My Life in the Little Brown House, part 8: Drum and Bugle Corps

One of the times I was disciplined as a child, that I recall, was at a mealtime. I was sent to the back bedroom (which by then had been converted into sort of a playroom) until my behavior was judged acceptable. What my offense had been I don’t remember, but I remember returning to the table and continuing the meal.

Adjacent to the kitchen, in the northwest corner of the house was the room that was initially a bedroom, and I have vague memories of sleeping in the large, double bed in the room. There was no separate closet but along the east wall of the room there was a large tall cabinet, with doors on the front, that was used for storage of clothes. When I was about ten years old I played a drum and marched in the junior drum and bugle corps sponsored by the local post of the American Legion. On one occasion for some reason I had taken one of the drums home with me (to practice?) and I kept it on top of this clothes cabinet. As I lay in the bed I heard the drum make little stress-induced noises (the tension on the head was adjusted by a number of screws along the periphery of the drum and any unevenness in the tightening of the screws would lead to slow expansion or contraction of parts of the drum). The noises perturbed me as I considered myself responsible for the drum while it was in my care and I wondered if I would be judged remiss by the individual in charge of the junior corps.

I was not in the junior drum and bugle corps at its inception but I have the feeling it had not been in existence long when I joined. There were two boys living relatively close to the little brown house who belonged to the group and it may have been through them that I joined.l Both of these friends, Harris Magnuson and Robert Blomgren, were in the bugle section. Generally, the drum section was more popular, both for the initial members and for new recruits; I don’t know how I got into it.

Practices were held on summer evenings on what was then the community golf course and involved both instruction on playing and marching; I do remember however some practices at other times of the year in the upstairs of one of the downtown store buildings. We marched and played on such occasions as the Fourth of July and Memorial Day (both of which at the time had parades and a ritual of observance) and on a few occasions on events in Fort Dodge (I don’t recall the character of these, but on one of them I came down with one of the sick headaches that I would have periodically even that early in life). The Fourth of July celebration in the Gowrie park was organized and sponsored by the local American Legion post as a money-raising activity and the men’s corps marched in the parade then and on Memorial Day. I think they used the money to fund their participating in the Iowa state competition for the best drum and bugle corps. I think they were best in the state several times.

The junior corps went on “booster” trips to nearby towns prior to the Fourth of July celebration to publicize it. We would march up and down the business section of these small towns. These trips would take place in the late afternoon, some of them before the school term ended for the spring. On one of these trips several of us were riding in the Model A Ford and the driver got up to 60 mph — quite a thrill for us and the fastest I had ever experienced up to that time. The attire for the junior corps was white shirt and pants, a white sailor cap and a red sash around the waist, long enough so that the ends hung down quite a ways. Somewhere I have a photo of me with my drum and Robert Blomgren with his bugle. I suppose my mother took it.









[Note: The handwritten caption underneath identifies the two boys as Carl and Harris, thus indicating that the second boy is Harris Magnuson, not Robert Blomgren.]