It Ain’t A Parade Without The Band !

 

            While at Houston, Holiday Parades were the bane of my existence.  When I first arrived, we marched in the Bartlett, Collierville and Germantown Holiday Parades.   We gave up Bartlett when they started scheduling their parade on top of the Collierville parade.  We quit marching in the Collierville parade twice for two separate reasons.  Back in the day, they did the parade around the square in Collierville.  It was so crowded that eventually a Shriner on a motorcycle ran over a pregnant lady (sad but very true).  Our band had grown so large and the street there was so narrow that we were literally on 3 sides of the square at one time.  Not only is that not conducive to a good performance – it is not a lot of fun. The year after the Shriner incident, I didn’t sign us up for the Collierville parade.  You would have thought I had taken a poop in the town square (more on poop, later).  Our not going became a huge deal.  The town’s Mayor (Herman Cox) called and threatened to “withdraw town support” if we did not come.  When informed that Collierville had never done anything to support the band, he “hrumphed” and hung up.  Then the Principal (Clayton) and Superintendent (Mitchell) called to “encourage” our attendance.  I offered to let THEM take the band if they could get the kids to go.  They both took a hard pass.  So that year we only did the Germantown parade (more on that parade, later).  

 

            After that year, the powers that be decided to move the parade to Byhalia Rd. to better accommodate crowds and performers.  The lawsuit filed by the lady who was run over by the Shriner was, I am certain, a mitigating factor.  I told the Mayor that we would give it another try.  Keep in mind that I live in Collierville and really enjoyed every chance I got to take my relatively enormous band to their parade to be compared with the Collierville band.  The athletic rivalry between Houston and Collierville was not the healthiest and, for whatever reason, some Collierville kids took it out on my band at the parade.  Now, even though we call them Holiday parades, they are essentially a moving celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus.  As such, kids in a marching band should not have things thrown at them, be spit upon, and (as best we could tell) have bass drum heads shot at with BB pistols.  Since all the Collierville kids dressed in Christmas camo, they were hard to catch. Needless to say that was our last Collierville Holiday Parade.

 

            The headache caused by the Germantown Holiday Parade was for different reasons.  Germantown is full of folks who like to be in charge of things.  This generally entails telling other folks why they can’t do something or making decisions without asking those affected if the decision works.    When they moved the parade to the second Saturday in December, they moved it onto a well-established date for ACT testing.  Out of town band participation dropped to almost none while pain and suffering for kids trying to take the test increased exponentially.  School folks were not a part of that decision.  

 

            They decided to alternate which of the local high school bands would lead the parade.  Because the parade has every politician in town in a convertible car with a poster board sign, it takes forever.  No high school kid who took the ACT earlier in the day wants to stand in the cold for an extra hour for the right to march at the end of the parade – all the while dodging horse poop.  Not only is that not fun, helping provide an audience for politicians serves what community purpose?  And speaking of cold, on the years where it was particularly cold, I would ask to keep the buses at the beginning of the parade so that the kids could sit on them and stay warm.  The first time I asked for this consideration, they said no.  A rather snooty lady in a golf cart told me it would not be appropriate (?) to have the school buses drive down the EMPTY parade route just before the parade began to get to the end of the parade.  Simple solution – we left and went home.  After we got to the school, some of the kids and I paraded through the neighborhoods for a while playing an arrangement of “Angels We Have Heard On High” coupled with the occasional “Louie, Louie”!  Germantown’s future solution to the too cold or too wet problem was two-fold.  They let us keep buses if we asked and they set a “rain date” for the parade to the following Sunday afternoon.    I’d would never have asked kids to march on a Sunday but, thank goodness, it never came up.

 

            So, what did we learn from all of this?  Maybe we learned that things like community parades need to have a fun quotient. Maybe we learned that folks who make decisions need to gather all of the relevant opinions and facts before deciding. Maybe we learned that “Keep your head up” and “Look out for horse poop” are conflicting commands.  What I learned was that, no matter the obstacle, the kids I taught would give great effort and find some way to have fun regardless of circumstance!  

We Will – We Will – Rock You!

We Will – We Will – Rock You!

            When I first came to Houston H.S., the budget for band, provided solely by the band booster organization, was much less than it had been at Shadowlawn Middle School (my previous job).  Houston boosters had been raising about $25,000 a year and I had proposed a budget of $125,000 a year.  This led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the parent led band boosters which, eventually, led to a new group of booster officers.  The “big money” raising parents after this transition were Molly McNally, Richard Hynes, and Sharon Kowalkie (Scheel family matriarch).  Before I came to Houston, the boosters mostly raised money by selling stuff.  They sold fruit, light bulbs, pizza kits, candy, had bake sales, etc….  I encouraged them to think bigger and maybe try to raise money without selling stuff (to parents) that they mostly didn’t want.  

Molly became quite successful soliciting businesses around town to donate big-ticket items for an auction.  We then put together either a dinner or (off campus) a wine and cheese party and asked community members to come bid on the stuff she had collected. On our first effort, we made about as much as the boosters had raised in the previous year.  Dick Hynes was my first introduction to a capital campaign where we would come up with a list of equipment needs and ask local philanthropists and businesses to either buy some stuff or donate to the purchase of some stuff. This was how we got our first set of real drums and our first vibraphone and real marimba.  Side note:  about 3 weeks after getting the vibraphone, either Steve Stires, Jason Hartsfield, or Kevin Moore flipped it out of the back of a moving pickup truck while moving it and, though it still played, much of the new was worn off!  

Sharon volunteered to be the coordinator for our first Rock-A-Thon. For those reading who are unfamiliar with the premise, we asked kids to solicit pledges or outright donations from folks based on the kid rocking in a rocking chair for 12 hours straight.  We let them out of the chairs for 5 minutes every hour to either get a snack or go to the restroom.  At the first Rock-A-Thon, the kids mostly played cards and board games.  By the time I had left Houston, kids were bringing computer or video game consoles hooked up to big flat screen TV’s, watching multiple movies, and doing karaoke or listening to live bands.  Still, for the most part, the more memorable moments at Rock-A-Thon involved more than the technology.  I remember:

One year at Rock-A-Thon it snowed.  During the five minute break, Renee Reyle, Katie Sauer and Miranda Lewis decided to strip to their underwear and run around the flagpole in front of the school to “see what that felt like”!  Keep in mind, it was 2:00 a.m.  The morons forgot to block the door open and it locked behind them.  We were having the Rock-A-Thon in the P.E. gym and, when they didn’t show up in their chairs, I went looking.  When I got to the band room, I saw a pile of clothes on the floor and heard banging on the outside door (old band room).  Renee was yelling at me to let them in but not to look!  Fearing for my job should anyone ever find out what was going on, I kicked the door open and ran for the gym.

One year, we held Rock-A-Thon about one week after the Lord of the Rings movie, “Return of the King”, came out in theaters.  I had a band kid who said they could get it for us to watch.  While I was leery, I had grown used to Katie Eggleston’s mom providing new movies for us to watch as she worked for Malco.  I thought this kid just had some connections. Not only were all the kids looking forward to this, I had some parents come who had put off seeing it in the theater to watch it free in the band room.  The kid had burned the movie to a DVD and gave it to me to play.  It was “Return of the King” all-righty…… with Russian subtitles.  I had my entire band and many parents watching an illegal and pirated version of the movie.  There is only one thing to do in that circumstance…… pass the popcorn!

Lots of little things:

1.             Lonzi Pink’s mom guarding the door to keep folks inside.

2.             Michael Wilson going to his office to sleep.

3.             Lori Tingle video taping Kathy Tuberville asleep and snoring “Hard”.

4.             A mom who showed up at 8:00 a.m. with 200 donuts (Rock-A-Thon ended at 7:00 a.m.).

5.             Leaving at 7:00 a.m. (as the Rock-A-Thon ended) with Spencer Nesvick to go to the WTSBOA band director’s manadatory meeting in Jackson, TN.

6.             The year it was canceled because of no water in the school and the kids still turned in donations in excess of what we had budgeted.

7.             The worry on the faces of freshman parents as they dropped off their kids to spend the night and the joy on those same faces when their kids had survived!

8.             Watching freshman boys eat free food like there was a global famine on the horizon…. and then turn green about 2:00 in the morning.

9.             Telling “young love” that one person to a rocking chair is the maximum allowed.

10.         Watching parents who volunteered to chaperone drift off to sleep one by one.

Just to show where the inspiration for a Rock-A-Thon came from, here is a picture of me, and some friends, from my first time in 1974.  Yes, the rocking chair had been invented by 1974!

With all that is going on right now, I hope kids in band now get to experience these sorts of “bonding” type things.  Very few people go back to a high school reunion to reminisce about conjugating verbs or solving the quadratic equation.  But watching Spencer Lane sing Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”……… Priceless!!

Statute of Limitations

Statute of Limitations

            I checked, and criminal exposure for the activity I am about to discuss has passed.  Since none of the people involved give a hoot about public embarrassment….. Here we go!

            David Pickler once told me that getting new resources, equipment, music, funding, etc… from the school system was problematic because we seemed to do so much with the little we had.  We were so successful that the need for help was not as apparent as it should be.  The competitive success came because the kids in our band were incredible and exceptional. Still, there were day-to-day needs that had to be filled and, without money, those needs were still there. Some of the kids developed a system of “Appropriation” that filled our needs as long as I was willing to not ask a whole lot of questions.  Examples would be:

            Before the storage building we have now, Shelby County Schools placed 2 small, very old, and repurposed portable buildings that had been condemned (yes – condemned) out near where the storage building is now. This was to serve to store uniforms, off season equipment, podiums, vermin, the “Beau Brady” museum of acquisition, and other stuff.  They did not, however, provide any shelving or rods for hanging uniforms.  A couple of the kids said they could rustle up some lumber and pipe and, sure enough, over the next week an impressive pile of building materials appeared next to the portables.  We all met one Saturday to outfit the portables with shelves and the like.  At some point during the day, I heard one kid tell another that the secret to “appropriating” what we needed was to not take too much from one place.  Feeling rather like Capt. Obvious, it was at that point that it occurred to me to notice all of the new house construction going on next to the school.  I thought it better not to ask.

            Every day, I would have to load up yard line markers, paint, chalk, speaker and microphone, or some such paraphernalia, and move it over to the grass area under the powerlines (TVA easement) for practice.  Flipping water moccasins back into the ditch was also a chore….. but I digress.  One day, an enterprising young man said, “Mr. Smith, what you need is a grocery cart to roll that junk in.”  The next day, a grocery cart appeared in the band room. Missing from the cart was the plastic handle cover that I suspect once said “Kroger”.  I thought it better not to ask.

            Every teacher is assigned a short filing cabinet and a desk.  If you were lucky, you would sometimes be gifted a second filing cabinet.  One day, I complained out loud to some band folks helping clean and organize the band room that life would surely be easier if we had “a few more filing cabinets”.  Keep in mind that I would regularly requisition them at the beginning of the year, only to be told that I could not get them.  A few days after complaining, I came into the band room to find 3, brand new, 4-drawer file cabinets.  The note on one of them said, “Please don’t thank the school for these – they might not understand!”  Coincidentally, I found out later that week that the school board had delivered new filing cabinets.  I found this out when a smiling plant manager delivered my 1 NEW CABINET.  Had he looked in the music library he would have been very surprised.  Though it was obvious to me that he had no idea I was now the owner of 4 new cabinets, I thought it better not to ask.

            Kevin Moore (may he rest in peace), Tom Mason, Alex Ertz and Richard Brown would probably like me to state, for the record, that they know nothing of these sorts of endeavors.  They probably would…… I thought it better not to ask!