Origins of a Music Man Tour: Days 4 and 5

I know you’ve all been patiently waiting to find out – how did the Origins of a Music Man Tour end?  Did G. Oliver ever give his credentials to the barbershop quartet that was stalking him?  Did the women of the town join Marian the librarian’s Balzac book club?  Did Wells Fargo jack up its fees for its wagon service?

Ah, I’m just joking with you.  If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that Meredith Willson’s The Music Man is not based on the life of my great-grandfather, G. Oliver Riggs.  But, if you keep reading, you will learn how I connect the two men at the end of the tour.

Let’s pick up where I left off: Day 4 of the tour was Tuesday, the day I gave my presentation at Iowa Wesleyan College.  The previous night, my parents and I had stayed in the home where Warren Beckwith grew up – the same Warren Beckwith who played in G. Oliver’s Iowa Wesleyan Cadet Band and later eloped with Abraham Lincoln’s younger granddaughter, Jessie.

The house where Warren Beckwith grew up, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa.

We arrived on campus Tuesday morning with plenty of time to get ready for the noon presentation.  The talk lasted an hour and drew a crowd of about 30 people, including members of the college music faculty.  It seemed to go quite well – people had some good questions, and there were no technical glitches with my Keynote/iMovie presentation, to my great relief.

G. Oliver and I pose before the presentation.

After the talk, Lynn Ellsworth took us to lunch – she’s the IWC archivist and executive director of the Friends of the Harlan-Lincoln House – and we toured The Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana, which is also located in Mount Pleasant.  The museum has a fascinating collection of memorabilia and artifacts from theater companies that performed in opera houses during the same time period that G. Oliver’s bands performed.  The collection includes 40 original, hand-painted opera house curtains and more than 4,000 scripts.

This is a display of the museum’s music-related artifacts.

We returned to campus for a tour of the Harlan-Lincoln House, and Lynn showed us the alcove where she thought G. Oliver’s orchestra played during parties for the Lincoln granddaughters, Mary and Jessie, in 1895 (I first blogged about these parties in the post, Party Like It’s 1895).

G. Oliver revisits the Harlan-Lincoln House.

My parents, G. Oliver and Lynn on the front porch of the Harlan-Lincoln House.

We also toured the chapel where G. Oliver performed during his time at Iowa Wesleyan.  It was renovated a few years ago and is a beautiful space with excellent acoustics.

The exterior of the chapel at Iowa Wesleyan College.

We left Mount Pleasant late in the afternoon and drove to Iowa City.  The next day, Day 5 of the tour, we spent the morning at the State Historical Society library going through the files of George Landers, G. Oliver’s mentor and longtime friend.  We found a few items of interest, including a program from a talk G. Oliver gave in 1927 at the C.G. Conn convention in Elkhart, Indiana.  His topic? How to Create More Bands.

After a picnic lunch at Coralville Lake and a visit with friends in Cedar Rapids, we stopped briefly in Cedar Falls to take a photo of the bandshell there.  G. Oliver did not direct a band in that town, but I thought he’d enjoy the visit, since the town is home of the oldest municipal band in Iowa.  The Cedar Falls Municipal Band gives free weekly outdoor concerts at the bandshell in June and July.

The Cedar Falls Bandshell was built in 1996.

We made a slightly longer stop at Music Man Square in Mason City to take a picture of G. Oliver in front of the Meredith Willson boyhood home and statue.

Willson was 30 years younger than G. Oliver; he grew up in Mason City and began playing the flute at age 10 in the Mason City Municipal Band.  He later played flute in John Philip Sousa’s Band and for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra before moving on to radio work and fame in Hollywood.  His show The Music Man opened on Broadway in 1957, 11 years after G. Oliver died.  I’m not sure that Willson and G. Oliver ever met, but they did know some of the same musicians and no doubt had some things in common.

I had a great time on my five-day tour of Iowa.  As the song from The Music Man says (altered slightly to reflect my itinerary):

“You really ought to give Iowa 
Hawkeye Iowa
Des Moines, Albia, Centerville, Mount Pleasant, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Cedar Falls, Mason City 
Ought to give Iowa a try!”