High school speech 1963

1963 I competed in high school speech contests with an 8-minute humorous speech, the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-a-play from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Did all the voices. I won First Prize in my category five times.

Wooster High School band got me started

A new era for the Wooster High School Band began with the arrival of Jack Emig as director in 1956. Director at WHS for eight years, Emig helped hundreds of students in Wooster to enjoy and produce music through participation in band.

By the time I joined the band, playing sousaphone, the 110 member Wooster High School Marching Band sported brand-new blue and gold uniforms.

Emig utilized his training at Ohio State University to usher in a new era of "precision marching". The band began venturing to distant performance venues and received much acclaim. 

I played the sousaphone because parents did not have to buy those instruments. I ended my Senior year being the First "O" in Wooster.

After high school, I began playing acoustic guitar, hand drums including djembe, congas and bongos and bass guitar.

I still play bongos.

I'm the first O in WOoster!

I was the first "O" in Wooster in the Wooster High School Senior Band in 1963. 

Typical for a fat boy, I played the Sousaphone because most other instruments had to be paid for by your parents. I was being raised by my grandmother and she couldn't afford a trumpet. The school purchased sousaphones. 

We were 110 members strong. I loved the band and our director Jack Emig. We did precision drills at football games and marched in parades.

It ended up making me an amateur musician for the rest of my life. I played a Fender acoustic guitar for about 10 years, played bass guitar for a few years in the Nineties, and played bongo drums for most of my life.

(And I still do.)

We deejayed school dances.

With two friends I deejayed our school dances in 1963.

Mitch and Henry played the music.

(Deejays played vinyl records back then. )

I was the announcer.

Although I was fat, some kids liked me because I knew all about rock and roll music and had introduced them to The Beatles.

Played all the parts.

While in high school, I participated in Speech Contests throughout the northern Ohio region.

I was in the category "Humorous Declamation" and I had chosen the Pyramus and Thisbe scene from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. 

I earned five blue ribbons over three years of participation.

It was fun. I played six characters during the scene.

Doing dances & introducing The Beatles

In 1963, with two friends, we deejayed all our Wooster High School school dances. This was back when deejays simply played (vinyl) records for dances instead of the hip-hop deejays who now exist. 

Doing dances caused me to become a sort of "star" among my fellow high school students. Even though I was a fat guy and didn't qualify to be a football player, some kids liked me because I knew everything about rock and roll music. In fact, I was also the first one at my high school to introduce The Beatles to my fellow students.

“The Beatles?” asked Karen Doty. “What’s that?”

“They’re this great rock band from England,” I said.

Although 1963 was a breakout year for the band in England and Europe, few Americans had ever heard of the Beatles. Ed Sullivan happened to be in London when the Beatles were mobbed by throngs of young girls at a rainy Heathrow Airport in 1963. He was stunned by their enthusiasm and booked the group on his variety show for three dates in February 1964.

“How do you know about them?” Steve Ellis asked.

I told him, “A US disc jockey got a British flight attendant to buy him a copy of I Want to Hold Your Hand, and he started playing it. It became the Beatles' first number one record in America in Feb. 1, 1964.” 

On the evening of February 9, Ed Sullivan looked like a genius for having hired the world’s most popular band for his show. Their presence on Sullivan’s show that night, attracted an audience estimated to be seventy-four million people, the largest audience in American television history at the time. 

For The Beatles, 1964 turned out great. Nineteen Beatle songs made it into the Billboard top 100 singles list that year.