And There I Stood with My Piccolo

5

5. THE SOUSA CONTRACT SAID THAT A MEMber must wear his uniform at all times, which was kind of like joining the Army. The uniform went all the way up to the Adam's apple. This called for a stiff white collar and stiff white cuffs —presenting a fantastic laundry problem on the road. By the time the second season rolled along, though, a fellow got wise to the "iron cuffs" that all the old troupers wore. They were mostly celluloid (although some of them were actually made out of some kind of sheet iron) and snapped right into the sleeves, and it was a cinch to wash them with soap and water every once in a while. The collar to match was sewed right into the uniform, and the white edge that stuck out could be "laundered " with the eraser on the end of a pencil. We were always relieved, though, you may be sure, to get to Willow Grove Park near Philadelphia and dig in for a six weeks' summer season and wear civilian clothes at least in the mornings. 40 This was a remarkable amusement park, this Willow Grove—maybe the oldest park in America —with cinder paths and elaborate flower gardens and water-lily pools that were swept, clipped, manicured, and refreshed three or four times a day. No man could enter the grounds without wearing a coat at all times—no shirt sleeves even in July and August—and the first movie theater in America was built right there on the midway. We gave four conceits a day, and you may know that Mr. Sousa was pretty unexcited about rehearsals. He'd done all this so many, many times before. So we had a few sketchy hours of rehearsal when we first arrived at the park, and then what the heck, let the chips fall where they may. And we played some difficult stuff, too—orchestra stuff transcribed for band like "The Sorcerer's Apprentice ." This is a pretty involved piece to knock off without any rehearsal, and I will never forget our performance of it one summer. The librarian sent word around that we would make a cut from letter E to letter H, which eliminated about seven minutes of music, also some of the most complicated passages; but this didn't help very much at the concert, for before we had gone very far some of the newer members of the band got completely lost in an avalanche of sixteenth notes, and how we ever finished together I'll never know. As usual, Mr. 41 Sousa didn't turn a hair and of course we played an encore. Back in the locker room at the intermission, I overheard a couple of new boys talking it over. "Wasn't it horrible?" said one. "Yeah," said his friend, "but think how much worse it would have been if we hadn't made that cut." "Cut?" said the first kid. "What cut?" Every Sousa season closed with a grand super concert at Madison Square Garden, and it was a tradition among Sousa bandsmen, wherever they might be, to dig out their old Sousa uniforms and show up at that annual concert. We had at least four hundred men in the augmented band the first time I played at the Garden, and when we went down front for "The Stars and Stripes Forever " that was it. First the piccolos went down to the footlights for the piccolo variation—there were sixteen of us —and in just thirty-two measures we were joined by practically all the trumpets and trombones in the music business. Nearly everybody had played with Mr. Sousa one time or another, and that night there were forty trumpets blasting out the melody on one side, we piccolo players in the middle, thirty trombones playing the countermelody on the other side, and twenty drummers in the back with that rolling Sousa rhythm. 42 Standing on my right was Ellis McDiarmid from the Cincinnati Symphony and one of the best flute players I ever knew, and next to me on the other side was the first trombone of the Philadelphia Symphony, Simon Mantia, and next to him was Arthur Pryor, the same Arthur Pryor who had his own world-famous band by this time. His old Sousa uniform was slightly moth-eaten and the sleeves nearly up to his elbows. His head was high...