By Ralph Holibaugh
How and when music came to Ronald Edmund Buetler is not documented. Not even his family knows.
He was born in 1924 on Walnut Street in the north end of Alliance. Nearby was an intriguing scene of freight cars, railroad switches, junctions, spurs, and a water tower. Small pieces of coal lay on the ground. It was a blue-collar neighborhood where proud people worked hard with their hands and valued craftsmanship.
Stanley Lutz, school principal and band director at North Lincoln Elementary School, was the most likely link to Ron’s early interest in music. An article in the October 16, 1936 issue of the Red and Blue, the Alliance High School newspaper, reported that Lutz was holding a free “trombone class for beginners.”
The accidental death of Ronnie’s father, Edward, in 1933, during the Great Depression, left the nine-year old, his mother and brother Kenneth, in bleak economic circumstances. Little wonder he was drawn to the lure of music and the trombone when he read Lutz’s invitation. From November 1938 to April 1941, Ron’s earliest musical accomplishments were documented in the Red and Blue.
In WWII, Ron served in the 671st Air Corps Band in India and Burma. When he returned to Alliance in 1945, he was employed in my grandfather’s Northend sheet metal and roofing business, William Fites & Son. That same year The Alliance Review reported that he performed with the ACB. Later Ron became a trustee of the band which sometimes featured his playing in its programs. In 1957, The Review reported a concert in which Ron played the beguine, “Pipiya,” as a featured soloist. I played Herbert L. Clarke’s trumpet arrangement of “The Carnival of Venice.” I will always treasure the memory of Ron and I both being soloists on the same program.
By the end of his life at 91, Ron had played with the ACB, as well as at least eight other musical organizations He also had played with local dance bands led by Lou Naumoff and Vic Rogers. Both bands had leaders and members who were simultaneously in the ACB with Ron: Pete Chordash, Al Nash, Ralph and Eldon Kropf, Herman Pahlau, and others. I had the good fortune to perform in many of these bands with him.
Ron relished an honest day’s work, his family, and the camaraderie of playing band music.