On Thursday in my home town of Redmond, Oregon a high school auditorium will be dedicated to my father, Clyde Moore. He is 85 and lives in Portland with my mother. He was the band teacher in the Redmond school system for 28 years, teaching in grades five through twelve. In a few short years he put our little town of 5000 residents on the map by developing one of the top bands in the state. He dedicated his life to the kids and to music. He spent evenings in the spring and summer marching the band through the town’s streets in preparation for the County Fair, Spud Festival and often the Rose Parade in Portland where we wore our military style uniforms of maroon with gold trim. There was a Christmas Concert in December and a Pops Concert in the spring. There was a dance band and marching and pep bands for the football and basketball games. We competed individually at recitals all over the state and as a group went to band competitions and festivals all over the country, including Hawaii, Canada and Mexico.

Dad was big on practicing and being one of his kids I was expected to tow the line. I played the flute in the concert band, piccolo and sometimes cymbals in the marching band. My older brother played the clarinet and saxophone and was by far the best musician in the family. My sisters and I did the best we could and were fairly competitive in vying for the “chairs” in the section that we played. I look back on it now and I suppose I would have been better suited to sing in the choir than play an instrument, but the choir was the ugly stepchild to band in those days, and of course, my father would not have heard of it. Band was his life and therefore our life. It was important that we play and it was doubly important that we play well. It was a tough row to hoe at times but, as time has the ability to do, I see now where there were so many gifts in being in the band, most of all it was being a part of something—something that brought these rowdy, headstrong, and terribly insecure teenagers together in a common endeavor. We were expected to excel, to show up, dress up and damn well do our best out there. We were part of the band, part of his band.

God, I haven’t thought about it in so long. I can see the band room at the high school; the practice and instrument rooms the windows along the north side facing the street where yellow school buses loaded and unloaded twice a day, the tiered risers set in a semi-circle with the director’s podium at their center, my father’s glassed in office in the corner, the smell of the cleaning oil, the squeak of tennis shoes and scrape of chairs on the brown tiled floor. I remember my flute in it’s felt lined case, pulling it out, twisting the three pieces together, blowing into the cold mouthpiece, starting with C and running up and down the scales, my fingers knowing exactly when to lift and when to fall. I remember turning to Carol or Betsy in first chair and leaning in to them, tuning to their C, the whole band tuning, woodwinds, brass, percussion tapping and rumbling in the background. I remember the rap-rap of the baton on the music stand, looking up to see my six-foot father raising his right arm in an arc, the look of authority in his eyes and posture, the look that bodes no monkey-business, that lets every one in that room know exactly who’s in charge and we are about to begin and you better stop goofing off and pay attention
while you’re in his classroom.

I know it was impossible then, but now when I go back and look up from my chair in the front row, brush away my drooping bangs and teenage angst and rebellion, when I look now at the imposing figure of this man, my father, my teacher, I see so clearly the heart and soul of someone who loved what he did, gave everything he had to impart courage and confidence in his students and I if I listen closely I am sure I will hear softly flowing out of his cloaked heart and into all of us sitting there, all of us who would be forever changed by him, the rhythmic, melodic, and entrancing wonder that is music.

My parents in San Diego right after they were married and he was still a Navy man.

This must have been in the fifties when I was still in diapers.

The concert band. If you get your microscope out you can see I’m the third flute on the left, first row (after Betsy & Nancy, of course).

The Pep Band at a basketball game.

At the football game–a page out of my junior yearbook.

*****

Here’s a poem I wrote this summer on his 85th birthday when I was at our house in Sisters. It came while I was looking out the window at the tall grass moving in the breeze.

Spirito

In slanted light long grasses sway, bow
to the east, a swirling concert of blades—

flats and sharps, tempo and cadence, allegro,
andante, pianissimo, piano, oh, insistent forte,

intrepid crescendo, glide of diminuendo,
flaming sky cantata slurs to lengthy shadows.

And the winds rest and the woods fall dark.
Still the roots play on…dolce, dolce, dolce.