As ill luck would have it, my college admission test was administered on the morning of the opening day of the annual pheasant hunt, so it was hard to keep my mind focused, what with the repeated thump, thump, thump of shotgun fire from the surrounding hills—hills where I felt far more at home than seated behind a desk in a stuffy classroom.
Needless to say, my score was nothing to shout about; however, it didn’t matter because I had already been granted a full tuition music scholarship to Carbon College—this in spite of the fact I couldn’t even read music, let alone play it. The trombone I’d carried through elementary, middle and high school was a hand-me-down that previously had belonged to my father—what you might call a “legacy” instrument.
Carbon Junior College was just two blocks south of the house where I’d grown up, so it made economic sense to go there instead of, say, Harvard or Yale. To my parents’ way of thinking, it didn’t matter which college I went to so long as I earned a college degree, which they hoped would enable me to land a job doing something other than shoveling coal. In any event, no ivy league school would have accepted me, since all this happened long before the advent of affirmative action, whereby a small proportion of disadvantaged kids are thrown into the mix in order to remind the privileged just how very privileged they are.
One advantage of attending a tiny college: You will NOT be a small frog in a big pond. Au contraire, I was a very big frog on campus! During my two-year stint at Carbon, I served as sophomore class president, drum major, editor of both the school newspaper and yearbook, and second runner-up to the homecoming queen. Yet when it came to multi-tasking, I couldn’t hold a candle to a burly recruit from Wyoming named Jim Bowns, who not only played football but also baritone in the marching band. No halftime show could begin until after Jim had changed out of his football uniform into his band uniform. That is, until he got hurt playing football and was relinquished to just playing baritone.
Probably the most indelible memory of my time at Carbon was the night our football team got into a brawl with the Snow College Badgers. This happened just before halftime, as the band was assembling on the sideline. A referee rushed over, asking if we would please play the National Anthem, his assumption being that patriotic music might serve to put an end to the savagery. As drum major, I was asking about as to whether anyone knew the notes when I noticed that Jim Bowns had broken ranks and had joined the melee on the field. One particular image, of a hapless Badger with his head wedged inside the bell of a baritone, flailing blindly, remains stuck in MY head as if it had happened only yesterday.
Only years later did I learn that my college degree is of no worth in the marketplace and that even my school’s official song is a rip-off, there being no such thing as “Halls of Carbon.” No, carbon doesn’t grow like ivy on walls. Instead, it settles there, either in the form as coal dust blown from a mine or particulate matter spewed from the stacks of a coal-burning power plant. Indeed, a more appropriate song for my alma mater would have been “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.”
