"Someday" just became "today".
I had just started teaching the band program in Payette, Idaho, having been lured out of the burgeoning metropolis of Boise that the dirt-scrabble town of Kuna was being devoured by. (It turns out that I like visiting cities, but I prefer living in small towns. Who knew?) Bill Parks, a band director from whom I learned a ton of things from (good, bad, up, down, you name it), had already laid the groundwork for a combined Payette/Fruitland/New Plymouth "county band" to march in the HCP that coming Thanksgiving weekend, so I got in on the second floor and Parks, my good friend Joel Williams and I led three bands combining to about two hundred who usually competed against each other to make ONE band to perform at this big event. [Big parades like big bands. Bands around 100 students aren't usually "big enough" to be accepted by these big-time shindigs. I'll tell you a story about THAT later....]
[No, I'll tell you now:
When I was growing up in northern California, I lived in two school districts - kids on my side of the street usually chose to go to Placer HS, which had an amazing band director named Clyde Quick, from whom I learned more about teaching than anyone except my own parents, who had a strong program that performed well but was more dedicated to creating exceptional human beings first. Kids on the other side usually went to Del Oro HS, which had an amazing band director named Ron Jones, a military man who raised exceptional human beings as a by-product of creating military-styled marching bands that were the stuff of legend.
When Del Oro was first growing, as a school and as a band program, Ron applied his Del Oro Golden Eagle band to perform in the Pasadena Rose Parade. The school was small, and though he had bands with 20-30% of the school population in them, that was still only 100-120 students. He showed me the rejection letter once, saying they didn't take "insignificant little bands" in their parade. This was in the late 1960s. Twenty years later, when DO had traveled to Austria, among other places, and had literally retired the sweepstakes trophies in several of the major competitions in Northern CA - I wish I could say I had anything to do with that, as I'd started teaching one of his feeder schools in 1984, but my contributions were minimal even then, and zero in the formative years - the Rose Parade actually reached out to Ron and asked if he would bring the Del Oro band to perform in Pasadena before he retired in the next couple of years.
His answer was classic. "I'm sorry, but we don't perform in 'insignificant little parades'."
Best comeback I've ever heard, because it took twenty years to set up.]
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
We had to create 200 brand new uniforms for the event (green, just about the ONLY color none of our three schools had in our own repertoires, "so none could boast"). We had to raise a HUGE amount of money for 200 students, another 40 or so adults, find rehearsal time OUTSIDE our normal school scheds to put the three bands together and put together not ONLY our parade routine at a world-class level but ALSO a standstill routine for a contest to be held at the HOLLYWOOD BOWL the day before! Oh, and I was a new teacher in a new school, learning a new system. We won the district marching band title that year anyway, by two-tenths of a point. And my wife was pregnant with a child we would eventually lose at birth. Worked our BUTTS off that fall!
Here's one of my favorite moments from the parade itself, which was AMAZING (three miles long, huge grandstands PACKED the entire length - it was the most incredible actual PARADE I ever participated in!). There were all sorts of celebs scattered throughout the parade, which we knew ahead of time, but we only knew what our band order was - which band we were ahead of, which one we were behind. Then the bands merged with the celebrity/car/horse part of the parade about three blocks before the step off in front of Graumann's Chinese Theater (y'know, where all the handprints are?) on the red carpet. Who did WE end up next to? My then three-year old son's favorite television star...the Bear In The Big Blue House himself! One of the Fruitland parents walking alongside got a picture of me posing with Bear at that moment, and when my little Hamilton saw that? I was a celebrity myself... Lord, I wish I had a copy of that picture today!
One of the most interesting lessons I learned in the entire process of putting the programs together was the disparity of teaching and conducting styles involved, and how style had little to do with success. I mentioned above being influenced by the two high school directors of my youth - Clyde was people first, which made the process work out for the best; Ron was process first, which made the people work out for the best. (And on top of that, my elementary director was a retired orchestra teacher, a 'little old lady' named Ardis Whitehead, who did amazing things with us and was as far removed from both Clyde and Ron as you can imagine!).
I also had the experience when I was one of the two elementary/junior high teachers for Ron Jones' program - I was a loud, energetic, demonstrative, always laughing kind of teacher, and the other feeder program was run by the wonderful Mrs. Joss Bravo, the exact opposite of my style. Whenever we combined our bands for Del Oro events (as we often did), my students would have to squint to find Mrs. Bravo's conducting, and her students would duck and cover when I started waving the stick around like Harry Potter! (JK Rowling hadn't written those stories yet - just pretend, OK?)
One semester, I taught Ron's freshman band class, and I started teaching like I usually did, Ron quickly pulled me aside and said, very nicely, "I know you're good at what you do the way you teach, but in my program, I'm going to insist you teach in my modality, since these kids go back and forth between instructors." And then he did something amazing. To demonstrate this, he proceeded to teach one class period the way I TEACH. It freaked his students out, and he could make it work, but it wasn't HIM. His point? When you run your program, you need to run it the way YOU need to run it to be most effective. Style isn't important. Consistency is. Students need to know what to expect. I've never forgotten that.
And that came back to me a decade later in 1999.
Back to the Hollywood Christmas Parade story!
When we held combined rehearsals, you had Bill, who made ME look quiet and conservative on the podium. There's a reason Bill burned out in about four years, took a couple off, and then went to a new band job for the next few years - it would've been impossible to keep up the pace he kept up! (Two years after this, he went into administration full time.) And then you had Joel, who as fun-loving a guy as he was and is, would have reminded you of Ron Jones with the baton: his students came to attention when he took the podium, even in concert band. There was NO talking except his.
In between? There was me. Bill's students freaked out at Joel's expectations; Joel's students freaked out at Bill's. I ended up doing a lion's share of the student-coordination work, simply because my style was most palatable to the entire body of students involved. Eventually, everyone got used to everyone else, but it was an interesting meshing of disparate styles that made me remember Ron Jones' words often.
(Ron used to come to Idaho after he retired to judge marching contests, often ones I had my bands in. His tape recorded commentaries were delightful, because he'd give us the usual narrative that a director would oft play for the students the next class period...and then there'd be a break, to give me an option to turn off the player, and then slip in about 30 seconds of "I'm glad to see you doing this or that with your band here, Gordon..." Always a treat. Not quite the treat I got when I brought Clyde up to judge festivals here, and seeing his pride in what I'd become as a director as a parent felt like the closest I could get to my dead parents' praising me. But close.)
There were bands from throughout the nation there - we had ridden busses from Payette County to LA, seventeen hours over the Nevada desert overnight, but some had ridden 36 hours on busses (the band from South Dakota!), and some had their kids scattered on seven different flights from Virginia into LAX (that poor director was SO worried that something would happen to one of his group's flights!). Bill and I had our own busses, and our own bus drivers - all former truckers, veterans of the road! - but Joel's Fruitland district had 'locals', what they called 'housewife drivers', whom they didn't trust to make a trip like that. So while our kids were riding big yellows across the desert, Joel's kids were on luxury busses riding in reclining seats! Our kids felt a bit jealous...until the hired gun drivers got themselves lost going from the Hollywood Bowl to Magic Mountain, and spent SIX HOURS on the road while our kids were enjoying the park! Never were we so thankful for our own drivers and our 'big yellows'!
Speaking of our "big yellows"...we were riding those big yellows through the streets of the city to get from our hotel over to the Hollywood Bowl for the "standstill competition" (a thinly veiled excuse to simply be able to say we've played in the world-famous Hollywood Bowl of Bugs Bunny opera fame!). On the way, we're stopped at a stoplight, and we notice on the right side of the bus, across the street, there's this bank in a strip mall that's literally being held up by three or four bank robbers as we watched! Being Hollywood, we're scoping for camera crews, all that sort of stuff, but none to be seen: apparently, it was a legit robbery in progress! Then we saw a SWAT team (don't know whose - probably local police?) creeping up along the street side of the bank, which would've been their blind side. About five cops looking like in about thirty seconds all heck's gonna let loose.
So the kids on my bus are BEGGING to stop and watch what happens, or worse yet, get out and try to help the cops stop the crooks! It's utter bedlam on my bus (Two other busses of ours are right behind us - one of them never even noticed them, and the other only as they were passing it on a green light.) And finally "Mack" McKensie, the biggest guy in the band (also played lineman on the football team. All of the linemen...), shouts out the best bathplug to the bedlam he could have possible said: "Yeah, 'cause THAT'S exactly what those cops need right now - a bus load of HIGH SCHOOL kids!" Um, yeah, point taken. Never mind. Don't know what happened; it sure looked like the good guys were going to win...
Magic Mountain amusement park was an amazing experience, and the second to last thing we did on the six day trip. (The televised parade itself was on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving, and we literally got off the street, changed out of uniform, put everything on the trailers, and started home overnight.) Bill Parks and I had slaved away at the arrangements for this trip, and all the little stupid stuff we had to put up with for MONTHS to make this work, and we decided that the heck with all of this! We slipped away from the gaggle of students from our bands who wanted to hang out with us, and went off to ride rides on our own, and spent several hours whining to each other about all the problems we'd faced to make this stupid trip happen, and poor little us! Finally, Fruitland's band arrived, and then that evening we had the awards ceremony from the Hollywood Bowl competition we'd had that morning.
Some logistics you need to understand: the Hollywood Bowl is built on a hilltop - LA itself is hill country - and that South Dakota band was in a hotel at the very foot of that hill. (We were all in a dozen different hotels. One of my jobs upon our arrival was to help our 200 kids find their hotel rooms, and explain to our rural bumpkins that "304" meant their room was on the third floor. That knowledge had never come up in their lives before!) Remember, that South Dakota band had ridden on busses for 36 hours to get there. So, listen to what the contest director told us that evening (and I'm paraphrasing - it's been eighteen years...):
"Hey, everyone, I need to tell you about something that happened after you all left the Bowl this morning. The South Dakota band was walking down the hill towards their hotel after the competition. A mom and dad, band parents for them, walking down the hill on the sidewalk with their nine year old daughter, watched as a reckless driver crashed off the road, across the sidewalk in front of the couple and killed their daughter right in front of them."
And at that moment, Bill Parks and I looked at each other, and were ashamed for having complained about the trivial crap that we'd been whining about all day. I lost touch with Bill in the late 2000's, when he and his wife moved back to their home town of Stockton, CA. But the two of us were changed as teachers and as people in that moment. The new question was now, "Did everyone survive the trip? Then it couldn't have been that bad." Priorities. Be careful of what you complain about, because it could be SO much worse.
[And isn't that true of us in every direction we look? "Boy, it's hard work being a Christian!" Really? Want to go to Africa or Asia, where they're known to kill people just because they believe in the truth of the Living God? And you're bitch'n because you can't pray out loud in class? Shut. Up.]
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