Whilst Pondering
By Mitch Berg
Summer – like any season, really – brings back a flood of memories.
When I think hot, dry humidity, I remember most summers in North Dakota, and being dry and hot – at baseball practice, caddying for my dad, sitting in the stands at baseball games craving a Coke.
But when it’s hot and the humidity is up near tropical, I think first about my time at International Music Camp, back in seventh and eighth grade.
Both years, I won scholarships to go to the camp, up at the International Peace Gardens, on the boarder between North Dakota and Manitoba. The camp – about half a mile on the US side – was a summer program teaching a variety of genres of music in one-week chunks throughout the summer. Being a cello player, I went for Orchestra both years. It was a high-speed week, spent intensely rehearsing for a concert held every Sunday. There were two full-group rehearsals a day, along with sectionals and small-group clinics to try to improve on the instrument.
Not being an especially good cellist at the time, I was in the “lower” of the two orchestras. Both orchestras had guest directors brought in from hither and yon. Both years, my director was a guy named Howard Leyton-Brown, an Australian native who was a violinist and conductor at the Regina Conservatory in Saskatechewan. On the program, I noted that among his credits he listed having flown in the Royal Air Force during the war.
One day after a late rehearsal, I approached him, and asked what kind of plane he’d flown. “I flew a Handley-Page Halifax”, he replied, seeming astonished that a bobble-headed American junior-high kid would ask – and moreso that I knew what he was talking about.
And apropos not much, it occurred to me to test the miracle of Google, and see if I could find any reference to Mr. Leyton-Brown.
And I did – in this case, an audio account of his time as a bomber pilot.
July 22nd, 2011 at 6:59 am
I feel for you Mitch. I mean suffering in the heat of North Dakota must have been hard when the state tree is a telephone pole. 😉
July 22nd, 2011 at 8:59 am
When ever I tour a WWII era bomber at an air show, I think of how relatively primative the planes were and how many airmen were lost simply due to leadership not knowing the limits of the men or the machines.
July 22nd, 2011 at 9:47 am
So, you’re saying, “One time, at band camp…”
July 22nd, 2011 at 10:06 am
He was playing cello, which makes the American Pie reference even more odious.