathan.

The percentage of those who arrange to donate their organs after death is also not racially balanced. In this region, of 483 deceased organ donors in 2015, 355 were white, 67 were black, 49 Hispanic, and 12 Asian or multiracial, according to Gift of Life.

"The message that we're trying to get across is, it's a neighbor-helping-neighbor program. So what most people don't realize is that most people in Philadelphia waiting for a kidney are African American," said Nathan, whose organization will be at Saturday's play to provide information aimed at dispelling myths and fears that keep some from registering to become an organ donors.

"I'm targeting everybody, but especially the African American community because we need donations the most and we donate the least," Quick said.

Getting that message out is a matter of life and death, he said, noting that every 10 minutes a name is added to the waiting list and about 20 people die daily from never receiving a second-chance transplant.

Quick said he was drawn to Philadelphia as a venue for his play because he has family here and he once attended Cheyney University, and because the city lags the national average in the number of people registered as organ donors.

While the national average is 54 percent, just 31 percent of Philadelphia residents are designated organ donors compared with 48 percent statewide, according to Gift of Life.

Those statistics remind Quick of his father's death and drive him to keep promoting the play, which he wrote in 2006, and rewrote and retitled in 2014 to put greater emphasis on the organ donation plot line.

The play has been performed nine times in the Washington area and New York. Costs have prevented more showings, Quick said, and have, at times, resulted in his being so broke, he's been a homeless couch surfer.

"Everything I own, everything I have, I have put into this play. The only thing I have left is faith," said Quick, who is looking for investors to back a national tour of the play and accompanying organ donor registration drive.

In the meantime, he's looking forward to his next project: writing a feature film about his father and the Del-Vikings.

The original members were Air Force buddies who met on their Pittsburgh base. When the million-selling "Come Go With Me" hit No. 4 on the Billboard pop chart in 1957, it became the first time a racially mixed group reached the Top 10 in the rock music era, according to the Vocal Group Hall of Fame Foundation.

"I loved my dad so much - he was so cool," said Quick, who reluctantly sold his share of the royalty rights to his father's recordings in the early 1990s to support his own recording career.

Quick has loftier goals now. "My mission is to make sure people don't lose their loved ones sooner than they have to," he said.

deanm@phillynews.com

215-854-4172 @mensahdean