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Bob Knapp\u00a0 –trombone, euphonium<\/p>\n
“It pays to be hopeful.”<\/p>\n
I was born in Modesto in 1932 and my dad died when I was three in an automobile accident.\u00a0 My mother had three kids and no sign of support so we had to move in with my grandmother.\u00a0 She was over in Riverbank over ten miles away.\u00a0 I went through first grade in Riverbank and then my mother remarried and we had to move up into the hills to Groveland.\u00a0 We lived on a ranch about six miles out of town so it became a very rural upbringing for a while.<\/p>\n
I was the youngest of the kids.\u00a0 We lived in Groveland but I couldn’t go to the Groveland school because our ranch was in Mariposa County and\u00a0 Groveland is in Tuolumne county.\u00a0 Mariposa County was another “metropolitan” area–Buck Meadows.\u00a0 There’s not much there.\u00a0 Brown’s Lodge used to be there and that was about it except during The Depression there was a CCC camp.\u00a0 I guess Roosevelt started that.\u00a0 My dad would drive in from the ranch to Groveland and then leave me off with the teacher and then I would ride with her the 11 miles to Buck Meadows.<\/p>\n
The ranch was pretty hard scrabble, you might call it.\u00a0 My stepfather worked for the county.\u00a0 He drove road graders–a heavy equipment operator.\u00a0 The ranching was left to my mother, my brothers and I.\u00a0 Except my brother, the one that I dearly loved.<\/p>\n
When my dad died, my father’s brother said to my mother, “Why don’t I take one of the boys and raise him and it will lighten the load.”\u00a0 Well, she evidently didn’t have anything to say about it so off he went.\u00a0 I didn’t see very much of him but he spent one year with us living on the ranch and going to Buck Meadows Grammar School.\u00a0 And it was just the best year of my existence.\u00a0 We had a great time.\u00a0 Boy, when my he had to go home that was heart wrenching.\u00a0 That was terrible.<\/p>\n
We’d ride horses, feed the chickens, take care of the garden.\u00a0 I had my own horse.<\/p>\n
It was very spare.\u00a0 We didn’t have a lot of things that kids had growing up.\u00a0 We had a telephone.\u00a0 It was called a farmer line.\u00a0 It went into town to the general store and they had a switchboard there and if you wanted to call someone you’d simply plug in the phone and you’d ring the bell and it would ring out there. \u00a0If you wanted to call out you’d have to go and pour a bucket of water on the ground wire because it had to be grounded real well.\u00a0 I never used the phone so I didn’t know anything about it.<\/p>\n
We had chickens; we had pigs.\u00a0 In fact my stepfather used to collect garbage from the CCC camp and the Oakland Recreation Camp and the Berkeley Recreation Camp and the San Francisco Recreation Camp. \u00a0The San Francisco Camp was up near Hetch Hetchy Dam.\u00a0 I guess those places still exist.\u00a0 He’d collect garbage from them and we’d feed it to the pigs.<\/p>\n
When we got up to the ranch someone unearthed a trombone and put it together.\u00a0 Nobody knew how to play it but we would go out and make noise on the porch.\u00a0 BEAAAHHHH!\u00a0 And all of the horses would run up to the porch and look.\u00a0 We thought, “Hey, that’s cool.”\u00a0 So we’d bring the cows up to the porch .\u00a0 . . AND the horses.\u00a0 So that was my early trombone lessons–how to call the horses.\u00a0 I’ve intended to take my euphonium out somewhere here and just park alongside the road and see who came up.<\/p>\n
That went on until 1944, 45.\u00a0 I remember all the people on the main street of Groveland the day that the war was over and everybody was very happy about that, of course.<\/p>\n
I never knew what went on between my mother and my stepfather because at that point she said, “We’re going back to Riverbank.”\u00a0 It was right after the War so we moved from Groveland back down to Riverbank and I went to 7th grade in Riverbank.<\/p>\n
I started playing trombone in the first grade.\u00a0 And you can imagine what a scene that was because I couldn’t hold it up so we had a piano at home and a piano bench with a back that raised up so I would raise up the back of the piano bench and rest the slide on the back of the bench and then I could move it all right.\u00a0 But I couldn’t hold it up.\u00a0 I would play like that.\u00a0 When we moved up to Groveland we must have taken the trombone with us because that was all the lessons I had for the trombone.\u00a0 I never continued.<\/p>\n
So we moved back to Riverbank and I ended the 7th grade there and I didn’t leave Riverbank until I went off to the army.\u00a0 I went to Oakdale High School.\u00a0 Riverbank didn’t have a high school then but they have one now.\u00a0 Got to be a big town, got its own high school.\u00a0 Oakdale High School was five miles away.\u00a0 And there I got into music because the music teacher had had my older brother.\u00a0 He was six years older than I was and when we moved over to Riverbank he started high school there and he played in the band.\u00a0 He was very musical and the music teacher remembered him.<\/p>\n
For some reason he called my brother Charlie.\u00a0 His name is Edward but he called him Charlie.\u00a0 He played trumpet primarily.\u00a0 He learned to play piano all by himself.\u00a0 He couldn’t read music but he would play to accompany me.\u00a0 My mother had dreams of me being a rising star like Shirley Temple.\u00a0 And she had sheet music that Shirley Temple made famous.\u00a0 “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine” was one of her favorite songs.\u00a0 She figured I was going to go into music.\u00a0 I had to sing and Edward had to accompany me.\u00a0 She bought me a pair of tap shoes.\u00a0 She was insistent that I was going to be a tap dancing star.\u00a0 And I wanted nothing to do with it but I went through the lessons and I put on my tap shoes and I went through the drill and I guess she realized that this was hopeless.\u00a0 It disappeared.\u00a0 I never performed tap dancing.\u00a0 I used to sing because Edward would accompany me and I would sing for all kinds of things.\u00a0 But what I wanted to do was ride my bicycle, swim.\u00a0 I wanted to go to the swimming pool.<\/p>\n
After high school went to Modesto Junior College.\u00a0 I was a music major.\u00a0 This music teacher I had in high school, something about him, he liked me.\u00a0 He thought I was great.\u00a0 I wasn’t.\u00a0 I never learned to read music.\u00a0 I played a baritone solo at my graduation and I remember he brought the music.\u00a0 We were practicing the band for graduation.\u00a0 He had the band there and it came time for me to play the solo.\u00a0 He had just given it to me recently and I had to memorize it . . . and I hadn’t memorized it.\u00a0 So he got one of the trumpet players, she was a fine musician, and she would play it so they could hear what it was going to sound like.\u00a0 So I played it at graduation.\u00a0 I don’t know what people thought of it.<\/p>\n
Then I went off to Modesto to start my music education and I had a wonderful teacher there.\u00a0 Frank Mancini was his name and he had been a clarinet soloist with the Souza band.\u00a0 First class.\u00a0 (editor: Frank “Proof” Mancini was playing with the John Philip Sousa band in San Francisco at the Panama Pacific Exposition. He went to Modesto to play in the orchestra for the opening of the Strand Theatre in 1921 and decided that the Central Valley was very much like his native Italy so he stayed.\u00a0 He was the award-winning band director at Modesto High School, helped found the Modesto Symphony Orchestra and the Stanislaus County Boys Band<\/em>)\u00a0 He had a ranch out of town in Modesto somewhere.\u00a0 He was great too, \u00a0just a nice person.\u00a0 I used to go back after I got out of college and visit my mother in Riverbank and then I’d go over to Oakdale and see him.\u00a0 Good guy.<\/p>\n And he introduced me to Spike Jones.\u00a0 I thought that was the bee’s knees.\u00a0 I thought, “My god!”\u00a0 This guy could make music like that?\u00a0 And it was good music.\u00a0 They were good musicians.\u00a0 But it was funny.\u00a0 That’s for me!\u00a0 I still have a lot of Spike Jones records. He was a fine musician.\u00a0 Those guys were all good.<\/p>\n So I went off to junior college, started my music career.\u00a0 I was always reading treble clef when I was playing baritone.\u00a0 When I finally started to read music I was reading baritone treble clef parts and I go off to San Francisco State and entered as a junior.\u00a0 I was going to finish my degree there.\u00a0 That was different.\u00a0 I wanted to major in trombone.\u00a0 What convinced me was that I had an old clarinet.\u00a0 It was a metal clarinet.\u00a0 It came apart in the middle.\u00a0 It was a Conn, I think.\u00a0 So I thought, “Why not learn to play clarinet?”\u00a0 So I go into the clarinet major class at San Francisco State with all these guys with their La Blancs and Selmers and things and I didn’t even open the case.\u00a0 I walked in and sat down and here I’ve got this case.\u00a0 I had painted it up to look fancy.\u00a0 I thought, “I think I’m in the wrong place here.”\u00a0 So I tiptoed out, never opened the case and that was that.<\/p>\n So then I went to trombone major class and walked in and he said, “Okay boys, I want you to go out and buy a treble clef Arban’s.\u00a0 Arban’s is the bible.\u00a0 That’s what you learn on.\u00a0 And I had one.\u00a0 And I had been playing it learning to play the baritone.\u00a0 I had used the Arban’s to practice.\u00a0 So I read treble clef.\u00a0 And I had thought, “Wait a minute.\u00a0 This is going to be a problem because these guys are all going to play bass clef.”\u00a0 But he walks in, a little Italian guy, played first trombone in the symphony and he taught at San Francisco State.\u00a0 And he said, “Okay boys, I want you to go out and guy a treble clef Arban’s.”\u00a0 “Treble clef Arban’s?”\u00a0 “Yes.\u00a0 We’re going to learn tenor clef.”\u00a0 What the hell is tenor clef?\u00a0 Well, most trombone players can play bass clef, tenor clef and alto clef.\u00a0 They’re just three different ways of writing music.\u00a0 And so I would practice like hell and learn the exercises but they were in the treble clef Arban’s book so I was doing great.<\/p>\n Meanwhile I was getting help from a couple of the guys in the band . . . what’s this bass clef stuff?\u00a0 They showed me.\u00a0 So I had to work on that too.\u00a0 It was just incredible that I ever got through.\u00a0 Amazing.<\/p>\n It was great to come to the city, just fine.\u00a0 I loved it.\u00a0 I needed some money so I got a night job.\u00a0 The city ran a kind of a school for people who had to work during the day so they could go to school at night.\u00a0 It started out in one place and then they moved.\u00a0 I learned to ride the bus.\u00a0 I thought that was great too.\u00a0 Everything was so different.\u00a0 I loved it.<\/p>\n I was at the old campus of San Francisco State.\u00a0 It was at Haight and Buchanan Streets just off of Market Street and near the new mint.\u00a0 Good old rickety place, funny old place.\u00a0 And we had classes in a church just down the street from us.\u00a0 We had some music classes there and the rest were up in the old campus and then they had a bus to the new campus that I took to a humanities class and the only things out there were the gym, the science building and maybe the library.\u00a0 That was from’51 to ’53.\u00a0 The humanities class was in a hut, an old farming hut of some kind out in the sand dunes.\u00a0 The bus would drive over Twin Peaks and come over and he would park on 19th Avenue and we’d get out and go through the sand dunes over to the school hut.<\/p>\n And also I was on the swim team.\u00a0 In junior college I swam.\u00a0 In 1951 I made All American in the 220 yard free style and I was number 10 in the nation in junior colleges.\u00a0 I couldn’t believe it.\u00a0 My coach–he was a great guy–found this booklet that had listings from all over the country and he gave it to me and . . . “Oh my god.\u00a0 Look at that!”\u00a0 I couldn’t believe it.\u00a0 So I was doing a lot of swimming in San Francisco too.\u00a0 Nothing official.\u00a0 I played water polo.\u00a0 I liked that.\u00a0 That was fun.\u00a0 All the other guys were going to the practice rooms and practicing their horns and I was out playing water polo.\u00a0 But it was fun.<\/p>\n We had a great band, some great musicians there, guys who later went on to all kinds of things.\u00a0 My favorite guy was Stu Dempster.\u00a0 Stuart Dempster.\u00a0 He played trombone.\u00a0 Oh, man, did he play trombone!\u00a0 He could play anything I guess.\u00a0 He could play baritone, valves.\u00a0 Bass clef, treble clef, tenor clef, alto clef–he didn’t care.\u00a0 Amazing musician.\u00a0 I still talk to Stu once in a while.\u00a0 He lives back east.\u00a0 He got into this far out . . . he plays didjeridu.\u00a0 He would perform on the didjeridu and do all kinds of funny things.\u00a0 (editor:\u00a0 According to Wikipedia he is credited with introducing the didjeridu to North America.\u00a0 After Dempster completed his studies at\u00a0San Francisco State College<\/a>, he was appointed assistant professor at the\u00a0California State College at Hayward<\/a>, and instructor at the\u00a0San Francisco Conservatory<\/a>\u00a0(1960\u201366). During this period he was also a member of the Performing Group at\u00a0Mills College<\/a>, and from 1962 to 1966 was first trombonist in the\u00a0Oakland Symphony Orchestra<\/a>. In 1967\u201368 he was a Creative Associate at the\u00a0State University of New York at Buffalo<\/a>\u00a0under\u00a0Lukas Foss<\/a>. The following year he was appointed assistant professor at the\u00a0University of Washington<\/a>, in\u00a0Seattle<\/a>, where he was promoted to full professor in 1985. In 1971\u201372 he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at the\u00a0University of Illinois<\/a>, and in 1973 he was a senior Fulbright scholar to Australia.\u00a0 And in 1979 the University of California Press published his book,\u00a0The Modern Trombone: A Definition of Its Idioms. He received a\u00a0Guggenheim Fellowship<\/a>\u00a0award in 1981.\u00a0<\/em>)\u00a0 He never did any formal trombone soloing, I don’t think.<\/p>\n The San Francisco State Band had here and there a lot of really good musicians.\u00a0 My favorite guy was Chris Bogios.\u00a0 It’s Greek.\u00a0 He was a fine musician but he was a real energetic, driving kind of guy.\u00a0 He was just great to be around, really fun.\u00a0 But he wound up on second trumpet on the San Francisco Symphony.\u00a0 So he did his wood shedding.\u00a0 He was a good musician.<\/p>\n There was another guy.\u00a0 Joe Smiell.\u00a0 He had a German band.\u00a0 He was of German extraction and that German band was something.\u00a0 He used six trumpets in the front row and I guess he used three trombones, two euphoniums, a\u00a0 number of clarinets and several tubas.\u00a0 It was a big band.\u00a0 We played for Octoberfests.\u00a0 I was lucky.\u00a0 I didn’t measure up to the rest of the guys in the band.\u00a0 They were really<\/em> good.\u00a0 (editor:\u00a0 Joe Smiell played button box accordion, an instrument that his Austro-Hungarian\u00a0father had played, at the Cotati Accordion Festival and was honorary director in 2001.\u00a0 He played bassoon, clarinet and accordion, and composed.\u00a0 He died in 2012.)<\/em><\/p>\n I graduated from college in ’53.\u00a0 And then I was in the army.\u00a0 In those days the draft was on and they would let you go until you got your BA but then you had to go in the army so I did.\u00a0 I was in an army band in Germany.\u00a0 The Korean War was just finished and all these guys were coming back and I was at Fort Ord for my training.\u00a0 These guys were sitting around, just waiting<\/u><\/em> to get out.\u00a0 They were a funny bunch.<\/p>\n It was good fortune that I went into the army for two years because when I came back I went back to college and got that on the GI Bill.\u00a0 That was easy on my mother because she had footed the bill for everything before that.\u00a0 I was working some but not enough to sustain me.<\/p>\n That’s when I met my wife.\u00a0 Her parent were living in Marin where she grew up and her father was a research professor at UC Medical School in San Francisco.\u00a0 We met at San Francisco State.\u00a0 She was a French horn player–very good.\u00a0 She did a little professional work after she got out of school though I don’t think she majored in music.\u00a0 She played in the band and knew all the musicians.\u00a0 I was getting a teaching credential in music education.\u00a0 After I graduated we got married.<\/p>\n When we got married I got a job in Boonville teaching music in the elementary school and the high school up there.\u00a0 But they didn’t have a high school band.\u00a0 My first day in school I was in the band room and three guys walked in and sat down. I said, “Okay, what do you play?”<\/p>\n “Nothin’.”<\/p>\n “What do you<\/u><\/strong> play?”<\/p>\n “Nothin’.”<\/p>\n They didn’t play anything.\u00a0 They just wanted to take band.\u00a0 So I said, “Well, why don’t you go look for something else.”<\/p>\n And I started working with the elementary school that was next door and we wound up with a very small choir.\u00a0 I found a kid in high school there that played piano and she was willing to be an accompanist.\u00a0 So I had an accompanist and willing people so we had a choir.<\/p>\n But after two years–no more of this for me, no more.\u00a0 And my wife didn’t like it.\u00a0 She was a city girl.\u00a0 And we had two kids.\u00a0 One was a newborn and the other was two.\u00a0 So from Boonville I moved back to San Francisco and went back to school and got a credential in mathematics.\u00a0 It didn’t take much.\u00a0 I couldn’t teach anything but algebra and geometry and arithmetic and I worked at a really good high school–Washington.<\/p>\n So we moved back to San Francisco from Boonville and I got a credential in math and I started working in the high schools.\u00a0 I lived in a variety of places.\u00a0 The last place was over on Cambridge Street.\u00a0 The first school that I taught in was Mission High School.\u00a0 Oooh, that was something else.\u00a0 It was crowded.\u00a0 I was there for three years.\u00a0 The first two years we had kids from Hunters Point coming in as well as from the Mission District.\u00a0 Then when Hunters Point opened up–pheeooo–it got a lot more opened up.\u00a0 It was crowded!\u00a0 But we had a nurse and we had a psychologist, both great people and everyone was fairly united in thinking the principal was an idiot.\u00a0 So that helps.\u00a0 But then evidently–and this is weird–evidently I went to Balboa because in my collection of yearbooks there’s a Balboa yearbook with my picture in it but I don’t remember it at all.\u00a0 And then another one at Galileo that I don’t remember so I sort of skipped around I guess.\u00a0 Well, that’s when I was going through a divorce.\u00a0 The marriage really ended when we got back to San Francisco.\u00a0 She was back in the Big City.\u00a0 She got a job.\u00a0 Then she got an apartment . . .\u00a0 That was a rough time.\u00a0 Strange . . . strange.\u00a0 The kids were always with me.\u00a0 She didn’t want kids.<\/p>\n But we did and now my youngest boy, he works for a Japanese electronics company of some kind.\u00a0 They make lasers.\u00a0 He’s the representative in the United States.\u00a0 He spent twenty-two years in Japan.\u00a0 He couldn’t find a job here so he went to Japan to teach English.\u00a0 Great!\u00a0 So he spent a lot of time there and he’s fluent in Japanese.\u00a0 In fact he married a Japanese woman who was from Hiroshima where the first atom bomb was dropped and next thing you knew she had cancer and died.\u00a0 And this is while he was teaching English over there and living over there so then he got acquainted with a Chinese woman and he married her and then they moved back to the states.\u00a0 They live up in Portland now.\u00a0 They have two kids.\u00a0 He speaks to the kids in English, she speaks to them in Chinese, and he and his wife speak to each other in Japanese because that’s where they’re most fluent.\u00a0 She’s not good in English and he’s not good in Chinese.\u00a0 But he’s learning.<\/p>\n Jeff is the younger of the boys.\u00a0 The older one is a doctor for Kaiser in Vacaville.<\/p>\n And then I taught at Washington High and that’s where I met Muriel.\u00a0 She was a teacher and she belonged to the teacher’s union as did I.\u00a0 The head of the teacher’s union at Washington was a real sweetheart and she was a good friend of Muriel’s and she knew me and one day I walked into teacher’s room, grumpy and scowling–“RRRR!\u00a0 Damn kids!”–and she said, “Y’know, there’s somebody I know that you should give a call to.”\u00a0 And Muriel was going through a divorce at the time.\u00a0 She had been married to the president of the teacher’s union.\u00a0 I guess I saw her one time.\u00a0 Her oldest boy, Mark just retired.\u00a0 He’s 65.\u00a0 Well, he was in my algebra class.\u00a0 He knew I was interested in music and he was taking classical guitar lessons at the San Francisco Conservatory.\u00a0 He was in a program and Mark told me, “You ought to go to that concert.\u00a0 I’m going to play in this recital,” he and other musician.\u00a0 So I said, “Oh, I’d like to hear that.”\u00a0 And Muriel and her husband were there of course to hear Mark.\u00a0 So after the concert Mark came over to me and said, “I’d like you to meet my mother.”\u00a0 “Okay.”<\/p>\n I already knew her husband.\u00a0 He was the president of our union.\u00a0 And so he introduced me.\u00a0 I said, “He’s a good musician, he’s a good student, you’ve got everything.”\u00a0 And that was that.<\/p>\n So things got heavy with me.\u00a0 Our union rep at Washington said, “You better go and talk to somebody.”\u00a0 So he gave me her phone number and I called her up and said, “Jerry said that I should come and talk to you.”\u00a0 And she said, “Yes.”\u00a0 And she had heard about me because Mark thought I was a good teacher and I thought he was a good student.\u00a0 And she said, “Oh, would you come to dinner?”\u00a0 And I did and the rest is history.\u00a0 Best phone call I ever made.<\/p>\n And we’ve been married–oh mighty!–45 years or something like that.<\/p>\n She had two kids and I had two kids so that was enough.\u00a0 We had a good time.<\/p>\n And boy, Mark is our lifesaver nowadays because we’re living in this assisted living and he comes over and fixes the television.\u00a0 And then we screw it up again.\u00a0 And then he comes back–“No problem.\u00a0 I’m over here anyway.”\u00a0 And he straightens it out.\u00a0 Right now we can’t use it.\u00a0 He got a beautiful TV for us but it’s got a zillion channels and I can’t figure it out.<\/p>\n I retired at 62 in ’94.\u00a0 Before I retired my kids and I all moved in with Muriel.\u00a0 She had this big old house out on 46th Avenue in the Richmond District just above the Cliff House a little ways.\u00a0 It was a nice area.\u00a0 We got married and then the boys and I moved in with her.\u00a0 We lived there until we moved to Petaluma because Mark was in Forestville and we wanted to get out of the City.\u00a0 I love San Francisco but it is so damn crowded and we wanted a little peace and quiet so we moved to Petaluma.\u00a0 And it was great.<\/p>\n I was playing in the Golden Gate Park Band but I decided that I was out of my league.\u00a0 Those guys had been playing that music for all their life.\u00a0 I recently he saw a notice or a flyer or something that said that they were honoring a good friend of mine that I met in college–a tuba player– for playing tuba in the Golden Gate Park Band for 50 years.\u00a0 When we went down to play at the band course, I tried to get in touch with him.\u00a0 I saw him come in and I called to him and one of the other members of the band who was right there said, “Oh, he’s not going to hear you.\u00a0 He’s deaf as a post.”<\/p>\n Hank Niebolt.\u00a0 Tuba player extraordinaire.\u00a0 He played it like a violin. (editor: Henry Niebolt<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 tuba \u2013 who joined the band in 1961, is in his 57th year and may have performed in more Golden Gate Park Band concerts than any other player in the band\u2019s history. He also performs regularly with the Symphony Parnassus. Hank has also performed with the Marin Symphony, the Ringling Brothers Circus, the Ice Follies, and many other groups. \u00a0He retired after a 32 year career as an elementary school teacher.<\/em>)<\/p>\n I was playing in that band when the earthquake hit.\u00a0 I went over to the band shell there.\u00a0 It had rained the night before and there was a hole in the roof.\u00a0 The earthquake had broken something.\u00a0 I went over and one of the guys in the percussion section was in their library sorting things out.\u00a0 It had rained on their library and he was despondent, just heartbroken, and there was an old timpani there that had been rained on and the head was ruined and it was all dented and he said, “Oh, we’re going to throw that out.”\u00a0 And I said, “Can I have it?”\u00a0 So I took it home.\u00a0 But I also took home a bunch of sheet music that was all wet and I had rigged up a drying rack in the basement garage of Muriel’s because it was on a hill so when you drove in you went down and then it was level and there was maybe a 14 or 15 foot ceiling.\u00a0 So I rigged up a drying rack that we could hang from the ceiling and lower it down to put clothes on it and then raise it back up to the ceiling above the car.\u00a0 So I took a bunch of music home, put it on the drying rack, raised it up to the ceiling.\u00a0 Of course it was all wrinkled.\u00a0 I wasn’t about to iron it. \u00a0I took it back to him wrinkled.\u00a0 Maybe he ironed it out.\u00a0 I don’t know.<\/p>\n When I got up to Petauma I hooked up with Swing and a Miss and was playing with them.\u00a0 The woman that runs Swing and a Miss was an elementary school teacher in Petaluma.\u00a0 One day I saw her at rehearsal and I said, “Oh, you’re a teacher.”\u00a0 And she said, “Would you come and help my trombone players?”\u00a0 So I started teaching over there.\u00a0 Oh, they were great kids, wonderful kids.\u00a0 They gave me a plaque.\u00a0 There were two girls–one big girl, one little bitty girl.\u00a0 And I had loaned the little girl one of my trombones.\u00a0 I’d go over and help them and show them how to hold the horn and work with them.\u00a0 When finally they left, they gave me a plaque that showed their picture on it, both of them playing trombone.\u00a0 I treasure that.\u00a0 They were cute kids.<\/p>\n But if you were a kid in grammar school now . . . what a future they have now.\u00a0 The future scares me.\u00a0 Climate change scares me.\u00a0 It pays to be hopeful.<\/p>\n And it was through Laura Cummins at Swing and a Miss–a nice friendship.\u00a0 Good people.–that I got hooked up with New Horizons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bob Knapp\u00a0 –trombone, euphonium “It pays to be hopeful.” I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-464","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/464\/revisions\/541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}