Dan Dan's Band Director:
CLASS OF 1968
Adelphian AcademyClass of 1968
Holly, MI
Dan's Story
I came to Adelphian Academy as band director in 1964, after teaching for three years at Forest Lake academy in Florida, my first teaching position. In retrospect, those four years at AA were some of the most rewarding in my career as band director.
The students were very talented and highly motivated and the band was able to perform music being played by the best of high school bands and some college bands. The concert band grew during those four years to include over 90 members and a wind ensemble of about 40 of the best players was formed from within the larger group.
R.W. Pratt, principal during that time, was an enthusiastic supporter of the band, having been a brass player in his earlier years. His call for offerings at concerts were particularly memorable and a significant amount of money was raised that way.
Many new instruments were purchased so that the instrumentation of the group matched or exceeded that found in most of the SDA college bands at that time. Over $20,000 was spent at a time when my annual gross income as a teacher at AA was, at its highest, about $7,000. That $ 20,000 would be in today's dollars about $200,000.
More important than the growth in the program and the acquisition of instruments were the relationships with the students I enjoyed during those years. Although I am tempted to name names, I won't for fear of offending those that would be omitted.
Remember the entrance of the band at the beginning of concerts that evolved during those years, the enthusiasm of the audiences, tours (forget about the school's policy on sideburns, hair on the forehead, and other restrictive behaviors which I was obligated to enforce but inwardly disliked), and the backdrops? And don't forget the records and those nerve-racking recording sessions.
Perhaps you know how Carl Ashlock came to be at AA. It is a story that still inspires me whenever I think about it or relate it.
At the end of my first year, the choir director left late in the summer. I was in grad school when I got the word. The band program was taking off and I did not want to add that responsibility to my duties as music teacher.
On the Sunday evening a week before school was to start I fell asleep, having my usual conversation with God about this concern. I awoke the next morning to a voice saying, "Carl Ashlock." He was a musical person I had worked with at Forest Lake Academy where had been the boysÃÂÃÂÃÂÿ dean and taught Bible. Although he had a gift for working with young people and had been a great boy's dean, he had been unfairly released two years earlier because of politics, and had been working in the public school system as a counselor.
I immediately went to Pratt and said I think I have someone who can do the choirs, and began to describe his qualities. Before I finished, he interrupted with the name, since they had looked at him earlier that summer as a possibility for being dean. He liked the suggestion and immediately made a phone call.
By week's end Carl and his family were on campus and for my remaining years at AA he run an outstanding choral program.
We fell to talking several months after he arrived about how he had come to be there. He described how on the Sunday night before he got the phone call with its invitation to come, he had gone to an orange grove and had prayed all night that somehow he would be able to teach again in our system.
As we compared notes we came to realize that his name had come to me the following morning, as that night was ending. I am still moved by the recollection of this evidence of the power of prayer.
In later years, at Union College and Walla Walla College, a response to a knock on my office door would often mean an always enjoyed reunion with one of you. More recently, email letters out of the blue have brought back wonderful memories of those very enjoyable years.
You might be interested in my years before AA. I was the first child in the family and born with a severely depressed sternum (breastbone) which became more pronounced as I went through childhood. The doctor and my parents were so concerned that through those years I was examined every six months at what were called Crippled Children's Clinics (Euphemisms were not in vogue then).
It was at one of these clinics that a doctor suggested it might be helpful if I learned to play a wind instrument, particularly during those early years. The next thing I knew I was standing beside my mother looking at wind instruments while the owner of the local music store talked about them.
He started by showing me a cornet, then a flute, and a clarinet. The glitter of that cornet caught my eye, but by the time he finished telling us about the instruments, I was so confused that when he asked what I wanted to study, I blurted out, "The clarinet."
Imagine the disappointment of that 10 year old when at the first lesson the teacher opened the case and handed him a silver metal clarinet. However, except for that fortunate turn of events, I might have ended up as a brass player, so maybe there was a blessing in this anyway!
My mother had become an Adventist when I was 3 and I attended a one-room church school from 6th through 8th grades. I went to the local public junior high school for ninth grade, where I joined the band. At the end of the year I went to the director and told him that although I wanted to play in his senior high school band the next year, I would not be able to do so because I was a Seventh-day Adventist and could not march during the Friday evening football games.
He put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, "Anybody who is willing to take that stance is somebody I want in my band. Just sit up in the bleachers during practice. Join us after Thanksgiving when the season ends." That fall as I was walking towards the football field, he came up behind me and said, "Dan, how would you like to learn to play the oboe? I will show you how to blow it and teach you a scale. You can practice while we rehearse outside this fall." I had no idea what an oboe was, but said "yes."
I fell in love with the sound of that instrument, practicing two hours a day. Many nights, my father, who was a 10:00-o'clock-to bed person would come to the bottom of the stairs and yell "That's enough, Danny. Its time to go to bed." That instrument and music became a major part of my identity, an important emotional outlet in those critical teenage years.
My mother was determined that her children would have a college education in one of the Adventist colleges and, following high school graduation, off I went to the nearest one. That year was a disaster. Although intending to be a history major, I ended up as an oboe major. The band director and oboe teacher, who had come to that college with the understanding that he could run a music store in the music building because he was paid $1 less than full salary, early on tried to get me to study accordion, because he could pocket the lesson fee, promising that if I took accordion he would get me a job in any academy I wanted to go to.
Now while it was true I was from the hills of Pennsylvania, I wasn't that naive, so I declined. I rented my oboe from him directly, paying $5 a month. On a Sunday in April of that year I went to get it from a closet...Expand for more
where it was kept, only to find it was missing. When I asked him where it was, he told me that since I was behind in the rent, it was not available until I paid him. I asked and than pled with him to let me use it at least until my lesson with him on Tuesday, since I would have to call home for the money and it would take some time to get it. He refused.
I returned to my dorm room angry, overcome by frustration. I remember going to the window looking out on the campus and slowly pounding my right fist on the nearby wall. I had no instrument . . . and I was stuck with a fast-talking music teacher who ran a band program far inferior to what I had known in high school, someone who was obviously more interested in himself than in his job or his students.
The disillusionment was total. I left at the end of the year, vowing never go to another Adventist school and never to be in music again. During that summer, a sister talked me into going to Atlantic Union College, an Adventist college in New England, where I registered that fall as a history major. But I missed my music too much. I joined the college band and was encouraged to play in a chamber group with a young instructor, Melvin West, and chair of the department, Ellsworth F. Judy.
Late that fall, after the group had played in a church on a Sunday morning and returned to the campus, Mel and Ellsworth turned to me after we had parked outside the music building and said simply, "Dan, You should be in music." I was flattered, but pointed out to them that the semester was about over and I would be behind in theory. Mel said, "I will tutor you". . . and he did.
Looking back, it was the pivotal point in my life.
My goal when I graduated was to go out and somewhere in the Adventist system develop a band program equal to the best in any high school. My first job was at Forest Lake Academy in Florida. Many of my lessons there were grade school students. It was at one of these lessons with a young trumpet player that I had an experience that still haunts me. He was a shy boy of about ten and on this particular day not doing well at all.
Growing impatient over what appeared to be a lack of practice, I finally said, "Tommy, it sounds like you haven't practiced. You are wasting my time and your parents money. There is no point to continuing our lesson today. Practice this next week and we will have a full lesson." He didn't say anything as he quietly put his horn away, got up and left. A moment or two later, I happened to glance out the window in time to see this little kid, trudging up the hill, bent over, weeping uncontrollably. I learned a valuable lesson that day about the fragile world our students live in and how easily they can be hurt.
Henry Wooten was the business manager at FLA. When he came to AA in the summer of 1968, the band director had just left and they were looking for a replacement. He suggested me to Pratt and I was contacted.
In order to be able to go to AA, I had to resign my position at AA since they wouldn't release me (it was different back then!) The day I resigned, the FLA administration building was struck by lightning and burned to the ground (true story!)
Since my wife was pregnant and they had not completed the house we were going to live in at AA, she stayed in Pennsylvania with my folks and my brother, Larry, and I drove over. We ended up driving on the gravel road (Fishlake Rd?) just before getting to the academy. I remember remarking to Larry, "What have we gotten ourselves into?"
We found Pratt's house and rang the doorbell. His greeting to us when he opened the door was, "What can I do for you boys?" I quietly told him I was his new band director.
I left AA to accept a position at Union College where I would direct the band for the next eleven years and serve as chair of the fine arts department for the last three of those years.
In 1979, I went to Walla Walla College to serve as music chair and direct the band. Given what I had heard via the grapevine about turmoil in the WWC music program at that time, it seemed that the move there to serve as chair was tantamount to committing professional suicide. Yet, even though it represented the greatest professional risk of my career, I felt impressed to go.
The concern was unwarranted. The music faculty was committed to getting past the turmoil and, while there were problems, there was support from both students and faculty that made the resolving of those problems a group accomplishment. And, as I have discovered in so many instances in my life, decisions involving the greatest risk often, in the end, yield the greatest return.
I directed the band during my first four years there and then devoted full time to chairing the program and teaching conducting, music appreciation classes, and eventually a world music class. In my 21 years at WWC, over 3,000 students took the appreciation and world music classes.
Since retirement in 2000, I have been doing a lot of writing. While still teaching, I began to write a family history, The Twisted Tree, in 1981. A centennial history of the WWC music program, A Great Tradition, was released in 1992. Following retirement, I wrote the centennial history for the local symphony, A Dream Fulfilled, completing it in 2006. In 2014, Adventist Musicians Biographical Resource, a book that includes the stories of over 1100 musicians associated with the church, including that of Little Richard, was released.
I am presently preparing entries about music in the church and its musicians for a new online SDA encyclopedia (encyclopedia.(for Seventh-Day Adventist.org) which is currently being constructed and will be expanded as time continues. It presently includes articles that I have written about the Wedgewood Trio, music at the Voice of Prophecy program. Some of these articles (with fewer details) I can also be found at a another website hosted by International Adventist Musicians Association.
Looking back . . .
The physical impairment of that firstborn that so troubled my parents led me to music, and a career that would never have happened otherwise.
Those troubling happenings in that first year of college in the end, yielded insights and a sensitivity as I have subsequently worked with students
Even the happenstance choice of musical instruments seems in retrospect, not to have been so, since the chance to work at Union College came about, in part, because I played a woodwind, more specifically, because I played the oboe.
As my career unfolded and my work at the college level began and continued, I never forgot the experiences of that lonely first year at college away from home and the disappointment and frustration of that freshman year . . .
And I have also not forgotten those two teachers who, in my sophomore year, took the time to encourage and help a student at a crossroads.
The events of my life, the connections and progression of events, and the eventual workings out of what seemed liabilities and disasters at the moment - all have led to a trust in the leading of God in my life.
I am now older than “Pop Anderson” was when we were at Adelphian! My children will all be eligible to retire within the next five years and many of you (my musical AA children) are retired and in your 70’s. You as a group remain a treasured group of friends from a special period in my life . . .
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