SANTA ANA – Trumpets blat. Drums rattle. A conductor waves his arms. About the only person not in motion on the polished stage of Hector Godinez High School is a sandy-haired, spectral-thin man named Robert Ward.
Instead, Ward stands planted like a tree, slightly stage left, watching the musicians. He wears a red jacket that bears the words: “Santa Ana Winds.”
He has come every Monday for 37 years.
“I don’t have a life,” Ward, 77, jokes.
Or, more accurately, his life is here, on stage, watching the marching band he created and fostered to greatness.
Now Ward must decide: Will the band play on?
The “Winds” are an all-volunteer marching band made up of youth from across Orange County and beyond.
Ward founded the band, bought most of the uniforms and molded successive generations of musicians ages 14-21 into a prize-winning Californian tradition. The band regularly marches in the Hollywood Christmas Parade and has appeared in the Rose Parade. In three decades it won nearly 300 top awards in marching band competitions, including two national titles.
A marching band, Ward says, is “a concentrated effort by many people to do one thing and to do it with dignity and showmanship and a lot of pizzazz.”
But pizzazz is at a premium as bands like The “Winds” face a new reality: the overbooked nature of the modern teen.
“They’re going a million miles an hour, they’ve got school, they’ve got jobs, they’ve got every electronic gadget imaginable and are multi-tasking,” says Bob Morrison, the founder of Music for All, an Indianapolis-based non-profit group that lobbies for increased arts funding.
They also don’t have access to music, Morrison says.
Student enrollment in music programs declined 50 percent in California since 1999, largely due to budget cuts, Morrison says.
Although Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger restored $500 million of arts funding in 2006, “one year of funding does not a trend make and it’s certainly not enough to turn around two decades of decline,” Morrison says.
In Southern California, youth bands shrank from several dozen in the 1970s to three today, Ward says.
Nerdy portrayals of marching band members in movies such as “American Pie” don’t help. And even Ward admits that his interest in traditional tunes like “Yankee Doodle Dandy” might seem quaint to young ears accustomed to the more modern cadences of My Chemical Romance or Kanye West.
“It’s a harder sell, but it’s worth the effort,” Ward says.
The result: ten years ago Ward’s “Winds” numbered 200 strong. Today a core group of about 60 students assemble each Monday night at Godinez High School to practice holiday classics for the upcoming Hollywood Santa Parade.
It wasn’t always this way.
Ward founded The Winds in an era when up to 25 or more community marching bands stomped the parade grounds of Southern California.
It was 1970 and Ward had recently left his job as a school band master to work as a salesman for Stanbury Uniforms, a marching band uniform company.
His new job paid him more but inspired him less than working with young musicians. Determined to “keep my fingers in the pie of music,” Ward met with local music teachers and sent out flyers inviting any youth – regardless of skill level – to audition for his new marching band, “The Santa Ana Winds.”
Without today’s Tivo, Gameboys, or summer jobs to distract them, children came – 3,500 of them in total over 37 years – from all walks of life and all socio-economic levels.
In return, Ward gave youth a safe place to learn a musical instrument, and something else: “self-discipline.”
“He likes things very disciplined and very orderly but in a nice way,” says Liz Moreno, 17, a bass clarinetist from Santiago High School. “I think that (discipline) is why the band has been around this long.”
As Ward honed skills the band grew in size and renowned. In 1971, The Orange County Board of Supervisors dubbed the group the “Official Music Ambassadors for Orange County.” In 1975, The Disney Corporation gave the band a $1,000 grant. In 1976 the band took part in Bi-Centennial celebrations in Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia and New York. In 1991 they were invited to the Rose Parade.
This November 25 will be the 30th time the “Winds” will march in Hollywood’s annual holiday Parade.
In a Hector Godinez storage room, six-foot-high trophies stand next to racks of uniforms and shelves filled with “Shako-Master” hat boxes.
Upstairs, a young trombonist, Sarah Wilson, 19, of Whittier, describes the joy of playing in a live marching band.
“It’s a sense of emotion you can’t get from a CD or a rock band or anywhere else,” Wilson says.
Still, Wilson says that if marching bands disappear, “that would be horrible but that seems to be the way the world is going.”
Which makes the decision Ward must soon make that much more difficult.
“This may be our last year,” Ward says. “It’s going very well and I’m still at it (but) it’s not an easy task to find somebody who will take over and run it the way it’s been going.”
A new conductor would have to work for free. The “Winds” earn no income other than the $10 monthly fees band members pay to participate.
Complicating matters is Ward’s health: He relinquished his conductor’s baton for much of the past year following a heart attack and a battle with prostate cancer.
Ward’s alumni – 45 of whom have gone on to become music teachers in their own right – hope he will pass the baton to new leadership and in doing so, let the Winds play on.
Ward says he is aware of what stands to be lost.
“It’s Americana. It’s apple pie and 4th of July and parades,” he says. “Music is something you take with you your whole life.”
Contact the writer: 714-704-3705 or gdriscoll@ocregister.com
