THE McCOOK HIGH SCHOOL BAND – THE KELLY YEARS
by Don Glaze MHS class of 1955

Seldom in one’s life do you come into contact with someone who will push you to your absolute limit in the attainment of perfection. In this case it was not one person, but a family who set the pace and lit a fire that still burns half a century later. But I am getting way ahead of myself. In the early 1920’s the Chautauqua movement was sweeping across a country that was just recovering from World War I. For those of you that slept through American History your junior year, Chautauqua was a carnival show that traveled from town to town providing the hinterlands with some good entertainment and a taste of city life.

A talented man in the person of Leo Kelly was part of the band and had been on the road longer than he liked. Although exciting it was not an easy life. Somewhere in central Nebraska he hit the wall and began to inquire about possible local employment. He was offered the clarinet position in the Hastings Symphony and was told not to worry about supplementing his salary. A job would be found for him…and it was…as a barber at the state hospital! While there he united patients and employees into a very successful orchestra. Here too, he met a nurse who was to become his wife. Then came news of a music position in Kearney at the Nebraska home for delinquent boys. Not ideal… but better than being on the road.

He accepted the challenging position and like Professor Harold Hill of Music Man he started to teach basic music to his charges. His enthusiasm caught on, and with his superior teaching skills the band began to take shape. It should also be noted that his son Bill was born there.

Many questioned his next move when he asked the administrators (wardens) if the band could go off campus (jail) and play some local concerts and march in parades? With much reluctance he was given a limited tether and some extra guards to keep an eye on things.

To make a long story short he succeeded not only in providing good band entertainment but after a year developed a loyal following of the boys, none of whom tried to misbehave or escape when on their outings with him. This was Pop (as he became known) Kellys’ stepping stone.

The next year he was approached by Colonel H. P. Sutton of McCook and asked if he would consider coming to western Nebraska and start a community and school music program. Thus the die was cast and the Kelly family moved to McCook.

The Kellys consisted of the parents and three children. Like the Marsallis family of New Orleans fame, each of the Kelly youngsters played and mastered different instruments. Charles-violin, Bill-clarinet, Mary-trumpet. Mary was the first girl to earn first chair in the University of Michigan Band under famed conductor William Revelli.
Leo Kelly took bands to state contests in the 1930’s when only one 1st was awarded. He brought back two of these honors to McCook. The band, small ensemble and soloists went to the national contest in Colorado Springs in 1938 where they achieved a superior rating. A banner year and the people of McCook were so proud and supportive. The whole town helped in funding this trip. Bill played a clarinet solo and won a national first place.

Bill served in the army, playing in a band in New Caledonia (South Pacific) during World War Il. When he returned, he attended the University of Nebraska. Pop Kelly was nearing retirement age and Bill was offered the position of High School Band director.

This is where the Kelly dynasty began to take shape. Bill’s bride, Barbara, became the grade school vocal music teacher at Valentine Grade School. Pop Kelly continued to direct the Junior High Band and give private lessons, and Bill coordinated and directed the High School Band. Barbara and Bill began testing all 5th grade students looking for music talent for future years.

It was apparent that with a three-year high school, and only 300 students, that the band could not attract enough musicians to achieve the goals that they had in mind. Barbara would look for grade school youngsters that had musical talent. Bill would take them across the street from Valentine grade school to the Kelly house and they would be taught to play instruments. This small group of 6th-grade kids would become the future of the McCook Band.

By the time they got into Junior High they soon were skilled enough to move into the senior high band, usually by 8th grade. I was one of those kids lucky enough to do just that. This swelled the ranks of the band to nearly 100. Marching practice would begin on those hot Nebraska August days. We would try to schedule it for early morning before the sun took its toll.

The fall season would consist of a band halftime show for each of the home football games. Lots of practice of positions, memorizing of music, and getting the sound just right as often the band would stretch across the field. It was challenging!

The real challenge came when we were invited to compete in state competition at the AKSARBEN in Omaha. We knew there were the big bands from Omaha and Lincoln who probably didn’t even know where McCook was. But we went, competed and suddenly were cast into the spotlight by being awarded the highest rating.

The winter season took us inside to assemble into a concert band. We were introduced to the classics, to modern music, and to adjust our sound to lush and full depth of a symphonic orchestra. Bill made great effort to introduce the students to quality literature and music history. He found a number of symphonic transcriptions for band that allowed us to experience music and the history of classical composers.

We were also challenged by music contests. All musicians were expected to work toward solos and small group performances. Then we would compete among ourselves to see who would represent us. It was an experience that has stayed with us through our lives. Bill was a tough taskmaster, and we learned from it. But he also made band fun. Who can forget some of the Kellyisms such as “mell of a hess, the Star Spangled Banana, Let me call you sweatshirt”, or the pretend blowing his nose into his tie? Yes he made it fun too.
In the years to come there were more challenges, now more on the national level, two trips to Enid, Oklahoma to march against bands from sixteen western states. Here we competed with other bands from schools and programs listed as 6-A even though we came from a school that was only listed as a 3-A. At Enid we were announced as the winner of the Sweepstakes Award over all competing schools. And who could forget the annual Band Days in Lincoln at the University of Nebraska.

The highlight of those years was the invitation to the Music Educators National Conference perform a concert in Cleveland, Ohio with a stopover in Chicago for sightseeing and another concert. The performance in Ohio was yet another triumph for those of us who had become “Kelly’s Kids”.

This indeed was an honor. We worked extremely hard and tried to develop a program that would show our versatility and spot light some of our soloists and sections. The write up about the symphonic band from this little town in Nebraska was outstanding. The band became known around the mid-west and anytime dignitaries came to town the band was called on to show their stuff. This included state and national legislators, the governor and even President Eisenhower.

On Bill’s departure from McCook, Governor Ralph G. Brooks, then superintendent of schools made the statement that “Bill Kelly does not teach music, Bill Kelly teaches kids”. That he most truly did.

Yes, this was certainly an era to have experienced. Many thanks to the Kellys for providing these wonderful, memorable experiences.

Editor’s Note:

At a recent Celebration of Life for a dear friend in Lawrence, Kansas, I chanced to meet a woman who turned out to be from a family I knew well. Her grandfather had been my junior high band teacher, her father was the high school band director just before I got to high school—I played for him only once at the high school and once for a summer concert in the park—and her mother was my elementary music teacher in sixth grade. When I started Junior High, then 7th through 9th grades, her grandfather was my band director and music teacher. So, the genealogy is Leo Kelly, Leo’s son Bill, Bill’s wife Barbara, and their son Bill and daughter Kathy.

This all began in McCook, 1953, my first year at the old West Ward elementary school, a miserable year except for friends I made (with whom I’m still friends!) and the music class.

Don Glaze, class of 1955, chronicles the Kelly family—the chronicle included here—beginning when the Kelly’s moved to McCook and ending when Bill left McCook to become director of the band at Western in Gunnison, Colorado. Bill and Barbara eventually left Gunnison for Lawrene and KU, and Lawrence sports a bandstand and garden where Bill used to direct summer concerts. Barbara left her mark as director of a well-known, well-traveled bell choir at Lawrence’s Plymouth Congregational Church, just coincidentally the church where I was attending Jim Carothers’ Celebration of Life, whose wife and daughter, Bev and Cathleen, played in the bell choir and were close friends of the Kelly’s.

I suspect the Kelly’s ended up in Lawrence because the then Chancellor, Gene Budig, later president of the American League, was a McCook kid from the Kelly era, and again coincidentally my friend Jim was a Provost when Budig was Chancellor and they were also close friends. Possibly the Kelly family came first, and then the Budigs? McCookies stick together, and there is definitely a McCook-Lawrence connection. There, at Plymouth Congregational, together with the Carothers, Nancy and I got to see Barbara and Bill after hearing her bell choir.

Why all this McCook stuff on a website dedicated to providing a celebration and a chronicle of the arts in Kearney? Well, because, when Leo Kelly got tired of travelling with the Chautauqua band and when he left temporarily cutting hair in Hastings, he took the job of directing the band at one of the earlier iterations of what we now know as the YRTC, and a salient story—accompanied by some photos from his scrapbook—are part of Don Glaze’s story.

Just these added notes: thanks to Kathy Kelly Scannell for rounding up all this and passing it on—some of it will appear both here on Kearney Creates and at the High Plains Museum in McCook. Thanks to the timing, my education coincided with some of the Kelly years in McCook. Barbara helped the Harris family there start a small McCook symphony in which I played and string professor from the University of Nebraska would travel to McCook from Lincoln in order to direct. By the time I got to Junior High, Leo was known mostly just as “Pops” and I arrived in McCook with trombone in hand and got my first real series of lessons from Pops.

You wanted to practice for Pops if for no other reason than that, if you bungled a passage that he asked you to play, he took your instrument and played it for you so you could hear how it should be played. Pops did not smoke in the school but he was an inveterate chewer of a cigar…so when you got your trombone back from his demonstration and looked into the mouthpiece, well, you resolved to practice more often.

As Don Glaze mentions, sometimes junior high kids, I’m guessing at Pops’ prompting, were invited to play with the senior high band, and that happened for me once before the Kelly family took off for Gunnison. Bill was succeeded by C. Ward Rounds, later band director at the college in Maryville, Missouri. I was too young to imagine, then, what it must have been like for Ward to step into the shoes not of a former director but of a music dynasty. His style was quite a change, and his first year he struggled with kids loyal to the dynasty; but Ward, too, was a fine music educator, respected across the region. The last time I saw him, he and his wife were driving through Kearney, stopped, and took my wife and me out to dinner. Ward was succeeded by Ken Rummery, and Ken then taught at KSC/UNK, leading the band.

So, the story that began in Kearney ended in Kearney, and one way or another the Kelly story seems to belong on this site as well as being touted in McCook’s history. Just imagine folks lined up for a Veteran’s Day parade along Central Avenue and the conversation that must have followed Pop Kelly’s band passing up the street when folks began to realize the musicians parading before them had come from the reform school. Would they go back? All of them did!

Chuck Peek Winter 2025