It is late Fall 1971, and my mother and I are sitting on the couch watching a Baltimore Colts football game.  This is a relatively rare event for her, not being a football fan, but it is a special occasion because the halftime show will be performed by the WVU Mountaineer Marching Band.  We are both pretty excited about the possibilities, because one year hence, I will be a member of this same organization.  During the performance, which to the best of my recollection consisted only of the band standing in a straight line down the middle of the field, the camera panned down the relatively short line to display quite an array of apparent misfits and weirdos (including guys I would come to know as “Mad Chad”, “Fast Eddie”, and “Flork”).  For the 2^nd time in my life*, my mother looked sideways at me, and with her wry smile asked, “Are you sure you want to be a part of this group?”  My immediate answer was, “Yes”, though I could not possibly know how important that decision was going to turn out to be.

                In retrospect, it’s difficult to know how my life would have been different had I not enrolled in WVU as a music major.  More than likely, I would have been in the band anyway, but I had tried to convince my parents that a year of life experience before college would give me a better grasp on my future.  Had that occurred, and had I not followed my high school guidance counselor’s poorly-considered suggestion, I would very likely have majored in pharmacy, and every person I have met since then would have been someone different.  I might not have joined the band at all, and my life would have been incalculably altered (if not certainly for the worse) as a result.

                Band camp in the Fall of 1972 started out simply enough.  Fellow Big Red Band member Mike Ryan and I were dropped off at the Creative Arts Center with enough clothes for a week (we thought) and our musical instruments.  Like adults, we bravely waved our parents good-bye and turned our attentions to our new adventure.  Everybody was having a great time renewing old friendships but ignoring the Freshmen – until we got on the bus.  Then began the “harassment” that would persist for the entire week.  [Since this journal isn’t really about that Band Camp, you’ll have to read another journal to get that entire story.**]

                Arriving at Camp Dawson, we already had our heads spinning with attempts to memorize the fight song, the other fight song, and the names of every upper-classman on the bus, before we finally got to see our Band Director – Mr. Don Wilcox.  It was a bit unnerving that we hadn’t seen him earlier, becoming more so when he zoomed into the parking lot in a dune buggy (Where does he think he is?!), mop-top haircut flying in the breeze, and broke all records when he dragged us onto the practice field without having had the opportunity to unpack.  What kind of guy was this?  We soon found out.

                To be honest, the previous incarnation of the Band had a reputation for being slovenly, sloppy, musically questionable, and downright ornery.  It didn’t take long to realize that Don Wilcox was not the reason for that, but that he would certainly be the cure!  His quest for excellence knew no bounds, and honestly, I was thrilled by it.  As a Big Red alumnus, I was quite proud of our high school band, but it certainly had its flaws.  Our director was constantly assailed as incompetent (an unfair characterization, I believe), we harbored a number of ruffians, and that eternal military marching style was pretty limiting in many ways.  I had hardly played any band music that wasn’t a Sousa march before I got to Camp Dawson, and Don Wilcox was starting the season out with a Blood, Sweat, & Tears medley!  As if that wasn’t difficult enough, he wanted us to begin from a standing start and do an off-the-beat kick-turn in the middle of the introduction to “Spinning Wheel”!  This cool-looking guy with the cool car gave us cool music to do in a cool show, then became totally uncool by demanding that we do it perfectly.

                You know what else that cool guy gave me?  Responsibility.  Before I knew it (and I still don’t know how or why), I was co-Rank and co-Section leader.  All things considered, it was probably born out of necessity, with the band growing so rapidly, but I secretly hoped that he had somehow seen capability and leadership in me.  Regardless of how it happened, I suddenly found myself getting yelled at for the performance of other people!  I admit that I was proud of trying to march perfectly, but it is a whole different thing when you are responsible for a bunch of other folks.  Mr. Wilcox just kept demanding more and more, and true to my nature, I just kept trying to give it to him.  I really don’t know what it was about the guy, but it seemed impossible not to love and respect him no matter what he said or what he made us do.  Sometimes we sounded as bad as “Godebotec Junction Junior High School” with the saxophones going, “Woof woof woof”, and other times our marching was “badawfulterriblerotten” with formations that looked like a “Big Amoeba”.  Even if I had been perfect, I knew that someone somewhere had screwed up, so it was necessary for us to do it all over again.

                I can’t really objectively judge our relative quality as a band by the time we left camp, but we were a very cohesive unit that had made many accomplishments.  The Band had grown from the 88 I saw on TV to 128, and included… girls!  (Mike and I had seen the same thing happen at PHS, so we knew the Band would grow, but no one expected it to grow as much as it did over the next 5 years!  Except, perhaps, for Don Wilcox.)

                To be honest, those 5 years run together a lot in my mind at this point in my life.  I couldn’t possibly create a reasonably-accurate timeline of the various occurrences of that period, but many highlights are still quite clear to me:

                ~Being commanded by the upperclassmen to throw him in the shower during that Band Camp.  For a lot of guys, it was sheer terror to even consider it, for me there was a concern that it would represent disrespect.  I had already come to admire him in so many ways that I wanted nothing to imply that I held him in anything but the highest esteem.  I still don’t know whether that shower was some sort of tradition (to my knowledge, it never happened again after that), but I do know that he fought harder than I thought humanly possible.  There were over 40 of us Freshmen, and it seemed to take every single one of us to get him into that shower.  (This was, by the way, a communal shower built for about a dozen adults, so it should have been much easier than it was.)  Our “reward” for eventually accomplishing the task (besides getting wet, of course) was to be promptly told to go to the field and line up for Pre-game.  [Mr. Wilcox tells me that he “did NOT consider that a good use of our rehearsal time and thinking at the time that I was not going to make it easy...”]  We then did 54 consecutive tunnel entrances [a number he also quibbles about], each of which contained some grievous error that required us to begin again.  For many of those, I got to practice my hurdling skills when tuba-player Denny Thompson’s trick knee would give out on him directly in my path.  When Mr. Wilcox finally ran out of excuses to make us go again, we were exhausted but excited, and on the verge of a great Pre-game routine.

                ~That trip to Pitt my Freshman year, where we were all commanded to make a “Spirit Shirt”, to be judged by The Man himself.  I was too embarrassed to admit that I didn’t really have the spending money to go out and splurge on something for just that occasion, so I turned an old sweatshirt inside-out and used white shoe polish to write something clever like “Beat Pitt” on the front of it.  He gave me hell for doing such a crummy job, but I went away not angry, but determined to do better next time.  Some time later, I got a measure of revenge by organizing our Sectional shirt – a dark blue T with gold flocked lettering reading “Group Sax Can Be Fun”.  Knowing his tender sensibilities, I am certain that shirt produced an embarrassed chuckle almost every time he saw it. 

                ~All the weird uniform combinations we went through because he simply would not restrain the growth of the band, no matter what the obstacle.  Whether it was poorly-dyed jumpsuits or gold & white satin shirts, we would grow like Topsy until we could find benevolent “angels” to help us dress properly.  We paraded hither and yon to gather donations then did so again to thank everyone who had contributed to the fabulous-looking result (which I will always maintain was almost exactly what I had drawn for his class).  That was when we truly became The Pride of West Virginia.  We were proud to wear those uniforms, the fans were proud to cheer for us in them, and he must have been proud to see us finally dress in a manner that befitted the way we had marched and played for a long time.  (Color Change!!!)  I was proud to play a small part in helping him achieve that dream.

                ~All those creative routines that we did.  Pre-game was always the feature product, because we would do it every game; it couldn’t be boring or people would get tired of seeing it.  Ironically, most of the features we installed over those 5 years became so iconic that the band will never be able to discontinue them.  (Our cousin, Kathleen Riggs experienced the “joy” of being in the band that tried to change Pre-game entirely, and nearly got booed off the field.)  With “Purple Carnival”, the “Earth Mover”, incorporating the Jazz Ensemble into a show (really special for me, since I was in that group too), and even the “Looney Tunes” element that brought our dumb “Dominoes” game into a show, nothing was off-limits.  It was a time of tremendous creativity, and I can’t help but think that he must have imagined himself quite blessed to have a band that could do all the crazy things that he wanted to try.  (Each of us experiences a time in our life when our creative juices in our chosen field are turned on full force.  The greatest frustration is to have insufficient resources or a lack of support from our superiors to accomplish what we see is possible.  The greatest joy is to have a surfeit of both.)  In addition, we were blessed with excellent student arrangers who kept supplying us with unique charts of cutting-edge music to play.  From Dave Williams to John Locke to Bobby Carpenter to Dave McCullough and Dan Traugh, the tunes kept coming, and no one else in the country had them.

                The shows kept coming too.  It was a point of Mr. Wilcox’s pride that we would not repeat a Half-time show.  Admittedly, we had to stretch a bit sometimes to maintain that lofty standard.  We learned how to deal with 4-Day Wonders, those dreaded back-to-back home games that only gave us 4 practices to construct.  We learned about Rank Options – one of my very favorite things – in which he would simply say, “OK everyone, you are now in Chart C, you have 8 series to get to Chart D.”  I know not what course others may take, but if you give me an opening like that, I’m going to figure out how to arrive on my spot EXACTLY on the last beat, with as much craziness in between as possible.  I got a special joy out of hearing the man with the megaphone holler out, “Dave, where are you guys going?!?!” 

The piece de resistance, of course, was the decision to have a jet-propelled tuba player leap over the band, Evel Kneivel style.  I consider it one of the great gifts of my life to have been sitting there in the office with him, pondering what in the world we were going to do for a show, when the phone rang.  It must have been the quintessential slow news week, because the Daily Athenaeum staff was on the line, wanting to do a feature on the band’s upcoming Half-time show.  Momentarily possessed of colossal orneriness, Mr. Wilcox replied, “Oh, we’re going to jump a tuba player over the band on a rocket-powered tricycle.”  Then he hung up.  I don’t think we really gave it much more than a laugh after that, until the following morning’s paper came out, excoriating us for attempting such a dangerous and foolhardy stunt.  At that point, the challenge was on, and we simply had to do it.  It’s hard to imagine that you could pull off such a thing in barely a week, especially while keeping the denouement under wraps and battling with the newspaper (until Friday’s edition, when they finally caught on and pretended to be in on the joke all along), but by Saturday afternoon, Brad Dugan, all 250 pounds of him, complete with cape and aviator’s helmet, rolled out of the tunnel on a tricycle, barely made it up the incline in front of him, and rolled into the band, starting the aforementioned line of dominoes (i.e. band members).  The crowd naturally went wild, and a good time was had by all.  Lesson learned – never doubt Mr. Wilcox, no matter how absurd a thing he says.  [More on this on my website… Click HERE.]

                ~Then there were all the conversations with “opposing” band offices, misleading them into believing that we were what we had always been.  In those days, bands didn’t travel much, so it was often years between visits.  I got to spend an entire week one season misleading the staff at Maryland, who called every single day “to set up the visit”.  Using techniques I had learned from the master, I had them convinced that we had a hundred shoeless hillbillies who couldn’t march and play at the same time.  They were shocked when we blew them off the field in their own stadium.  We could be gracious, though, helping Virginia Tech transform from a tinny military troupe into a modern marching band.  Not that they particularly appreciated it, since their transformative show was “Disco Duck”!  (In the initial game of the 2017 season, they demonstrated their lack of progress by thrilling the crowd with a tuba-led version of the Hokey Pokey, made worse by their crowd’s enthusiastic participation.)

                The best example of this was my first trip to Penn State, where the team was guaranteed to lose, meaning that the band had to win.  PSU was another Mid-west style marching band with spats and a herky-jerky style.  They were led by their long-time leader Ned Deitz who held an over-inflated opinion of the quality of his rather routine formations and stock musical charts.  All week long, Mr. Wilcox had duped Ned into believing that our band was as clueless as it had always been (“They wouldn’t know a straight line if they saw one!”).  The insult became worse when it was announced that we would not actually spend any game time inside the stadium – we would get off our buses, do our pregame, and go back to the buses (I honestly can’t remember whether we did a halftime or not.).  In those days, we played a standing fanfare before setting off on the rest of our show – part to the left, part to the right, and part straight downfield – but on this day, the entire fanfare went straight downfield, because Ned insisted on standing under the opposite goalpost, clipboard in hand, and Mr. Wilcox wanted him to get the full effect of our musically-improved band.  It wasn’t until the following week that we got the punchline delivered to us.  Mr. Wilcox, a well-known teetotaler when it comes to swearing, regaled us with the entire story, reporting that the first note of that fanfare resulted in Ned slamming his clipboard to the ground while muttering, “Damn!”  I could never be sure whether the occurrence itself was funnier or Mr. Wilcox’s slightly-embarrassed rendition of it.

                ~Then there was that arranging class of his, in which we had to prepare music for a variety of instrumental combinations.  It was only one of the times that I was clearly reminded that I was in the wrong major, but since Mr. Wilcox was teaching it, I still wanted to do well.  The class was very enjoyable, with lots of discussions about general marching band fundamentals and philosophy, but at regular intervals we would have to complete an arrangement.  Like most of my projects at that point, I finished part of a Bach chorale at the last possible minute.  We were told to arrange 32 measures, so that is exactly what I did.  (I failed to “proofread” my score, or I would have realized that the chord progression didn’t resolve until Measure 33.)  As I recall, the group was a trombone octet, or perhaps some other collection of brass, and the whole thing was going swimmingly until we approached Measure 32.  As the only person in the room who knew this wasn’t going to end well, my dread steadily built right up to the final moment.  To a musician, an unresolved chord progression is a terrible thing, and to have one in a sweet, classical, gently-building passage is particularly egregious.  I steeled myself for the inevitable, and tried to carry the moment off with aplomb.  The final note arrived, there was a general tension in the air, and Mr. Wilcox nearly fell out of his chair (literally).  “Where’s the resolution?” he cried.  My pathetic response, “I just liked it better this way.”  We all had a good laugh, but I never knew whether he thought I had done it on purpose or not.  Regardless, he didn’t seem upset, nor did he demolish me for it, so it was a win overall.

                ~And the time he desperately needed a new bullhorn to direct the band at practice.  He casually asked if anybody could spare the time to go get it in Fairmont.  Despite not having a car, I readily volunteered to pick it up.  He said, “Go”; I found Grant Slawson and wheedled his car out of him; drove like an insane maniac to Fairmont and back, arriving at the field just in time for practice to begin.  The look of enjoyment on his face was all the reward I needed for having risked life and limb to procure it for him.

                ~Did we ever disappoint each other?  I must admit it.  I guess in every student-teacher relationship there are going to be moments of conflict, particularly if the student becomes fairly competent in his own right.  I never reached that status as a musician, but as a band member I feel like I reached a definite level of excellence.  The problems occur when elements of philosophy come into conflict.

                The first time came after he honored me by having me come along to try-outs he was holding to add a new feature-twirler to the band.  Up until that time, we had only ever had 3 total female twirlers, and though the 2 we currently had were competent, Mr. Wilcox had some ideas about things that could be done with 3 or 4.  (This was the original “seed” for what eventually became 4 twirlers, one on each corner of the Concentric Circle drill in Pregame, tossing their batons over the entire band.)  I never really fancied myself much of a twirling aficionado, but I greatly appreciated that he valued my opinion on the try-outs, so I was determined to use my best judgement.  We watched a number of girls and boys perform their best routines, most of which were fairly pedestrian.  There was one girl who really caught my eye, though.  This was not due to her physique, mind you, because she was short, somewhat overweight, and possessed a nose that would put Jimmy Durante to shame.  He had said ahead of time that our priority was to find someone who was extremely fast and flashy with their twirling, and this girl definitely had that.  Her speed was much faster than her competitors, and frankly, much faster than the twirlers we currently had.  She was flawless in her execution, and had a non-stop repertoire that was truly outstanding.  Following the tryouts, Mr. Wilcox and I walked together out of the stadium, and he asked me what I thought.  I told him in no uncertain terms that we had to add that one girl to our team.  He looked at me and said, “But she has that enormous nose.”  I was taken aback, not because he had mentioned it, but because in my imaginary “Don-Wilcox-is-perfect” world, it seemed out of character for him to be concerned about physical appearances.  He added, “As a twirler, she is out in front of the band, and seen closely by everyone we pass.  That nose is just going to attract too much attention.”  I may have been disappointed that my advice wasn’t accepted, but I think more so because I felt that such a judgement was beneath him.  True, it was his band, and he had a right to see it represented as he wished, but I guess I just wished he was above that sort of thinking.

                As for me disappointing him, our other disagreement was not a time, but an evolution, and a binary one at that.  In retrospect, I know that he was right (at least in part), but there was room for compromise, and neither of us was willing to change very much.  Ironically, it was all about change.  One of the major reasons I remained so devoted to the band was the experience I had at my Freshman band camp.  True, the upper-classmen were absurdly demanding, bordering on obnoxious, but their antics built a spirit of camaraderie and one-ness that probably could not have been accomplished any other way.  Especially after the Great Disaster**, our sense of unity and cohesion was sky-high.  In many ways, it stayed that high for most of my 5 years.  (I might also mention that members from those early years still make up the lion’s share of regular attendees to the Alumni Band.)  As a result, I felt a strong obligation to keep some level of that tradition going.  But Mr. Wilcox was headed in a different direction.  (Having been through other initiation rituals in my life, I never have viewed the Band Camp activities as true hazing, though I can see why some people would.)  Partly due to his recognition that “hazing” could no longer be legitimized, and partly due to the further complication of having girls in the band, he insisted that we become a ‘kinder/gentler’ band.    I have always held that that approach caused a slow diminution in the coherence and discipline of the band, and created in many new members an undeserved sense of entitlement and a lack of commitment and devotion.  (My beloved friend and roommate Bill Baran used to gently chastise me for being a “hundred-percenter”, but it is a trait of which I am still proud.)  The process brought many of us into conflict, strained my friendship with Dave McCullough, and left a tension between myself and Mr. Wilcox that somehow never seemed to quite fully go away – much to my regret.

Mr. Wilcox was very focused on improving the musical quality of the band, a goal he accomplished quite well.  To attain it, however, he made other compromises that I felt further diminished the level of buy-in of the members.  His fascination with the Corps style on the rise at that time brought about the addition of flag wavers (a thoroughly worthless element), the short rocker step (better musically, but silly-looking) and meaningless curly-cue formations.  The end result made the WVU band of the late 80’s as different from our band of the mid-70’s, as our band was from the spats-wearing bands of the Midwest that were in vogue earlier.  The combination of that change and the change in commitment level seemed to me to leave the band in a constant spiral of sameness from which it has never escaped.  Ironically, today’s band is supposedly better musically (it’s really difficult to judge when one is entirely inside one organization and completely outside the other) though the old band could literally march rings around them (partly because the current band can’t make a circle to save their lives).

One of my favorite Mr. Wilcoxisms was how he always addressed us the week of Homecoming to let us know that the alumni were coming, and they would judge us harshly.  In his best mock-expert voice, he would tell us that they would claim that they marched much better, played much better, and were vastly more important to the history of the University than we could ever hope to be.  I don’t know whether recent or current directors do the same, but there might now be some truth in that joke.  The marching part is a matter of visual record, so anyone could peruse pictures of the shows and make an adequate assessment of the relative quality.  The music is a bit more difficult to judge, but three times this past season I was close enough to watch carefully enough to count about one-quarter of the instrumentalists (percussion excluded) not playing while moving.

The bottom line is he never let on that he had any serious problems with me, other than the aforementioned argument with Dave Muck in which I was obviously the odd man out.  Apparently he valued the good that I did enough to keep from letting the bad do any appreciable harm to our relationship.  It’s an approach I’ve tried to maintain with every student I’ve ever taught.

                ~How much did that band experience, and particularly my relationship with Mr. Wilcox mean to me?  Simply put – everything.  To wit:

·         I walked into my weekly saxophone lesson with Dr. Krusenstjerna one day late in the first semester of my Junior year.  He had been continually disappointed in my progress as a saxophonist for some time, and had chosen this particular day to issue an ultimatum.  He pointed out to me that my progress was not sufficient to graduate on time, as though that would be some sort of revelation.  As previously mentioned, I had known for some time that I wasn’t nearly good enough at music overall to be teaching it every day.  His big mistake was in telling me that my only chance was to quit the marching band, insinuating that spending that time in a practice room would cause me to attain the necessary level.  (wink, wink; nudge, nudge; knowwhatImean)  Though he had always intimidated me somewhat, I gathered up all my nerve and told him in no uncertain terms that being a high-school band director meant always being judged on the quality of one’s band on Friday nights, and that working daily with the best band director in America in one of the best bands in the country was FAR better preparation than practicing a saxophone all day.  I packed up my horn, went directly to an advisor in the school of Education, and became a Social Studies major.  It was difficult to explain to my father, but the bonus was that it ensured TWO more years with Don Wilcox.

·         When the Band was awarded the Sudler Trophy in 1997, I was thrilled to be able to be present, and to have been a small part of the process that led to it.  Of course, I was also irritated that it took so long for the people who present that thing to realize the exceptional program that Mr. Wilcox had built over the years.  WVU was one of the nation’s top bands for over 25 years before an organization specifically designed to recognize excellence realized it.  In a way, it seemed to me like an insult to a great Director to make him wait so long, but I know he was honored and proud that the award had eventually come.  He was, as always, humble in accepting it though he need not have been – everything we ever were was directly traceable to him, and no sensible person who has ever been in those bands would deny it.

·         When I first heard that Mr. Wilcox was afflicted with leukemia, it hit me very hard.  As much as any man not from my biological family, he influenced the person I am today.  In all the years since those early days, I have never met a band member (or anyone else, for that matter) who could say anything genuinely negative about him.  Now, for absolutely no logical reason, he was afflicted with a disease that could possibly prevent him from being the man he had always been. I should have known better, of course, because he not only beat it, but maintained his usual dignity.  He shared a part of the story of his battle with us one Homecoming, and I have never seen a group of grown adults go from tears to cheers in such rapid order.  He asked no pity, but reminded us how important it is to do the things that matter to you, regardless of what obstacles are thrown in your path.  As usual, a life lesson for us all.

·         When we heard that the Alumni Band was taking a trip to Greece and Italy, it was quite tempting to sign on, regardless of the difficulties involved.  (Cindy had just had a laminectomy on her back, family summer vacation plans had to be undone, the expense was somewhat daunting, and Cindy didn’t have a valid passport.)  The clincher was the rumor that this might be Mr. Wilcox’s last such trip, so it moved quickly from “something we want to do someday” to “something we NEED to do NOW”.  I honestly couldn’t imagine my life being truly complete without taking such a journey with him, and as a lover of ancient history, it seemed to be the “perfect storm”.  That first day in Morgantown was SO much like that first day so long ago: some old friends, some new faces, pleasant butterflies in the stomach spawned by anticipation.  Sitting in front of that same Director, though far more experienced and confident now, I still felt that thrill of working with someone who would demand my very best.  It was pure joy to even practice with such an accomplished professional conducting.  (I had forgotten how enjoyable that could be.)  It was almost humorous how quickly he expected everyone to do their absolute best, but we all made a concerted effort to deliver.  There were many other excellent moments with Mr. Wilcox on that trip: dinner together at the 3 Brothers (where he marveled at our drinking prowess); singing the Alma Mater at Epidaurus; the many side comments at concerts.  The full story is the subject of yet another unwritten journal, but I mention it here for two purposes:  I believe that my skill at playing the music we were given advanced more in those two weeks than at any other time in my life, and that was directly due to my desire to give him the very best that I possibly could; additionally, while we were on the trip, another traveler joshed with me about always referring to our leader as “Mr. Wilcox”.  She said, “You just can’t bring yourself to call him anything else, can you?”  My answer was a firm, “No”.  Over the years, many of my fellow band members came to refer to him as “Boss”, or even eventually “Don”, but I have never been able to do so.  My follow-up to her question made my position clear, “I have too much respect for him to refer to him any other way.”

      Some people might find it difficult to imagine that a person could maintain that level of love and respect over such a long period of time, but I have had no trouble doing so.  Throughout all the years I have known him, including all those years when our total contact amounted to just a few minutes at Homecoming, he has remained a consistent and strong influence on my life.  It is vitally important for young teachers to have mentors that help them see how to achieve their full potential, and Don Wilcox is a great person for such a role.  He has as much integrity as any person I have ever known.  His insistence on hard work, setting high standards, and striving for excellence are part and parcel of my own teaching and coaching style.  His willingness to hold himself to the same standards he expected of others was an excellent example – his honorableness the sort of characteristic anyone would want to emulate.  Even after all these years of minimal contact, I try to be as good as he was in every way that he was every single day.  I have been very fortunate to have Don Wilcox’s influence in my life.

 

* See: One Time at Boy Scout Camp

** See: One Time at Band Camp

                

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