A Day Trip to the City of Lakes

My friend Laurel and I spent most of Wednesday in Fairmont, a town in southern Minnesota that’s about 12 miles from the Iowa border.  Laurel is a Fairmont native, and she graciously volunteered to be my personal tour guide as I conducted research for a travel article I’m writing for the Star Tribune.

I knew that music and culture were important to the town’s growth a century ago, so I kept my eyes and ears open to possible connections between Fairmont and my musical great-grandfather, G. Oliver Riggs.

Guess what?  G. Oliver didn’t let me down.  He continues to be the Kevin Bacon of his generation.  More on that six degrees of separation game* in a minute.

I don’t know if G. Oliver ever spent time in Fairmont, but it seems like a place he might have visited.  Located on a chain of five lakes, Fairmont was a happening spot at the turn of the last century.  Its opera house was built in 1901, around the time G. Oliver’s bands were playing at the Grand Opera House in Crookston.  In the teens and early ’20s, the dance pavilion at Fairmont’s popular lakeside resort, Interlaken Park, hosted performing groups including the Interlaken Orchestra, the Fairmont City Band, the Menke Melody Orchestra, and Harold Bachman’s Chicago-based Million Dollar Band, which attracted 10,000 visitors.

*For those of you playing the Six Degrees of G. Oliver Game, it seems likely that G. Oliver and Harold Bachman were acquainted, or at least knew of each other.  In 1909, Bachman became the protege of C.S. Putnam, band director at what is now North Dakota State University.  A year earlier, G. Oliver was the cornet soloist and assistant director of Putnam’s band when it played at the North Dakota State Fair in Fargo.  Also, Bachman studied music in 1915 under Hale VanderCook in Chicago, and in 1916 he played with the Chicago-based Bohumir Kryl Band.  G. Oliver, VanderCook and Kryl were all well-known cornet students of Alfred F. Weldon.

Putnam’s Band in 1908.  G. Oliver is in the second row, to the right of the drum.

 But I digress.  Back to Fairmont.

A view of the stage in the Fairmont Opera House.

Laurel and I weren’t able to visit the Interlaken Park dance pavilion because it burned down in 1972.  But we did tour the opera house, which had just concluded a successful run of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, put on by Fairmont’s Civic Summer Theatre.

As Tom Arneson explains in his book, And the Curtain Rises: the Story of the Fairmont Opera House, small towns used the term “opera house” to describe these public venues, even though opera was rarely performed in them.

“... The use of ‘opera’ in the name was politically expedient, for at this time musicals and plays were believed by many to be morally corruptive (and actors and stage musicians to be of doubtful virtue), but opera was revered as product of high civilization.  So an Opera House could be respectable and acceptable while a Variety Hall was not, even though what transpired in the buildings was exactly the same.”

The opera house began showing movies in 1912.  It was remodeled and renamed the Nicholas Theater in 1927 – the city band played for the opening – and it operated as a movie theater until 1980.  Fortunately, at the time it closed, efforts already were underway to purchase and renovate the building for continued community use (those efforts were led by Arneson’s parents, Robert and Mary, who died in a car crash in 1984).  Today, the Fairmont Opera House operates year-round as a venue for live theater and music performances.

Organs that once were used at the Fairmont Opera House and now are on display upstairs.

Another music-related stop on our tour was the Sylvania Park Bandshell.  I knew from my pre-trip research that the bandshell was built in 1926 and is still used for weekly summer band concerts.

The Sylvania Park Bandshell, on the eastern shore of Lake Sisseton.

The bandshell was designed by George Pass and Sons of Mankato, and the first concert was performed there on June 10, 1926.  I haven’t researched the history of bands in Fairmont, so I don’t know for sure who directed the band that year, but it may have been the same man who directed the Fairmont band in 1929.  His name was Guy C. Donnelly, and he was an acquaintance of G. Oliver’s.

How do I know this?  Well, it occurred to me while I was in Fairmont that I remembered seeing a Fairmont man’s name listed somewhere in my Minnesota Bandmasters Association files.  So when I got home, I dug out the group’s letterhead from 1929, the year G. Oliver served as president.  It lists Guy C. Donnelly from Fairmont as the group’s first vice president. 

I did some further research, and thanks to a link from Laurel, I learned that Donnelly began directing Fairmont’s band as early as 1919, according to the New Bands item in the Sept. 27, 1919 issue of the Music Trades:



(G. Oliver and St. Cloud band trivia buffs might notice another familiar name in this news item: Theodore Steinmetz, listed as director of a boys’ band in Eau Claire, Wis.  Steinmetz would later direct the boys’ band in St. Cloud, in 1927, when G. Oliver was working for C.G. Conn.)

I don’t know how long Donnelly remained in Fairmont as director, or whether he continued to be involved with the Minnesota Bandmasters Association, as G. Oliver was, until it merged with the Minnesota Music Educators Association.  That’s a research topic for another day.

The only other mention of Donnelly I found online was in a publication about the history of the Drake University Bands, written by alumus Thompson Brandt.  According to Brandt’s book, The Curtain Rises on the Drake Band, Donnelly had been the high school band director for Gordon Bird, one of Drake’s most academically accomplished band directors.  Bird was born in Fairmont, and Donnelly encouraged him to pursue a career in music.

This news interested me because I played in the Drake University concert, marching and pep bands for two years in the late 1980s.  I didn’t play for Bird, though; he was way before my time.

Bird enrolled at Drake in 1932 and graduated in 1936.  He served as assistant band director for one year and then took over as director, serving in that role until 1954.

I don’t know if Bird and G. Oliver ever met.  Bird at one time served as president of the Central Iowa Bandmasters Association, so he certainly would have known Maj. George Landers, G. Oliver’s longtime friend who was a founding member of the Iowa Bandmasters Association.  G. Oliver was a featured speaker at the 1941 Iowa Bandmasters convention, so it’s quite possible that his and Bird’s paths crossed.

Brandt mentions in his book that Bird “was inspired in music by his grandfather, who was influential in beginning Fairmont’s city band in the late nineteenth century.  An uncle bought Gordon his first cornet and later financed his Drake education.”  Brandt does not mention the names of these relatives of Bird’s.  Perhaps G. Oliver knew them, too?  I wouldn’t bet against it.