By Gary Topping–
Bandon, Oregon is a popular tourist destination on the southern coast at the mouth of the Coquille River. When my grandfather, George P. Topping, arrived there in 1895 to open a law practice, there were fewer than six hundred residents. Overland transportation was virtually impossible, and the only practical access to the town was by means of oceangoing ships or steamboats on the river. But my grandfather saw the town’s potential as an entrepot for the timber and dairy products of the interior which could be exchanged for manufactured goods from San Francisco. In addition to providing basic legal services for the developing community, he would serve four consecutive terms as mayor, one term in the Oregon State Legislature, and oversee the development of electric power, a culinary water system, and a system of paved roads and streets. He would have said, though, that his most important contribution was the Bandon Concert Band.
I have no idea how and when he learned to play the cornet, but band music was as important to him as his legal practice. In those days before the existence of mass media, people had to learn to entertain themselves, and at least a modest proficiency on a musical instrument was common. Municipal pride often centered on a community band which would provide summer concerts and holiday parades, and even some amazingly small towns in southwestern Oregon, as in the rest of the country, could boast such a band.
Bandon had had some such musical organization since the town was incorporated in the early 1890s, though some of its permutations were so small that they hardly deserved the term “band.” My grandfather set out to change that, and the Bandon newspaper carried an announcement in 1901 that a steamship had dropped off a complete set of band instruments and uniforms that he had talked the city fathers into buying. He was a real-life version of Professor Harold Hill! One can imagine him out on the street pressing a trombone into someone’s hands and offering to teach him to play it.
The Bandon History Museum has a photograph of that 1901 band which I have included with this essay. One can read a lot of information in that photograph, but what impresses me most is the balanced instrumentation, completely at odds with the typical town band where people would show up with whatever random instruments they happened to find back in the closet. True, one could wish for another clarinet player or two, and one of the cornet players might be exchanged for a flute/piccolo player. The double-bell euphonium and the valve trombone would eventually become extinct, but they were still popular in that day. The mellophones would eventually give way to French horns (my dad was not yet born, but he would be the first and only French horn player in the band), but they were much more “mellow” in sound than the E-flat alto horns that were then common. Assuming at least a modest competence on the part of the musicians, that band would have sounded great!
The band had its ups and downs over the years. A fire in the central business district in 1914 devastated the economy, and many people—including musicians—found it necessary to emigrate in order to find employment. There was a two-year hiatus until my grandfather and a couple of the other band stalwarts could find people to take over those instruments that the emigrants had left behind. Although the 1901 photograph shows a conductor (my grandfather, incidentally, is the cornet player seated to his immediate right), musicians with that kind of expertise were hard to find, and from time to time my grandfather had to pinch hit in that role (the Bandon History Museum has his wooden music stand with his name carved into it). In 1924 the problem was solved with the appearance of a real estate agent named Charles Atwood. When my grandfather learned that Atwood was a former professional cornet player with a conservatory degree, he talked him into taking over the concert band podium.
The Bandon Concert Band, and the city of Bandon itself, came to a fiery end in September, 1936. After an extraordinarily hot, dry summer, a brush fire east of town swept through, leaving only about three structures standing. The Topping family home and my grandfather’s law office with its extensive library went up in flames. Obviously, when people were fleeing for their lives, that trombone in the closet was not going to be the first thing they would grab.
Eventually, as the city began to recover and rebuild, those same band stalwarts mounted a feeble effort to reconstitute the band, but it was not to be. The conductor at that time, a former circus band tuba player named Sol Driscoll, announced that he preferred to put his efforts into developing the music program at the high school; without his support, reviving the band was futile.
My grandfather was somehow able to continue his law practice, which he was still engaged in at the time of his death in 1943. Incredibly, he did save his cornet, which he bequeathed to my equally cornet-obsessed cousin, who tells me she played it in the Salvation Army band until she completely wore it out! (I remember watching her play it, without realizing that it had been our grandfather’s.)
No one, perhaps, has ever captured the importance of the Bandon Concert Band to that small, primitive community better than Mrs. Margaret Murphy Wade. Speaking to the Bandon Women’s Civic Club at the end of 1925, she reminisced about her arrival in Bandon in 1900 at age seventeen after a five-hour steamboat ride down the river from Coquille. The natural beauty of the place dazzled her, of course, as it has visitors and natives alike ever since. “[When I] beheld for the first time a sunset in the Pacific Ocean, I considered it a privilege to be alive. Within the next few weeks I often marveled at Nature’s generosity in bestowing such natural beauty as a background for so small a town.” The town’s urban amenities, though, were appallingly backward. “Our only lighting system consisted of a half dozen kerosene street lamps, lighted each evening at dusk by the town marshal. Cattle and all kinds of livestock roamed the streets at will. The small reservoir, under private ownership, was our only water supply. There was a long distance telephone pay station at Manciet’s cigar store with only three telephones connected to the switchboard. . . .There was no city tax at that time, no debt, and no automobiles. . . . There was no modern sanitary plumbing in the homes. The population in 1900 was given at 650. However, the town even at that time boasted of Mr. Topping and his band.”
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian.
