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You Gotta Give a Toot

The Source

I think it was the smell that got me first. Some dozen fifth-graders and their parents squeezed into the tiny dungeon that we called the band room at Perry Elementary School as the man from the horn company began opening the cases of trombones, clarinets, flutes, and other weapons of parental ear destruction. But the smell. . . the luxurious smell of brass, velvet, and valve oil that emanated from those instruments sucked me in immediately. I had to have a horn. I’ve spent the last two-thirds of my life pounding the keys of a piano but it was the cornet that first lured me into the world of music and for only one reason: it was cool. When my parents succumbed to my pleading and shelled out a couple of hundred hard-earned bucks for my Conn cornet I entered the gates of harmonic heaven and flown around there through my college years. And no matter how many times I opened that instrument case the smell continued to waft up into my adolescent nostrils planting dreams in my head of performing with the Big Bands of the era or at least first chair in the high school combo. I probably spent more time polishing my horn than practicing it, but after all, I was after the “coolness factor” and not the tone. When I got to high school I began badgering my parents for a trumpet, a longer and even sexier version of the cornet and they figured that anything that kept my interest in music was worth the price. Viola! The trumpet! Some people talk at length about their adventures with their kayak, their hunting rifle, their speedboat or their ’57 Chevy, but my shiny brass trumpet took me places that a kayak would never dare adventure. To begin with it got me out of school. The Perry American Legion needed a bugler for their military funerals and two tooters were preferable if there was to be an echo. My buddy Gary and I eagerly scanned the obituary columns of the Pike Press to look for the next time we could get out of physics class. Physics was taught right before noon, the prime time for funerals, military and otherwise, and no self-respecting school administrator would dare deny a fallen veteran his or her rendition of Taps at the cemetery. We played the final song for vets in the rain, during snowstorms, on precarious hillsides and once inside a mausoleum where the sound of our twin trumpets still echoed as the hearse pulled away from the cemetery. We were paid with free tickets to the annual fish fry held by the American Legion. The only time our trumpets Gary and I any tension was the day when he stood before the music contest judge to play his solo and I sat on the front row sucking on a lemon. When he looked at me he couldn’t pucker. I arrived at Illinois College and needed a job so the powers that be gave me the title of “band manager” since I played the trumpet in the I.C. group. The title sounded impressive and it paid a little, but it amounted to setting up the chairs and music stands before each rehearsal. My trumpet was finally beginning to pay dividends. And I was a part of reinstituting the Illinois College marching band, an organization that had been on a 40-year hiatus. The size of our group was evident when we were all able to fit on the back of a flatbed truck in the Illinois College Homecoming Parade. At that time the college’s orchestra director was also the director of the Jacksonville Symphony and he asked me to join this prestigious group playing first chair in the trumpet section. I was a bit gob-struck at the idea of playing big-boy music and gladly became a part of the ensemble. These notes were a bit pithier than the ones I’d been playing all my life and I had to step up my game considerably. It reminded me of my eighth grade year when the band director said, “I need you to join the high school band since our last trumpet player just graduated. Now . . . are we going to have to come down to your level or are you going to come up to ours?” I got better very quickly. Playing with the symphony was a real kick, not due to the more complicated music but the fact that in those days we wore tuxedos and the only thing cooler than a trumpet is a trumpet player in a tuxedo. However, my symphony gig ended abruptly for myself and several other local musicians when on the day of a concert we entered Rammelkamp Chapel to find professional ringers from St. Louis who’d been hired to come play first chair in each section. . . all this without informing us. It was at that point that we told the symphony to take a short hike. After moving to Arenzville my tooting was limited mainly to military funerals and it was good to have something to offer at times of a family’s grief. However, declining breath and new dentures forced me to call a halt to trumpeting and I loaned the horn to my nephew David for his days at JHS, then when Dave graduated and Amy Albers put out the call for instruments to be donated to deserving young musicians I waved goodbye to the horn after taking a final deep sniff of the contents of the instrument case. It was heady. And now when I see the JHS marching band strut by me in a parade I look for the horn. I hope it’s out there somewhere, tooting as happily as it did when I first picked it up, and I hope that the kid playing it sniffs his case occasionally.