Homeburg Memories

d for its own Sweet Sak

l like it-provided, of course, that you have the price and that some speculator hasn't cornered the tickets, and that you can get home at night in time to get d

veteran soprano in the choir is going to hang on to the key or skid on the high turns. You laugh at me because I can't eat down-town unless I am encouraged by a bull fiddle, and because I gulp at free concert tickets like a young robin swa

ser in seven minutes flat. But while these things educate us and enable us to roll our eyes in the right place in a Wagner number, they don't satisfy the soul any more than souvenir cards from Europe take away a thirst for travel. We want the real thing, and year in and out we're music-hungry. We drive our young

des, there are only three names for a country band, anyway. If it isn't the Marine Band, it has to be the Military Band, or the Silver Cornet Band. Chet Frazier, who is ou

big enough to have a post-office, its citizens have either organized a brass band or are trying to get another man to move in to complete a quorum. Life never gets so complicated out on the grain elevator circuit that the station agent, sch

a breeze, except the band. It is up in the super-heated lodge room of the Modern Woodmen, huddled around two oil lamps, because the less light it has the less heat will be generated, and it is getting ready to practice the "Washington Po

scale, like squirrels running round and round in a cage. The warming-up exercises are on. They will continue until Frank Sundell shaves his last customer and gets up to the hall with his t

is to send a dozen horses from the wire. But finally the bass catches up with the cornets, an

et and stops for wind; this rattles his partner, who can't carry the air alone to save him. Dobbs sits down on the wrong key in the bass. The tenors weaken, discouraged by the cornet, and everybody hesitates. A couple of clarionets lose the place and get to wandering around at random, creating terrible havoc. The altos

d going over the faults of his neighbor in the most kindly and thorough fashion. Ed Smith empties out his baritone horn and takes a little practice run, and then they commence to begin

r and blow up in the back stretch? Not much. They canter through that air as if they had been born whistling it. There's a wonderful inspiration in marching to a band man-give him a horn, a ragged slip of music, and about four miles of road, and he will prance

d do all the damage they can, but who have to keep mighty quiet on the march. They can carry their horns, puff out their cheeks and l

of a sewage system, and the disgraceful condition of the stove in the Q. B. & C. Depot, we think of our band and are comforted. It has at least twenty members right along, most of whom can play their instruments, and Sim Askinson, who is a professional music teacher, has conducted it off and on for twenty-five years. Citizens from other towns get mighty jealous when they come down to Homeburg Thursday evenings during the summer an

t sends goose flesh up and down your spine. We're head and shoulders above any other band that enters the contests, but that's the trouble. The judges are never educated up to "Poet and Peasant." They always give the prize to the Paynesville Military Band,

, that fills a small town boy with such wild ambition as a band. When I was twelve, I used to watch that band in its more sublime passages, feeling that if I ever could become great enough to play in it, others could run the country and win its great battles with no jealousy from me. The snare drummer at that time was a boy of s

r three dollars and a dog. There was about as much music left in it as there is in a fish horn, but I was as delighted as if it had been a pipe organ, and when the folks wouldn't let me practice at home on it, I took it out in the country and kept it in Smily Garrett's barn. After a while I learne

reen looks on the faces of Pete Amthorne and Billy Madigan and Snoozer Ackley, as they watched me marching grandly down the street lugging my precious old three bushels of brass in my arms, and "ump-umping" until my eyes stuck out of my head. Of course they didn't know that most of the time I was watching a change in my notes half a ba

cessful church social, without us. I might say that the importance of a Homeburg citizen in the old days was determined by whether or not the Homeburg Band escorted him to his tomb. When great doings occurred in the neighboring towns, plain citizens dug down in their pockets for car-fare, and then dug painfully down once

ht or ten miles over unknown streets, picking out dry places underfoot and notes from a piece of music bobbing up and down in the shadows above our horns, and then drive home across country after midnight, getting home in time to go to work in the morning. Why, it was just like f

rd out of it just as perfection was in sight. Talent was scarce, and the rude, heartless city was forever reaching down into Homeburg and yanking some indispensable players away. Of course there was always a waiting list of youngsters who would coax a few hoarse toots out of the alto horn, and we always had a bunch of kid clarionetists who would sail along grandly through the soft parts and then blow goose notes whenever they hit

hope of developing one. Besides, the neighbors wouldn't allow it. Young Henry Wood showed promise once, but after his father had listened to him

grand success if they hadn't put Peters in the front row. He lived for his art, Peters did, paying no attention to anything but his trombone, and besides he was quite deaf. He got confused about the line of march, and when the band swung around the public square he kept right on up Main Street all alone, playing in magnificent form and solitary grandeur while the band swung off the other way. The whole to

g from the band because they are not allowed to play enough solos. Our greatest bonanza was a quiet chap named Williams, who came to town to work in the moulding room of the plow factory. After he had been there a week, we discovered that he had a saxophone. No one had ever heard or eaten a saxophon

around. We changed our name to the Homeburg Saxophone Band, and the way we rubbed it into Paynesville was pitiful. He was a little fellow, Williams was, and short of wind, which caused him to gasp a good deal during the variation parts. But he was willing. There was no shirk about him. After

him, and then we had to take our caps in hand and wheedle the Smiths and Askinson back into the band. I haven't belonged for years, but they are still there. When I drop in at practice, as many of the alumni do, Askinson greets me cordially and ta

ct, we never wasted any harmony among ourselves. We didn't have any to spare. It took all we had to produce the music. For twenty-five years the Smiths and Cooney Simpson, who plays first clarionet, have been at swords' points, each with a faction behind him. Cooney says it's a shame that a good band must limp along wi

e, "instead of notes. Come in on the A about eight-fifte

you'd try to follow both those cornets instead o

says Ad Smith, whirling around. "

rnetist," says Cooney, "it's

to be, and he gets up excitedly. "We'd get along a lo

rom the coils of his tuba. "Let 'em fi

preparatory to going home with his baritone horn and

He is our peacemaker and most faithful player. He has played second alto in the band for thirty-five years without a promotion, and is by all odds the worst player I ever saw, being only entirely at home in the key of C; and he can't play three-four time to save his soul. But his devotion is marvelous. He is alway

ers. Why, if Paynesville had you fellows, she'd have a band. That was my fault that time. I'

says: "Gentlemen and trombone players," as he has for a quarter of a century; and a minute later the band is tumbling eagerly through its piec

ding like Mocha and Java. All differences are forgotten, and the band breaks up with friendly words, Ed Smith and Cooney going home together. Music has charms to s

But I have an ambition. If ever I should become so famous and successful that when I went back to Homeburg to visit my proud and happy parents and stepped off of the 4:11 train, I would find the Homeburg Marine Band there to meet me, I would know that I had made good, and I would be content. The only thing that encourage