Music of My Life, Part 1

People who know me, even a little, know that music is an important part of my life. At church, people see me singing in the choir, sometimes leading hymns, and occasionally singing while playing guitar or mandolin. For a few years, I filled in as choir director. Others have seen (or rather heard) me singing in the Huntsville Master Chorale. I also played and sang in the Maple Hill Celtic band for a number of years, and about 10 or so years ago I had a sort of Americana / pop band with my daughter Vanessa and friend Howard (and others, including Justin Smith, who came and went). And those who knew me back in "the old days" would know that, in lieu of TV or radio, I spent most evenings with music on the stereo - sometimes while doing things like cooking or cleaning the kitchen, and sometimes just sitting still, drinking wine or otherwise relaxing with friends or by myself.

Looking back, I recognize that music was almost always there for me. First it would have been hearing the congregation singing hymns (led by my grandmother's strong voice) at our little country church in Ohio (United Church of Christ, for those curious). Then it would have been hearing pop music on the radio around the house and barn. My grandmother taught me about the piano, not exactly how to play with both hands, but at least where middle C was and what the white and black keys were and how to find notes that were in the hymnal. Finally, the big day came in 4th grade when I and some of my classmates were allowed to choose an instrument and take band. I chose trombone, because by then we had a TV in the house and I loved the sound and the look of the trombone section on the Lawrence Welk show. I remember going to the big city, Cincinnati, with two friends and our 3 mothers to pick them out. It was the usual "rent-to-buy," a hedge in case the kid decided it wasn't so much fun after all, or in the other extreme, actually stayed with it for more than a year.

The first day of band class, we were all very excited and wanted badly to make music on our instruments. It was chaotic, to say the least. But the teacher got us all to stop making noise and listen for her instructions, and she told us what a whole note was and went around to each instrument to help us find the concert F that she was looking for from everyone. Now, if any of you have ever tried to play a trombone or any other brass instrument, you know how impossible "making music" on such devices is for a 9 year old beginner. To think back on it, I cannot imagine how that teacher managed to make any progress at all, since none of us, that I was aware of, took private lessons. We were learning from scratch, in a group, on several different instruments. I recall 2 trombones, several trumpets, some flutes, and some clarinets. Of course, boys played the brass and girls played the woodwinds. When it came time for me to play the note, all I could do was to make a high squeak. It took several minutes for her to get me to loosen my embouchure enough to get that note, the easiest one that a trombonist can play (which is why I can remember it). The other thing I remember, later on, is that for playing notes out to 6th or 7th position I had to use my feet, since my arms weren't long enough. Eventually the learning process went well enough that, for a PTA program that unveiled all the new musicians in the school, I played a duet with one of the flutists.

Playing the trombone would become an important part of my young male identity. Trombonists were more than a little mischievous. We liked to horse around, sometimes using our slides as weapons in that endeavor. We often played parts that were loud and maybe even comedic. When called upon to do so, we could play beautiful harmonies. 

The school band played an important role in the community. The PTA programs relied on us (as well as the chorus) to provide entertainment for their monthly meetings. On Memorial Day, there was a tiny parade in the little town that hosted the township's cemetery, and I remember the county schools superintendent playing the bass drum with us. It was the only event we ever marched at, since the school didn't have a football team. But it did have basketball, and the pep band was a really fun activity that gave us non-athletes a role to play in the school's athletic program.

When I reached 7th grade, the township school merged with some of the other schools around our part of the county to form a larger school, one that would have enough students that we could actually have electives when we got to high school. The band was bigger, too, of course, and also the high school finally did start up a football team. We got brand new uniforms, made of wool, which were great once the weather got cool but miserable during hot weather.

I used that inexpensive, battered instrument through 11th grade. I never gave a thought to wanting a nicer one, but one day early in my senior year my band director said he had something to show me. It was a new King 3B trombone (with F attachment) in a really nice, fancy case. I tried to decline it, but he insisted that I take it home and show my parents. I highly doubted that they would go for the expense of buying it. They acted surprised, but not as shocked as I had expected. They had to have been in on it, of course, although they never did admit to it. They told me they'd buy it for me if I would play it through college, so that was that.

When I first went to college at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, I had to decide which band to try out for. I really wanted to play jazz, so that’s what I decided. The school recruitment pamphlets had bragged that it was award-winning, so I really wanted to play in it, but was not very sure if I would make it. I had always excelled as a big fish in the little pond in Blanchester, Ohio, but feared that here I’d be competing with players from big cities who had taken private lessons for years and would be far more advanced than I. In the private audition with the director, who turned out had played trombone and arranged for Stan Kenton, I thought I played the music all right. It was when he asked me who my favorite trombone player was that my heart fell.  I had never listened to jazz trombone in my life! The only player I knew of was Glen Miller, so that’s what I said. He didn’t laugh or react in any way, so I suppose it was okay to like Glen Miller. He probably smelled out that I was faking it. In any case, I made the band and found myself playing second chair, next to a player who was also a freshman but who had clearly studied much more seriously than I ever had.  He had a beautiful tone, could do lip trills, and could play notes higher than I had imagined trombonists could ever play. It turns out that I learned a lot from him.

The band was really quite good, in spite of having two freshmen on the first two trombone chairs.  Our first concert was in December, when we played a concert of the whole Stan Kenton Christmas book.  I have a recording of that concert (low quality mono), which I still play once in a while during the holidays.  In the spring, we went to the Notre Dame jazz festival and competed with other college bands.  Deedee and Cecil Bridgewater were with the University of Illinois band, which won first place.  Our band made the first cut and were part of the program on the final night.  We repeated the piece we had used to get there, which was an unusual avant garde symphonic jazz piece that our director felt needed to be heard by a larger audience than we had during the preliminary performance. I have a recording of that, too. Link to the Notre Dame Jazz Festival 1969 program.

For some reason, the other years at CWRU blur in my memory, except for a couple of events.  One was, during the middle of my sophomore year the lead trombonist flunked out of school, so I became the lead trombonist, a position I would hold for the next two and a half years. I was never a soloist, though, until my senior year. Then, our director had me play on a piece he had written, “Trajectory for Trombone.” We played that at the Michigan State jazz festival, where I got so nervous doing it that my mouth went totally dry and I had a very hard time even making a note. Afterwards, my director called it  “cottonmouth,” apparently a common phenomenon, but one that I had never even heard about. That experience was traumatic. I was very pleased, however, that our section won the award for the best section at the festival. I played that solo again for the last concert of the year and did somewhat better, although it involved a little improvising, which was never my forte. One thing playing trombone all those years taught me was that great pleasure can be obtained from playing music in an ensemble with others. It also taught me that doing it in the spotlight, as a soloist, was something that my personality did not handle very well. I think that attribute applies to other areas of life as well.

It would turn out that playing in my college jazz band for four years would be my swan song on trombone. Although I still have that King 3B, it stays in the closet except for rare occasions when I get the urge to see if I can still play it. Only a few minutes satisfies that impulse, as the lips get numb pretty quickly if one is not playing regularly. But I suppose that a little piece of my identity is still tied up in being a trombonist. Singing in the choir, I still visualize the trombone positions when I first sight-read a new piece of music. I still think of my fellow high school trombonists when I get the impulse to horse around in rehearsals. I often consider selling the instrument, and I came really close to doing so once; but I backed out, thinking that I might regret it someday. Who knows whether I might actually become inspired to pick it up again? It gave me my first stepping stone into the world of being a musician, and it’s like an old friend. Maybe one of my grandchildren will want to play it someday. The oldest one, my six-year-old namesake Timothy, has already tentatively laid a claim to it.

Tim's Grubwagon

Summer 1976

“It’ll do,” I said to myself and to my Uncle Gene as we walked around the truck yet one more time.  It was a 22-year-old step van, the type used back then as a delivery truck.  It was painted dark brown, so maybe it had been a UPS truck.  I had been back in Ohio for just a couple of months and was beginning a new part of my life.  I would work hard and would have my family shaking their heads in exasperation, as I left behind a failed marriage and a teaching career that I had barely started.

I loved to cook and had learned at lot from watching Tommy prepare my lunches when I ate at his lunch counter in Cleveland Heights. I built a kitchen in the van while staying at my parents’ farm in southern Ohio, with old appliances and parts intended for campers, and using a lot of old wood from a barn my father was tearing down.  I installed a lift-up door and serving counter and had an artist friend paint some cute images and a big “Tim’s Grubwagon” with an Old West motif on the side.  I fixed it up mechanically, put on some new tires, and headed west with both optimism and just a little bit of trepidation.  The first trial run was in a Denver city park for a couple of days, and next a weekend in Telluride during the famous film festival.  I made vegetarian pizza, burritos, enchiladas, hummus and baba ganoosh wraps, salads, and sandwiches, with recipes largely inspired by Tommy.  In Telluride a former chef gave me a nice big knife and taught me how to use it to cut up vegetables quickly without loss of fingertips.

The next step was to travel to my new hometown.  I had to decide:  Eugene, Oregon, or Tucson, Arizona?  They both had big universities and reputations for being friendly to alternative (“hippie”) lifestyles.  I had contacts in both places.  Tucson it would be, as it was already September, and it would be a cold and wet winter in Eugene.

What had brought me to this time of my life, when I would abandon my home, my friends, and my profession to set out on what would appear to be such a risky and potentially lonely venture?  Obviously, I had reached a point where none of these things held me fast.  My really close friends had already moved away, gone either out west or to the East Coast for their own reasons.  My marriage had turned into a disappointment and had come to a fairly quiet and peaceful end.  My teaching career was to have been a way for us to have an overseas adventure, teaching in American schools in exotic places around the world after getting some experience in Ohio.  That dream was tossed overboard when I signed the divorce papers.  And home?  Well, Cleveland (where I had gone to school and then lived for a couple of years afterwards) felt like a place in which I no longer belonged.  And although the farm where I grew up was the one place that I always knew I could go back to if things didn’t work out, it wasn’t where I wanted to spend the rest of my life, much as I loved it and my family there.  With disappointments behind me, what drove me forward were both idealism and a need to prove something to myself.  A couple of years earlier, a friend had introduced me to the book Small Is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher.  He was an economist who imagined an ideal world in which small cottage industry would be the predominant way of life.  I had spent the previous year looking around and thinking about what I could do to help create such a society (which surely was going to come to pass, when we ran out of oil), and came up with the idea of the grubwagon.

As I entered the outskirts of Tucson on Oracle Road, I looked at the mountains all around and at the city ahead. It was so different from anywhere I had ever lived before.  I felt an excitement and optimism like I had never felt before – or since, for that matter.  I felt like this was the place where I was finally going to make my mark in the world, to positive effect.

After finding a place to live (the very first day of arrival!), I needed to get a license to operate, which involved an inspection of the truck and a caution not to prepare food in my home.  The truck would be a licensed commercial kitchen, and I was good to go!

It took a few weeks of experimenting to figure out a good place to set up a lunch business.  I considered visiting construction sites, but didn’t know how to break in there.  What are all these workers going to go when a strange food truck just suddenly shows up?  I tried a street near the university, but the students mostly just walked by without showing much interest.  Then, I had pretty good luck setting up on the street downtown, near the courthouse.  It seemed that there were a lot of people wandering around looking for a place to eat, and they were attracted by the menu and prices.  Word got around, and business grew.  I hired one of my housemates to help me during the lunch rush.  Still, it was a hassle finding a consistent parking spot every day, and customers, who were mostly young lawyers and legal clerks and secretaries, joked about having to hunt me down.  I ended up renting a regular spot on the corner of a parking lot, owned by a local real estate “tycoon” who seemed to like me and gave me a good rate.

Business really took off after that, and during lunch rush there would be three us working hard to take orders and put the food out as fast as we could.  For a small income it was a huge amount of work, mostly because of the extensive menu and preparation that it required.  But we were happy, and I remember my friend John later saying that it was the best job he had ever had.  I made many friends, some of whom are still among my closest ones, including my amazing wife Theresa.

John and Liz, the other 2/3 of the crew.  She was important in two ways.  Not only eventually working for me, but prior to that, as a teenaged customer, advised me of a part-time job as a math teacher's aide at her "alternative" high school, for whom I became the de facto math teacher for 3 hours in the morning.  Then I would bicycle to the Grubwagon in time for the lunch rush, John having done the morning food prep.  Afterwards, I would be the one to take the grubwagon home and do the clean-up and advance prep for the next day.

So that is how I came to move to Tucson and to make a life there.  I didn’t keep the grubwagon going for very long.  After only a few months, as the hot desert summer approached, I realized that I wouldn’t be happy as a restaurateur the rest of my life, and I resolved to go to graduate school to study a lifelong interest of mine, meteorology.  And I discovered I could actually get paid for doing so!  An acquaintance bought the grubwagon business from me and tried to keep it going, but just didn’t have the knack for it.  He ended up defaulting on my loan to him and giving it back, and I later sold the truck to someone who wanted to take it back East to start a business in Knoxville.  I never heard how that worked out.  

After five years in graduate school, I left Tucson behind me, and with Theresa and my stepdaughter Stacy I headed to Huntsville for a job with NASA.  Our twin girls Vanessa and Allison were born shortly after arriving, and Huntsville would be our home for what may turn out to be the rest of my life.  The time I spent doing the grubwagon was only a year from start to finish, but that short road led to a “rest of the story” that I never would have predicted, not even in my wildest dreams.  To my children and grandchildren:  That, in a nutshell, is how the city of Tucson played a role in how you came to be!  I hope you get to spend some time there someday, experiencing the area’s unique beauty and culture, and remembering its importance in our family story.  Go to the Food Conspiracy on 4th Avenue where your mother (“Grammy”) used to work and where she and I met, and take a walk around the picturesque Old Courthouse downtown, listed in 1978 on the National Register of Historic Places.  The grubwagon parking spot is now covered by the modern Pima County Public Library.