Document text
Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Playing the flute just wasn�t my thing There I was, standing under a tree, dressed in a University Junior High marching band uniform. The snapshot is in black and white, but I remember the uniform as being brown with striping in dark red. On my head was something that looked like an overseas cap soldiers wore in World War II, which was then about six years away. I was 12 and in the seventh grade in my hometown of Austin, Texas. The snapshot is quite small, about 2 inches by 3 inches, taken with one of those cheap Kodak box cameras. My hands are holding a silver flute up to my lips. You didn�t have to be a psychologist to read from my body language that I thoroughly hated blowing air into a flute while dressed in a rumpled uniform that looked like something from the army of a poor country. I spent my two years in junior high trying to learn to play the flute. I was to get a piccolo later. I still have a lot of blanks in my memory from those years, as I was slowly recovering from the effects of a childhood medical condition. My being in that picture must have been a result my mother�s meeting the school�s bandleader at a parent�s meeting. He had convinced her that I should play the flute. I didn�t have a vote in the matter, but I would have preferred almost any other instrument in the marching band than that one. University Junior High was operated as a giant experiment for the University of Texas Education Department. Aside from the core curriculum, students were offered a long list of about 20 choices to choose from, giving them a lot of leeway in their studies. These classes were all "introductory sessions" that met from four to six weeks, and then the schedules changed. As I remember it, music and the marching band were among the few subjects studied at the same time and place for the whole school year. I do remember that the band director came by our apartment and offered me an incentive. If I agreed to learn the flute, he would also consider having me play the piccolo in parades. He further suggested that I take private classes on the instruments from a young man who had graduated from the University of Texas with a reputation as one of the finest instrumentalists who�d ever been to that institution. My most vivid memory of that period was my first visit to my young instructor at his home. He lived with his parents in a Victorian house atop a hill. I really hadn�t done much practicing, which I�m sure was obvious to him. He soon dropped me as a student, but not before I learned in a roundabout way that he charged my mother $3 for 30 minutes of instruction. This was in a time when $25 was a good weekly wage if you wanted to support a family. I think I stopped playing the flute as much because of the high cost of instruction as from my disinterest in the instrument. As for the piccolo, I don�t remember ever picking one up, much less trying to play one. However, in 1948, I bought a book by Meredith Willson who led studio bands for network radio programs and in later years would write highly successful Broadway musicals including "Music Man" and "The Unsinkable Molly Brown." The book was good, but the reason I bought it was because of this short piece that followed the fly leaf. "An old Moravian flute player once told me a story that went like this: �A very important king hired a whole orchestra to play for him one night during his supper, just because he felt lonesome. The orchestra played great, and the king was so delighted that he said, �Boys, your music was great, and just for that, you can all go to my counting house and fill your instruments with gold pieces.� "I can still hear that clatter as sack after sack of golden tiddlies streamed into the tuba and slithered down the neck of the bassoon and spilled out over the bells of the French horns. "And there I stood with my piccolo." (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.