By Ralph Holibaugh

Mr. Best was the most extraordinary musician and teacher I’ve known. I first met this former coal miner from County Durham, England in 1954. He was thin, tall, bald, and had huge hands. I had heard that he was a euphonium soloist in the Alliance City Band (ACB), and that he was also the best trumpet teacher in northeastern Ohio. It was rumored that after a spectacularly dismal lesson with a student who repeatedly did not practice, Mr. Best gave back his fee to the student with the understanding that he and his pupil no longer had a musical relationship.

That rumor quickly became more personal. In my earliest lessons I had a very much used trumpet. After my several failed attempts to execute a passage, Mr. Best grabbed the horn from me and said, “Like this!” He couldn’t get a sound. I soon had a new trumpet. William Booth Best was, indeed, a serious musician and demanding teacher.

I was in 5th grade when Mr. Best accompanied me to my first rehearsal with the ACB. I learned from band members that after he left the colliery brass bands of England and immigrated to the U.S., he had settled in Beloit, Ohio to work in potteries for a living, but he also continued to play in bands throughout his life. In keeping with English musical tradition, he taught trumpet to his son, “Charlie,” who became a professional performer, a musically gifted five-year old, Clyde Hunt, and other outstanding pupils such as Roger Tayler, Ralph Kropf ( later a director of the ACB), Kropf’s brother, Eldon, and others.

Mr. Best had ‘rescued’ the Band twice when he became director twice as documented masterfully by Paul Hobe. When the demands of WWII depleted its ranks, he took over its leadership in order to keep the Band functioning.

There is an argument to be made that Mr. Best was the most broadly influential figure in the history of the ACB. Like Emil Rinkendorf, his standards of precision and overall excellence were very high; he had assisted “Rinky.” But after more than 45 years of unbroken service to the ACB, and in light of the heritage of superior students that he left in his wake, a revised assessment of ACB’s history is overdue.

By Paul Hobe

Often when one imagines a small town in the late 19^th and early 20^th century in popular culture a shady park or town square with a gazebo or band stand comes to mind. It is estimated that there were ten thousand bands in 1889, a significant number were community based. Area local media mention at least a dozen such bands. They could be family bands (Haines), military (GAR and Marine), ethnic (Italian), and bands supported by major businesses (Morgan Engineering). Audiences would enjoy marches by Sousa, Gilmore, Goldman, and locally King and Rinkendorf. This era also spawned the school band movement.

Civil War units of both Union and Confederate armies were accompanied by brass bands. They led regiments on the march, entertained in camp and communities through which they passed and served as medical assistants during battle. They could be professional musicians or trained in the field.  They were financed by their government or by officers of the units.

Now let’s see how the Alliance area was involved in Civil War music. We have already considered how the Haines Silver Cornet Band was involved with the Underground Railroad and Lincoln’s short visit to Alliance.

In September 1861, the Three-Year 19^th Ohio Regiment was being organized in Alliance at Camp Ford, recently Rockhill Park. The federal government provided funds for a band for each regiment being mustered which consisted of one-thousand men. The Roster of Ohio Soldiers shows that on October 10, 1861, twenty men, most likely from around Stark County, on the roles as “musicians” with Thomas Woodford and George D. Myers as leaders. The only names of note to the reader are John C. (Columbus, “Tump”) Haynes, Augustus Vignos, and Dwight Kimmel. Kimmel is buried in the southeast area of Alliance City Cemetery and has a specific reference to his membership in the 19^th Ohio Regimental Band on his grave monument.

Thirteen band members in band uniforms are posed in a photo available. Haines can be seen as the tallest musician in the back row standing. Vignos of Louisville has a moustache and his right arm is leaning on the person to his right. (He has his own interesting story.) In the summer 1862 the federal government considered regimental bands too expensive and sent most of them back home.  The Ohio Roster shows them as mustered out September 4, 1862.

In March 1864 John Columbus Haines brought his musical talents back to the war when he joined the 104^th Regiment Band. A picture of the 104^th Band shows Haines as the fifth person from the left. The dog at the left is the noted “Harvey, the War Dog.” A letter from Haines is on display at the Haines House in Alliance, Ohio. It was written in the summer of 1864 during the siege of Atlanta.

A 1918 Review article tells that the Band (known as “Silver Cornet Band”) was organized by twelve men, mostly soldiers who had returned home with honorable discharges from the ranks of the Union Army. These men were Columbus Haines (director), Foster Haines, Charles Haines, Charles Hester, Thomas Hester, Martin Seacrist, Sly Seacrist, Morgan Anderson, Holland Vick, John Sharer and Mark M. Southworth. Three were still living when the article was published.

Haines had a family band that was popular in the 1880s. He moved his family to Detroit in 1893 where he passed away in 1942 at the age of 100 being the oldest Civil War veteran in the Detroit area.

More information and experiences of the 19^th Ohio and the 104th Ohio, and Augustus Vignos can be found in And Other National Airs, Some Stories About Stark County . . . and Dixie Odyssey, the Trail and Tales of the Nineteenth Ohio Regiment by Paul Hobe.

By Ralph Holibaugh

When it came time for me to choose a musical instrument, the ‘final step’ recommended by Mr. Nash, I remember immediately thinking about the trumpet and two of its players. One was Clyde McCoy, who was famous for recording “Sugar Blues” on Columbia records. It was the first time I ever heard a trumpet with a mute in its bell. The other trumpet player was Wilbur Fites, my uncle.

In the ‘40s I only knew Uncle Wilbur from family celebrations and holidays at my Grandma Fites’ extensive feasts. He would occasionally mention “playing jobs,” then smile slightly and say that he was paying for his house with the money he earned from those jobs. I learned that Wilbur’s “jobs’ were playing trumpet at dances.’

Much later I learned that “Shorty,” as he was affectionately called in childhood, had been an Eb alto horn player in the historically important Reed’s Boys Band of Alliance since the age of 9. He was in Reed’s Band when it joined the Alliance City Band in marching on May 29, 1923, three years before Alliance had a High School Band! In 1929, he played in a combined extravaganza featuring the Reed Band, the new AHS Band, and the Alliance City Band directed by Emil Rinkendorf. Wilbur, along with Ray Shank, Forest “Woody” Barth, Donald Stump and several others personified the links among these three bands. From a historical perspective, the first two bands had been “feeders” into the Alliance City Band.

 My studies with Al Nash were musically foundational and significant. As he had earlier with the Flutophone, he taught me the rudiments of playing the trumpet, as well as playing in small music groups. I still recall vividly taking individual lessons with him, as well as practicing with small groups he directed in a caged space in the basement of Stanton Junior High School. The space served as a locked area for sports equipment!

At the end of sixth grade and graduating from elementary school, my caring, patient Flutophone teacher and first trumpet mentor told me that I would need to find another teacher. I was shocked. It was unexpected. “Who?” I asked. He replied immediately. “Go to the Band-Orch and ask for Mr. Best. That’s who you want to see.”

There was a time when a small pipe with holes became very important to me. It didn’t just drop down from the heavens into my lap, but it was presented to me as part of a system that combined science and art which I knew nothing about. Very slowly I learned, not on my own, but through a teacher who was a master of this system.

In 1948, when I began attending South Lincoln Elementary School, Mr. Nash, or more informally, Alexander or Al, was one of its teachers. He was an accomplished, practicing musician whose love of music led him to study music and education at Mount Union College. His education led him to adopt the Flutophone, a widely available, inexpensive plastic wind instrument, as a primary tool in his music instruction. For the first time, he brought the possibility of testing for music aptitude to all elementary schools.  

After these basic steps had been taken, each of his individual students, brimming with the enthusiasm that only new students seem to have, took the next step of playing together in their first ensemble of Flutophones. Mr. Nash did his best to patiently reign in those students who were looking around in any direction other than the “conductor,” making faces at one another, and those clueless deemed “tone deaf” by someone along the way. Somewhere in his studies he learned to patiently accept the general cacophony that often raged around him.   

With a graduation ensemble performance behind them, the proud graduates each had their names announced and received individual certificates indicating the achievement of their new status. Bravo!  Armed with training, practice, experience, and the confidence of learning how to ‘play together,’ the final step was to be taken.  

In consultation with Mr. Nash and their parents, a choice needed to be made of a musical instrument that was appropriate to their goals, including keyboard (in many cases untried), an instrument in the brass or woodwind families, or perhaps that most intimate of instruments, their voice. To have constantly pursued these steps in all his schools for so many years, with warmth, patience, and caring, Mr. Nash’s presence not only offered core music instruction to all students throughout the Alliance school system, but it was a significant element in the character and growth of the entire city.