There are a lot of Band stories, however, this one is about how I think I managed to allow the Marshall High School Marching Band to collect a First Division award at the 1968 Marching Festival by simply not showing up.
For most of my high school music career Ross Van Ness was our director. A tolerant and well liked teacher, he retired or otherwise left the Band Room in 1968. His replacement – whose name I don’t recall at the moment – was not my favorite. When he said how he admired George Wallace, the avowed racist governor of Alabama, his rating with me sank further.
I played French horn in the orchestra and concert band, but trumpet for marching. Much easier to handle and less risk to my Holton Model 99 horn I placed a Chichita banana sticker in the bell and occasionally got the music right.
We would practice at the athletic field aka “A-Field” at the Western edge of Marshall. Normally we rode a school bus there and back, but this particular day I rode to the field in my buddy’s late model Pontiac convertible. After practice and preparation to return in said convertible, Mr. X, while driving the bus off the field hailed me from the driver’s window as follows:
“Next time you guys ride the bus and Hey Reizner! Cut those sideburns or don’t come to the Festival tomorrow.”
I was unfazed by the direction to ride the bus, but confused on the apparent binary choice to cut this minimal facial hair OR simply not attend the competition. Note that said “sideburns” were little more than much less than an inch long and probably rather thin too. Cutting or shaving these few hairs actually never occurred to me at the time, but it wasn’t a protest or any conscious move on my part. As I recall high school, much of it was pretty unconscious, unencumbered by the thought process.
So, in fact, I DID attend the festival, but only as a spectator in the stands. That got me kicked out of the band permanently. I didn’t know that failure to attend would have that effect, but what the hell. I sold my horn to a promising player and bought a camera. But how did my choice effectively improve and secure the band’s achievement of a festival first place (or similar award)?
One has to go back several weeks to when I went to the band uniform storage room to collect my Marshall High School Marching Band outfit. And what an outfit it was. Never totally awake it seems, or at least a PROcrastinator, I arrived weeks after everyone else in the band had selected their uniforms. What was left was uniform in name only.
As I recall, my kit consisted of, among other faults, coat and pants too large, white cross belts (goes across shoulders and chest) that were not so white. In the chest center was a chrome two inch square clip/plate. Most of the chrome on mine was worn off so I had a bloom of the underlying brass with a chrome surround. Looked like it had been perhaps at the bottom of a pond for a while. I had two right spats that appeared to have coffee stains and the feather plume that inserted into the boxy hat looked like it had been used to clean a gun recently. The entire ensemble was the turd in the punch bowl. But I took it anyway.
So, the rules of the competition provided for various “demerits” that counted against the total score for the band. My being absent was “a man out of place” and ONE demerit. IF I had been on the field in that getup and not in the stands one could only wonder how many demerits it would have garnered. Thus, at least in my mind, my choice allowed the rest of the band not to get knocked out of a first division finish.
I was summoned into the director’s office the next school day and with his regret to lose a French horn player dismissed from the music program. Well, being a senior I took this as reasonable and that was that.
Now let us skip ahead five years. I am attending my first high school reunion. To my surprise I am being recalled as some kind of hero. That would not fit with my own perception of my social status back then, but the accolade was genuine. The rumor at the time – and Marshall was famous for rumor – was that I quit the band in protest over the removal of sideburn order. While I certainly did quit the band, though not intentionally, the idea that I was protesting anything still strikes me as amusing and rather absurd. The oblivious “hero” perhaps.