The new year found both the ODCB and the LODB busy as usual. The LODB continued its habit of representing the band in area events ranging from family reunions to library and bank festivities to habitat house fund raisers. The guys even entertained Donna, the famed Mesker Park hippo, for her 50th birthday party, and it was noted that Donna enjoyed the music as well as her popsicles. A concerned monkey in the immediate vicinity harassed the band with well-timed jeers, and a nice crowd enjoyed it all.
The guys also played for the Henderson Fly Fishing Club, where they were fed chicken, of all things. They played 28 times this year, including several birthday parties for people with no monkey to sing or hippo to smell bad. These guys will play anywhere!
The big band took the trailer out on three parades this year, including the first Newburgh Easter Parade, which wound around a couple of blocks down by the river on a freezing cold day. Dan Schultz, Bill Haas, Ted and Rachelle Gore, Hugh Whittaker, Bryan Hartig, Frank Book, Carl Zimmerman, Dave McGill, Tracy McConnell, Wayne Fiester, and Mary Williams (who wore her Peep Easter bonnet, which tried its best to get away) rode, with Jim Fox conducting and Jim Sermersheim driving the towing Navigator. For some reason, in Newburgh, the parade is usually bigger than the crowd watching it!
In June, the band went to Haubstadt to join the Sommerfest Parade, which covered every street in that little town where I grew up, winding past almost every house with every porch and yard filled with happy folks of German ancestry enjoying the beautiful day and the parade. In October we were back at the West Side Nut Club Fall Festival Parade, slowly traveling the few blocks on Franklin Street packed with more German West Siders than we quite know what to do with! These folks do know how to enjoy a parade!
Summer of 2006 saw 10 members of the ODCB travel to northern Ohio to participate in the Northern Ohio Adult Band Camp at Ashland University. In 2005, Dan and Wayne took off on their own to spend the week at camp, staying in a dormitory and enjoying their time at camp so much that they convinced a few more of us to go with them in 2006. Adult band camp is a little different than what you might remember from those fun days in high school when you spent hours on a hot parking lot learning new marching band routines. We spent hours learning new music, but it was all spent indoors in a nice rehearsal hall at a pretty little university, and we had a wonderful time.
Those attending The Ashland Band Camp that year were Gene Van Stone, Hugh Whittaker, Mary Williams, Nance and Wayne Fiester, Tracy McConnell, Jona Witherspoon, Ruthe Potami, and Dan and me. Some of us stayed in a local hotel, but the girls enjoyed a dorm room, sleeping under wet towels to stay cool! We all thought we were going north and it wouldn’t be quite as hot as it turned out to be. Since then, Mike and Mary Ann Decker have gone to Ashland every year and report that it’s still as wonderful as it was that first time. There are other band camps especially for us grown ups around the country and, if you haven’t ever gone, you should consider it. Believe me, you learn a lot from experts in a very short time! Plus, we had a good time doing it.
The ODCB, and, of course, the LODB, have always enjoyed playing for area nursing homes and retirement villages. Our concerts at Lakeside Manor and Atria and Solarbron are always looked forward to by us and, we suppose, our hosts and audiences. There are always nice crowds and people who appreciate our kind of music: people to sing along and clap to the beat: people who remember how to tap their toes to big band sounds and Sousa marches: people who are our friends and neighbors and who, like some of us, are getting older and only better. They are our biggest supporters and we usually have our biggest band turnouts for these events because of them.
Starting about this time the big band performed for the first time at the new Ohio Township Public Library, sponsoring our own concerts for the public in this beautiful new facility. We have seen our audiences grow larger at every concert as word gets out that we actually sound pretty good, and we certainly appreciate the library for allowing us to have these concerts almost every month in recent years. It is a good venue for us: large enough for our growing numbers and our growing audience, bright enough for even old eyes, set up by the nice maintenance staff: and free!