High School Years

The earliest memory of High School was December 7, 1941. It was a beautiful quiet Sunday morning and as I was walking toward church, I saw several people running out of a drugstore on the square screaming, "The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor"! I had never heard of Pearl Harbor at the time, so I went into the drug store where the radio was still announcing the news. I could almost hear the "BOOM-BOOM" of the bombs being dropped on the innocent victims. I was to learn more of this later.

I had been looking forward to high school mainly to get into the band program. One of our neighbors had been in the band and I learned a love of music from him at an early age. Of course, I needed an instrument and once again I turned to my mother for this. I'll never know how she found the money to buy a used cornet for me, but somehow she did.

Learning to play the cornet came very easily for me. Our band director ("Boss" Fulkerson) was a great teacher and disciplinarian who was to have a profound influence on my life - both musically and professionally.

We had band practice every day and I developed some life-long friendships there. I especially liked Gene Wilson, Bill Craig, and James Hanry. "Boss" instilled pride in all of us and his favorite motto was "Anything worth doing is worth doing right". We had a large band for a high school (about 80 members), which included such instruments such as French horns, oboes, bassoons, tympany drums, and fifes for use in symphonies.

Our uniforms were beautiful and the music was constantly rehearsed. My special pleasure was marching at half-time for the weekly football games since my older brother (Wren) was a member of the team. I thoroughly enjoyed the four years in the high school band.

Once during my freshman year the entire symphony band was invited to perform in New Orleans where the International Lions Club was having their annual convention. This was a great experience for a 14 year old boy who had never been out of Arkansas before. We all loaded our instruments and ourselves into 2 huge Greyhound buses and started out for the 10 hour journey to a place we had only heard of.

We stayed at a nice hotel near the auditorium. We had a wonderful time, not only performing but just looking up at the tall buildings we had never seen before. The performances by the band went well and some of the sights we saw were very exciting for us kids. We saw street entertainers, and also shoe-shine boys who had their own little portable kits. This contained the polish, a cloth, and a brush. The price for a shine was 15 cents (or a nickel for a dust-off). We settled for a 5 cent dust-off.

The concert was well-received in the largest auditorium we had ever seen. We played many of the John Phillip Souza marches as well as Beethoven, Lizst and Shubert compositions.

My grades in band were always straight A's and English grammar did not cause any hardship at all. Typing was also a very interesting subject for me. I sometimes struggled in some of my other courses, such as algebra, trigonometry, and science. There came a time that I even thought about leaving school early and joining the service since WW II was still raging at that time. After a long talk with my band director, "Boss" Fulkerson, I changed my mind and finally graduated in May 1945. One week later I was drafted into the U. S. Army.

I also worked after school at odd jobs such as bagging groceries, working behind the soda fountain at the drug store and bus-boy at a cafe. One summer I worked with a construction crew helping to build an airport near our town. All this experience was to be very helpful to me later on.