Hudson High School - True Blue Yearbook (Hudson, WI)

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SCHOOL LIFE 29 I BOOK II Organizations Activities

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MUSICAL ORGANIZATIONS MR. DAVID DAHL Director of Instrumental Music When you Income discouraged by your lack of technique and realize to your dismay that you have a “tin ear”, Professor Dahl encourages you and helps you to overcome your difficulties. He tells you that to get somewhere in music you have to work hard. Let us look a moment into his past and see how lie has gained his place in the world of music. Mr. Dahl was born on a farm in Warren, Minnesota, the eldest of eleven children. While he was still a little boy his mother taught him to play the guitar. He often played and sang with his sister in his father’s church. One fall day little Dave, who was nine years old, heard that a band was to be organized, to which anyone could belong—that is, anyone who had fifteen dollars to pay toward an instrument. Fifteen dollars was a great amount of money to a small boy, but it did not discourage him. He trapped a few mink and foxes and sold a few dozen eggs his mother had given him. “By the time I laid down the fifteen dollars,” Mr. Dahl reminisces, “all the instruments that were left were a three-fifty piccolo and a drum.” lie wisely chose the piccolo. Wisely, because he had to walk more than seven miles to the place where the band was to practice. By early summer the little band that had been organized had grown and was ready to perform. Their first engagement was at Hallock, Minnesota, at a Fourth of July celebration. He joined another, the Red River Cornet Band, and played whatever instruments they happened to be short on. Still later he joined the Hallock band. They needed clarinets so Dave worked hard and saved his money and bought one. Perhaps you have wondered how Mr. Dahl started playing the cello, for you know it is his favorite. This is how he started. One evening he went to the Orpheum theater in St. Paul and heard a wonderful cellest who played a number which so inspired him that he work- ed still harder to earn enough to buy a cello and learn to play it. Ten years before Mr. Dahl came to Hudson, he had a Reed School, the largest of its kind west of Detroit. Each week there were over two hun- dred students enrolled. Gradually the school branched out to teaching other instruments. We have been fortunate to have Mr. Dahl with us for the eight years he has taught in Hudson High. The band and orchestra under his direction have grown a great deal. Tt is a problem to have a balanced instrumentation every year, but he has managed to fill the places of the grad- uates by training children in the grades and helping them all through. He seems to be a tireless worker, for when he is not leading the band, giving pri- vate lessons and planning programs, he is repairing an old instrument or arranging a piece of music. David Dahl 30