For most of my life I’ve kind of used the excuse that I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grow up. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the Caribou County Sun, the local Soda Springs and Caribou County, Idaho newspaper, and saw my name in the “Pages From the Past” section, under “50 Years Ago.”

I remember the circumstances quite clearly. After a number of years of a less-than-mediocre music department, the Soda Springs school district hired Brent Covington in the fall of 1959 as the music director for the high school. He was young, energetic, and exciting (I think this was his first teaching contract after graduating from college). He was also strict and had very high standards. We knew something great was happening when, at our first band practice in the old high school band room, he wrote on the blackboard a trumpet obligato for the school’s fight song and had the trumpets each try to play it. Then he got out his trumpet and showed them what he wanted. It was just plain spectacular.

We actually started doing the things that high school bands in that day did: march and play in parades and football games. He formed a pep band to play at the basketball games and even got the school district to pay for a bus to go to the away basketball games. In the fall of 1959 I was a Freshman in high school and played the drums in the band and in the pep band.

He told us that we’d have elections and a real band government. At the beginning of the second semester in January, 1960 we held elections and I was elected as a band manager over a part of the band along with two other Freshman classmates, Duane Beins and Barry Bingham.

Band was a very important part of my high school experience all due to Brent Covington’s enthusiasm, discipline, and standards. A couple of years after I graduated, Brent’s father died and Brent left teaching to go run his father’s farm near Idaho Falls. He was killed in an automobile accident a couple of years ago.

I wonder if he ever knew how much of an impact he had on a small group of backwater band members?

However, I guess when I finally show up in the “50 Years Ago” column in the newspaper, I’m no longer really able to ask what I want to do when I grow up. Maturity (at least from a chronological standpoint) has arrived.