Life Happens-a journey

I recently had a message exchanges with a friend whose acquaintance goes back to 1985. This exchange, which I will get to later, sparked some old memories. I met Bonney in January 1985 when I took a job teaching band at a small school in Bagdad, Arizona and she was a senior in the high school band. It was my second full-time teaching job since graduating from Western Michigan University in May 1983.

My first job was at a small school in Michigan in the fall of 1983, but I was laid off at the end of the semester. I was let go from the first job because I didn’t have a PhysEd minor and the band director there was expected to teach 7th and 8th grade gym in addition to high school band, junior high band, beginning elementary band AND K-8 general music… all on a salary of $16,000 per year.

I spent the rest of 1984 substitute teaching, taking an adjunct position of one class at the local community college and working in a restaurant in the evening as a dining room manager. The job in Arizona popped up, so I jumped at it. It was going to be JUST band: high school and junior high and beginning band (5th grade) and it paid a couple thousand dollars more per year.

I had other career choices in my mind as a forward thinking teenager until the summer after ninth grade. I went to Western Michigan University with my close friends Pam and Ken late in the school year. Pam was a french horn player as I was. Her brother Ken was a euphonium player. Both very talented. They were auditioning for WMU’s Summer Seminar music camp. Pam and Ken’s parents suggested I audition. I had not prepared anything, but Pam loaned me her horn and to my surprise I was accepted! Now to go home and ask my dad for the hard earned and admittedly scarce $600 for the camp fee. He came up with the money.

The camp was two weeks living in a university dorm immersed in music. Everyone was in a wind ensemble. Then the students were all broken down into applicable wind or brass quintets, though the saxophones had a sax quartet assignment. All brass players were part of a full brass ensemble and at the middle Sunday of the two weeks session, the brass group played in the local Episcopal cathedral which had a 7 second reverberation. Students also took music theory classes while in the two week camp. It was literally like being in a college music program and I was hooked. From that point on I was going to do music for a living and become a band director.

I busted my butt back home, practicing in the morning, skipping lunch to practice and practicing again in the evening. Chairs were assigned by the band director based on audition results. Players could also challenge a fellow player to their seat to move up.

For french horn sections, it is different from other instruments and the line was not as simple as first chair (the best player usually) to second then third then fourth. Horn sections first chair was first horn in the composition. Second chair was third horn in the composition. Third chair was second horn in the manuscript and fourth was fourth. And sometimes there would be a fifth horn player as back up to the first chair effectively making that backup player second chair because they would cover solos when the first horn was not able or needed a break. By working hard I challenged my friend Anne who was first chair and captured the seat for myself early in the second semester of my senior year. She challenged back, but I retained the seat for the remainder of the school year graduating as first horn in the symphonic band and orchestra.

I pursued my dream and goal in college! And I became the proverbial small fish in a big pond. There were so many fantastic horn players at WMU. In addition I struggled to elevate my performances. But my main focus was not to be a performing horn player like my friend Lynne who would go on to get a master’s at the Royal Conservatory in England and play professionally in Europe. I was going to be a band director so not being a superb player myself wasn’t an impediment. I took five years to graduate as I worked my way through school working full-time evening jobs on top of my full college course schedule.

I got hired at the small Michigan school due to a very good reference from the band director at Mona Shores High School (a suburban school in the Muskegon Michigan area) where I had done my semester of student teaching. But as noted above, I lost that position after the first semester. Two semesters of substituting and a semester at MCC then off to Arizona in January 1985.

The Arizona school had a band director and a choir teacher. We became friends but she was leaving in May 1985 to move, ironically, to the metro Detroit Michigan area to marry the band teacher I replaced.

As the school season wound down, this school had a system by which the students signed up for classes the next year. After a flurry of sign -up activity, only six- SIX — of the more than 30 band students that year signed up for band the next fall. I was depressed and crestfallen. Absolutely dejected.

Part of the problem was perhaps because I came up in the Muskegon High School Big Red band system. The MHS band program’s ethos and drive for excellence started in the 1950s and never slacked off. The Big Red Marching Band was a legend and as junior high band players we dreamed of the day we’d be in that band when we saw them march by. The symphonic and concert bands regularly took the highest marks in the annual concert festivals from judges. Maybe I pushed the kids in my bands too hard?

Anyway, I talked to the superintendent and told him the best option for the school was to have a music teacher that could teach both instrumental and choir and since I didn’t fit the choir side of the equation I would resign and they could hunt for the appropriate teacher. I moved back to Muskegon in July 1985, took three part time jobs as I sent out resumes. This continued into the summer of 1986. I had gotten in a great relationship with my now wife Joni. We moved in together as I worked odd jobs and sent resumes. I spent most of 1986 sending resumes and substitute teaching. No job popped up for that fall and I entertained a career change.

I had an interview with the United States Marine Corps Officer recruitment office in Lansing in the summer and they did a background check, sending a lieutenant around town to interview relatives, neighbors and employers. I was accepted! I was given orders and a plane ticket from Lansing Michigan to Wash DC to go to Officer’s Candidate School bootcamp[4]. Joni and I drove to a motel the day before the flight where I shaved off my mustache and goatee and trimmed my hair. What followed was the toughest thing I had ever done!

I arrived at the DC airport to be met with yelling drill sergeants. The next few weeks were of running, drilling, no sleep. I could go into great detail on this experience alone but will leave it for a stand alone article. To make it short, by week seven I was suffering severe pain on the outside of my knees such that it hurt simply to lay in bed on my side. I had no spring in my legs to jump. My last day on active Officer’s Candidate School bootcamp I was supposed to go over a wall which was only about six feet high. To do so meant leaping up and getting one’s hands on the top and swinging your body over. But I had no leap and when jumping up merely hit my chest on the wall six or eight times before I was pulled from the course and sent to the sickbay. Due to the injury I was released from the program and told I could come back next year. While in a ‘recovery’ squadbay for a week before going home I had bruises all over my chest and biceps from the wall.

Back in Muskegon, I was now back on the market to get teaching job. I took a job at a 24 hour convenience store which was part of a small six store local chain- imitation 7-Elevens. I had proposed to Joni in a letter while at OCS and we set the date for January 31st 1987 to get married. We did so with a magistrate in my dad’s living room.

Early in the summer of 1987, I did have a promising interview with Benton Harbor schools. But as the school year got closer and closer, still no news. By late August, with no feedback from Benton Harbor, I had a decision to make. The owner, Tom, of the convenience store chain I worked for offered me a management job to run one of his stores. The pay was almost double that of a beginning teacher pay and bonuses were possible each quarter. He had already offered a position twice before that summer and I knew he wouldn’t offer a fourth time. After discussion with Joni, I left teaching for good and now embarked on what would be a ten years of retail management career.

Retail management found me first in the Frontier Marts in which at one point I was managing two of his stores and getting bonuses quarterly and realizing the lowest shrink level of his six store chain! Then to Meijers for year as a grocery stocker planning to move to management but Meijer reduced their grocery management staff and shut down that avenue to advancement. So the jump was made back to convenience stores with a position in Grand Rapids with 7-Eleven which necessitated a relocation from Muskegon to Grand Rapids which neither Joni nor I ever regretted.

The 7-Eleven job didn’t go well for reasons that I won’t go into here and which would make its own stand-alone article. Back to two part time jobs before landing full time stints with Dairy Mart and then Rite-Aid.

By the fall of 1995, I was burned out on retail’s long hours and mediocre pay. A friend suggested I apply at a manufacturing facility in Grand Haven where he worked. He said it was a good place to work. So I did and got hired without an interview due to his recommendation.

I worked third shift in the welding assembly area which produced bumpers for GM and Honda vehicles. In a year and a half, I was team leader in charge of the Honda side of the plant supervising 10–12 staff members. A new manufacturing manager came on board and posted for a “Continuous Improvement Facilitator.” I applied for it and got the job, moving to the first shift. The position entailed implementing kanban systems, designing gages and work stations, reworking plant floor layouts, calculating capacity studies.

As a good self-learner, I pulled in knowledge from numerous sources and amassed an engineering book library of almost forty books, my favorite of which are the five books I have on Shigeo Shingo.[3]

After two years of this, in May 1999, I told Doug, the manufacturing manager, that I was effectively doing industrial engineering and wanted to move into the actual engineering office with a pay that went with it. At the time, I was hourly with annual income of just over $19K. The engineering role should pay mid-$30K. But by September there was no upward movement and I realized it wasn’t going to happen there. I formatted my resume along the lines of industrial engineering and put my education (Bachelors Degree) at the bottom of it and sent it out to recruiters and job postings. A recruiter firm contacted me and I made the change in October 1999 to become a “process engineer” at a local manufacturer in Grand Rapids. I have been doing engineering, most quality engineering, for the next 25 years at various locations and mostly automotive based.

Last summer, my college friend Lynne, still living in Europe, messaged me and asked if I still had the horn she sold me in 1983. ( To digress, when I got accepted to WMU music school my dad bought a silver nickel plated french horn for me which cost him $600. The horn had an 8 gauge bore which meant the entrance to the horn where one placed the mouthpiece was 8 millimeters diameter. I ended up selling it to buy Lynne’s used Holton with a 6mm bore and boy what a change. I realized in hindsight, though I always appreciated my dad’s generosity, that part of my struggle with horn performance was the instrument. 8 gauge just forced the player to push more air into the instrument versus a 6 millimeter bore!) Lynne was looking to replace her current horn. Well, I wasn’t using it so I sold it back to her for about the same amount I bought it forty years earlier.

I then put my three french horn mouthpieces up for sale, selling one of the Sanders pieces right away and this past weekend a young horn player in Pennsylvania bought my Schilke. (Why I have two different mouthpieces is also a stand-alone story). As an aside, Niel recorded several times with the Beatles and can readily be heard playing the horn solo on “I am the walrus!”[5] Lynne even found and sent to me a copy of Niel and other musicians in the studio with the Beatles!

Recently, my friend Bonney posted a photo of her daughter with four other young students in a wind quintet (flue, clarinet, bassoon, oboe and french horn). I still have music study books for my horn and messaged her and asked if the young french horn player wanted them. She did, so I mailed them a couple days ago.

I told her in messenger that since I sold my horn back to Lynne, I had three mouthpieces still in my possession- two different Sanders mouthpieces and a custom made Schilke and didn’t need them that I had sold one of the Sanders on ebay a month ago and just sold the Schilke this week. I mentioned that Niel Sanders[1] was my instructor at Western and had patented his own mouthpieces[2]. I added a link to information on them

Bonney asked: “You don’t miss playing?

I replied “Sometimes, but it’s been such a long time. And i’m so much more active with my biking and my running and politics I would not really have time anyways”

And here is the real crux of the article. I added:

“And then there is admittedly an underlying sense of disappointment and resentment. The way my teaching and musical career went nowhere where I expected it to. Sometimes it’s just the right thing to move on.”

I spent years resenting my education in college- all that hard work and money to be working minimum wage jobs, not having the life for which I had planned for almost a decade. This is also why, when my high school alma mater has homecoming alumni band I never joined. It was, in my mind, a step down. Here I would be, a music college graduate and band director relegated to the band, not directing it as I had so wanted for so many years.

So I moved on. I still love music. I have over 1000 vinyl records from pop to rock to classical and opera. Another 1000 CDs across the same spectrum. We attend symphony and opera here locally. My education in the field allows me to appreciate those performances better, I think, than an average attendee.

I also resented my degree in general aside from the disappointment in the music side of life. It wasn’t until I landed my engineering job in 1999 that I realized that just having the degree opened opportunities which would not likely be available without it. I came to appreciate the work and sacrifice it took to get the bachelor’s degree. I also realized my strength was not just learning what it took to get that degree, but rather, I had the ability to learn how to learn and it wasn’t just relegated to a single field of study.

As I said- Life Happens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neill_Sanders

[2] https://www.hornmatters.com/2009/09/the-neill-sanders-mouthpiece/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigeo_Shingo

[4] https://www.marines.com/become-a-marine/process-to-join/officer-candidates-school.html

[5] https://www.beatlesbible.com/1967/09/27/recording-mixing-i-am-the-walrus/#google_vignette