FishrCoAg ... Thanks for the offer but I will have one in the mail in a few days.
I have had the notice of Homecoming on my desk for a couple of months but just never worked up any enthusiasm for attending. Not many of my friends left now so those events are usually a grim reminder of our own mortality.
Yeah, I remember the Band back around the 1947 days. We had a new eager teacher at the high school and she was actively recruiting live bodies to revive a band that was probably not too great to begin with. She was desperate for some heavy metal operators so three or four of us volunteered our musical talents ... limited as they were to a few years of calling hogs and cows.
No one was inclined to pay cash money to purchase a musical instrument so the alternative was to dig through the various horns piled in a storeroom and select something that seemed to suit your style. Problem was there were only a couple of trumpets or cornets, which went to the early birds, and the remainder were a tuba, an alto horn, and a baritone. There were some pieces of a slide trombone but we could not figure how they went together or how they worked if you got them together. I ended up with the tuba.
Well, as it turned out the new eager teacher did not know any more about operating a clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, alto horn or tuba than we did ... so our band practice sessions were not too different than the scene out of the musical "The Music Man."
We were fortunate that the school song,"Rise Ye Men of Roby High School" was set to the tune of "The Eyes of Texas" but we only knew the notes as in "I Been Workin' On The Railroad." So the way we learned it was someone would pick a note and begin humming it and the rest of us would jiggle frets and valves until we found a note that came pretty close to the note being hummed. We actually found some sheet music but it may as well have been written in Chinese. Call it hit or miss ... or hunt and peck on a strange instrument, whatever, we eventually found a close approximation of the notes ... although no one had any idea what key it may have been in.
Yeah, the uniforms were another story ... piled in another store room. You had to dig around for a coat and hat and pair of pants that generally fit. Even after several days hanging on the clothes line the odor of several years of sweat, storage pile, more sweat, more storage pile was almost overpowering. (Dry cleaning had not arrived at Roby and if you desired that service you had to bundle things up and send them to Sweetwater on the bus ... so we didn't.)
Within a month or so we had possible passable band. We were good enough to impress our schoolmates at assembly (most had never heard a band before even on radio ... which not too many families had.) So were doing our musical magic in fertile virgin ground.
The conflict arose on Friday nights for home football games. Those of us in the band, boys all freshmen, had also come out for football. The band lady insisted that we sit with the band so she would have a band whenever she wanted to inspire the homefolks and the team with our own version of a John Philip Sousa march. We wanted to be on the bench with the other scrubs in front of the pep squad. The football coach betrayed us by saying, "hell, I don't care where they sit so long as they can go in in case I need a substitute." So there we sat during games, suited up to do battle on the field, but relegated to a seat between the clarinetist and the piccolo player. It was a revolting development ... but occasionally, really occasionally, the coach would come to the fence and call someone's name to go in for so and so. King Gill never felt so proud in 1922 to come out of the stands ... for us it was more like Gabriel calling us out of Purgatory.
It wasn't too long until I pawned that tuba off on some other kid ... either Baldy or Jug Stuart, if I recall ... and I moved to a more portable instrument, the French or alto horn.
My cousin, same age, played the trumpet and for a couple of years we played together putting together tunes we had heard. He played lead and I tried to harmonize with the alto horn. Not a bad sound when we actually hit the notes we were aiming at but it did not make a lot of difference ... our audiences were forgiving. There were a number of organizations that had meetings in those days and some soul was always tasked to come up with some sort of program. My cousin was a promoter and when asked he was always ready ... "Sure we will play." So the two of us yo-yos would show up at county Boy Scout gatherings, Farm Bureau meetings, church socials and various other events. It was a bit embarrassing but the home folks always applauded and said nice things ... I suspect they were more relieved that we were in a place where they could see us and did not have to worry that we were in the parking lot stealing the hubcaps off their cars.
