And the Ret is History... Marvin Manring, Historian


Congratulations to MMEA Service Award recipients Chris Auchly (26 years), Anita Hartley (26 years), and Doug Hoover (35 years). The honorees were introduced at the second general session on Thursday evening. If you have taught for 25 years, consider submitting your information to MMEA for the coming year, and set that calendar for Thursday, January 25, 2018!


The MMEA history display at the Hawthorn room was well attended and busy during the Thursday and Friday of the 79th Conference. No official count of visitors is available, but a steady stream of all ages of attendees came through to look over historical documents, photos, and memorabilia. Each year, something new or unique is added to enrich our sense of MMEA’s beginnings, progress, and effect on Missouri music education. Thanks for stopping in!


Special this year was a poster/instrument display regarding the Marshfield bandstand, built in 1906 for $100.00. A sketch of the bandstand by artist Lloyd Burks served as the cover art for the Missouri School Music publication during the mid-1980s (see below). The Marshfield community had several concurrent community and family bands performing from 1865 to 1928. Prominent among these were the City Cyclone Band, formed in 1880 after the Marshfield Tornado, and its successor in 1903, the Marshfield Concert Band.


The town bands served as the community’s ambassadors of musical goodwill, providing music for patriotic events, festivals, political rallies of all kinds, and a vital slice of Americana—the Saturday night band concert on the square. Also on display in the History Room was the 1919 Holton cornet of bandmaster Theron H. Watters of the Marshfield Concert Band. Watters was the publisher of the Marshfield Mail and led the local band as solo cornetist.


In 1926, the Marshfield School District offered a band class for the first time, and the students were deemed proficient enough by the next summer to take on the community’s musical needs. The bandstand was sold at auction for $18.00 when a new courthouse was built, and it spent a second career as a cattle feeder. When the bandstand was rededicated in 1983, Dee Lewis and a small band of Marshfield musicians provided the ceremonial music for the event (Karl King marches, of course!).


As editor of the MSM, Lewis chose the sketch of the bandstand for the publication’s cover art, where it greeted MMEA readers for several years.


See MANRING, p. 64


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MISSOURI SCHOOL MUSIC | Volume 71, Number 3


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