Duane Hale In ICU

I am publishing a chapter from the book that I wrote with Duane Hale, about his battle with Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Duane is in ICU at Mother Francis Hospital in Tyler, TX right now fighting to breathe. In 2011, the year Life Rolls On was published, Lindale lost Butch Almany and David Wilkerson. Both men touched Duane's life in different and equally special ways. Below is a chapter from Life Roles On about Duane's relationship with the legendary Lindale educator.

Our book is available on Amazon.com as a physical book or as a digital download. Click HERE to read the first two chapters of Life Rolls On.

Click HERE to like the Facebook page. Duane monitors his "likes" constantly, and today we hit 1000 likes!

The Leader of the Band

“His own disease causes his head to tilt downward. It’s like he was genetically engineered to look straight into my eyes as I sat in my wheelchair.”

--Duane [on Butch Almany]

If you grow up in the mountains of Colorado, you probably want to be a skier. If you grow up on the beach in Hawaii, you might dream of being a surfer. If you're a boy growing up in Texas, you most likely want to play high school football.

I certainly couldn’t play football so I always dreamed of being in the band.

I spent a good part of my childhood watching my friends compete. In first and second grade, I tried to get involved in some playground games but I just couldn’t keep up. I gave kickball a shot, but when it was my turn to kick, I couldn’t even kick the red, rubber ball back to the pitcher. Even if I could have kicked, I sure couldn’t run afterward.

I wasn’t able to throw any ball, except a tennis ball, more than a couple feet. So I spent school recess playing marbles and Hot Wheels under the big oak tree on the edge of the playground. Depending upon what else was happening, I might waddle over to watch my friends play football or basketball. For the most part I felt like Rudolph—excluded from the reindeer games.

Most boys were pretty focused on physical games, but every once in a while, Eric Bartley or Cary Johnson would come over and play marbles with me or just talk for a while.

One day, a new kid came over and started talking to me. “Hey, can I see your Hot Wheels?”

“Sure.” I said. “My name’s Duane.”

“Mine’s Ronald Bunch.”

A few days later, while everyone else was playing tag football, Ronald had me hold a plastic bat while he pitched me tennis balls. I gave a few weak swings but couldn’t make contact with the ball. Finally, Ronald had me hold the bat out while he threw. After about ten tries, the ball hit the bat that I was holding and dribbled out a few feet in front of me. That was the closest I’d ever come to hitting a home run.

I wanted to compete in something. Even if it wasn’t athletics, I wanted to be in contests to measure myself against others in something. I wanted to be part of some kind of team or unit. I’d never joined any organized group or competed in anything. That would all change in sixth grade.

In those days, nearly half the student body played in the band. For twenty-four years, the architect of the band’s success and popularity was its director, Butch Almany.

I wanted to be in that band, which meant I was eager to join the intermediate school band at the earliest opportunity—sixth grade. My parents didn’t make a lot of money. Although medical bills, wheelchairs, lifts, van, and all my other disease stuff had already put a financial strain on the family, my parents worked overtime and set money aside. In August, just before sixth grade, they bought me a cornet for my eleventh birthday. The instrument represented their approval and commitment to support me in joining the band. I chose the cornet mainly because it was light and easy to handle.

For a month before school started, I struggled first just to make a sound with my new instrument, then to play a note. I practiced simply holding the horn to my mouth for several minutes at a time.

On the first day of sixth grade, I carried my new cornet that I had no idea how to play into the band hall of one of the most iconic educators to ever grace my town. I hoped things that I’d heard about Mr. Almany were true. Could a man really take a kid with nothing but ambition—a kid who could barely get his instrument to make a noise—and train him how to play beautiful music? Would he really bring out the best in me, like everyone said he did for his students?

I wasn’t sure if I had the wind or the arm strength that it took to play an instrument, let alone any musical talent.

I heard Mr. Almany was tough on his students, that he was a perfectionist. Rumor had it that he only taught sixth grade because he wanted to weed out the underachievers before they got to high school. Several older kids told me he tended to call people out individually in front of the whole band. I feared I’d be one of those people—that I would be the first one. I imagined him stopping down in the middle of our very first practice to humiliate me. I could picture it in my mind. “Stop! Stop! Duane Hale, is that you making that God-awful racket? Go to the office and tell them I said to put you in study hall because your cornet is hurting my ears. I can’t have that noise in my band.” I worried my band experiment would have a humiliating end. Would it be the same as me trying to kick a ball? Would I lag behind in band just as I had on the playground?

Within weeks, I was at ease. Although he never seemed to treat me any different than anyone else, the fact that Mr. Almany was also a frail cornet player with a degenerative disease, Anklyosing Spondilitis (AS), might have made him sensitive to my condition. His AS, which is an arthritic disease, caused him to walk with a gimp. But more than that, it contorted his body toward a forward lean and a downward tilt to his head. Because of his lean and head tilt, Mr. Almany, like me, also looked up at the world. To me, his posture made him appear inviting because he leaned toward people during conversation, almost like he was bending in to hear a secret.

I was amazed at how fast I learned to play. It was one of the most exciting learning experiences of my life.  He pushed me, like he pushed everyone. He had an amazing ear. I quickly learned there was no fooling Mr. Almany. I couldn’t claim to have practiced a piece when I hadn’t. He always knew. He had this aura about him that made us students not want to be the one to disappoint him. You wanted to please Mr. Almany. You want him to approve of your sound.

Mr. Almany’s high school bands received Sweepstakes awards twenty consecutive years. They played for the President and for the Governor of Texas.  They were the pride of Lindale. When I started in sixth grade I hoped that I would be good enough three years later to play for him again in the Lindale High School Marching Band.

When I went into my wheelchair, I realized our diseases brought us a unique point-of-view of each other—one that nobody else shared. Ironically, the combinations of our conditions brought us eye-to-eye in the physical sense. Of all the people he dealt with, only my eyes landed in is natural line of sight. Mr. Almany’s head tilt was humble, yet his gaze was intimidating. Because of his posture I had the unique experience of connecting with him eye-to-eye more than anyone else. I was the only person he could talk to whom he didn’t have to look up at. In the physical sense, and as a mentor, Mr. Almany had me in his sights.

In high school, Mr. Almany encouraged me to join his prestigious stage band. My parents came through again, this time buying me a shiny, silver trumpet. By then I needed to raise the support arms on my wheelchair so I could rest my elbows and forearms on them while I held my trumpet.

After one of my performance solos, he nicknamed me “iceman” because he said I was so cool and collected on stage.

During our stage band rehearsals, Mr. Almany made a few jokes about how hidden I was from the audience’s perspective in my wheelchair. “Iceman, I think we’re going to have to start calling you “Invisible man.” I can’t see you. You better make sure I can hear you or I’m counting you absent.”

Not that I ever complained, but it did bum me out to know that my face was two feet below the other trumpets in my row, and the woodwind section hid almost my whole body from the crowd. I was proud of being in the stage band and I wanted people to see me.

When I showed up in the auditorium before our first performance for our high school classmates, Mr. Almany greeted me with a smile. “Hey Duane, follow me, please.”

He gimped unevenly toward the stage as I wheeled behind him. He glanced me a smile as he pointed to a square wooden riser sitting on the stage, about two feet high with a ramp leading up to it. There was gray skirting around the front of the platform. It was a stage on a stage. He pointed at the ramp. “Can you wheel up to the platform and see if you fit?”

It took me a moment to figure it out; then I realized. Mr. Almany had a platform built for me. That ramp became part of our regular stage rigging and at our concerts my head would be at the same level as the other trumpets. To the audience, I would appear the same height as everybody else.

Mr. Almany put music in my soul and made me feel like a rockstar in his stage band. Mr. Almany quenched that childhood yearning to belong to a team. 


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