White River Junction
The pulling was what dug the teeth of the saw into the giant log that lay between them, and made the sawdust spill out the sides. The pushing was just a preparation for the pulling. What was most important was the rhythm.
They were Americans in Heimsheim, Germany. It was 1999, and the Schleglerfest, Heimsheim’s annual tradition to honor the Teutonic Knights who defended the area in the 14th century, carried on around them: Carole Blake, the director of the Upper Valley Community Band, and Jim Young, her tuba player.
But really, at this moment, they were the festival. The band, which grew to more than 80 people under Blake’s direction, was watching them. The townspeople of Heimsheim, dressed in swords and shields and armor, were watching them.
At one point, the two of them started singing. Young said he doesn’t know what made them start singing — maybe it was a device for their rhythm. Maybe it was a hope for camaraderie in a foreign land.
Whatever the reason, “Everybody that was an American started to realize what was going on,” Young said. “All of a sudden, everybody that was an American started singing I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”
Soon, the Germans in the audience began singing their own song, and Young and Blake won the log-cutting contest that day.
And Blake, who had helped organize an exchange between the UVCB and the Heimsheim Town Band called “Hands Across the Sea,” which included a joint concert with Blake directing, also left the festival as an honorary Teutonic knight, the first woman to be so honored there.
For Blake, who died in March at 73 from complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, music was the central element of her life.
“Carole was a remarkable person,” said Young, who first met Blake in 1966, when she was studying education at Boston State College. She was a student teacher for his high school band class.
Born in Hanover and raised in the Upper Valley, Blake became especially interested in music in fourth grade, while at elementary school in Lebanon.
Ellen Robb was the woman who introduced Blake to her first instrument, the trumpet. She would play in her bedroom, or the room upstairs that her parents, Lauris and Helen Blake, kept empty, often for hours every day.
“Music is a part of your life forever,” said June Gyger, Carole’s sister. This, she said, was Blake’s philosophy. The music never stops.
Gyger took lessons as well, but eventually drifted away from music. For Blake, there was never any doubt about her passion, or her career, Gyger said. “It has always been music.”
Blake made the All-State Band in New Hampshire each of her four years in high school.
From there, it was on to the New England Conservatory of Music. She graduated from Boston State College with a master’s degree in education in 1971, blending music with her other passion.
“She was absolutely dedicated to the teaching of music,” Gyger said.
She taught skiing at Whaleback for a few years upon her return to the Upper Valley. Blake almost always lived with two cats. She taught the cats tricks — to sit, lie down, roll over, and jump through hoops.
“All kinds of tricks that I never knew cats could do,” her good friend Marilyn Black said.
Blake, however, chose to teach music for a living. She taught first in Medway, Mass., then in Woonsocket, R.I., and Malden, Mass. Blake took the Malden High School Band skiing in Switzerland, perhaps a premonition of things to come.
Blake returned to the Upper Valley in 1988, and she took a job at Mascoma Valley Regional High School.
Students there soon came to learn about her philosophy that music never ends.
In 1990, Blake became the director of the Hanover-Norwich Band. The band already accepted members from the surrounding towns, and under her tenure changed its name to the Upper Valley Community Band. For much of her time as director, students from Mascoma High School played with senior members who were 75 to 80 years old. Before Blake, the band had comprised of around 40 members, often less. During her tenure, it rose to 80.
Blake’s most resounding strength, Jim Young said, was the ability to push people to their limits, without instilling a fear of failure. The most important thing was that rhythm, where the tubas, and trumpets, and trombones could play when their time came, and play to their full potential.
Under Blake’s direction, the band played an exchange concert in Joigny, France. While she was there, Marilyn Black said, Blake received some funny looks.
“She never considered herself to be inferior to all the other male directors out there,” Black said. “It was just the way she was.”
Nonetheless, Blake was the only female director at the festival in France.
Besides music, Blake’s other interests included teaching, skiing, golf, and animals.
She traveled to China, Africa, South America and Europe on trips with her close circle of friends, including Black. Even on these trips, which were not organized specifically around the band, Blake’s excitement often came back to the same simple themes that featured so heavily in her life as a whole.
After one of her two trips to Africa, Blake showed thousands of photo slides, not just personally to her sister, but publicly to many of her friends and community members.
But, June Gyger said, perhaps her sister’s favorite moment from the entire trip was the fact that she was able to golf in Africa. While she played, many of the animals that she had traveled so far to see meandered across the golf course.
Back home in White River Junction, Blake, who never married, spoke by phone almost every night at 9 with her sister. Blake’s cats, she said, were like her children.
At a memorial concert for Blake a few weeks ago, Tom Gyger, Blake’s brother-in-law, recalled, “The first question out of everybody’s mouth was ‘how are the cats?’ … Well, the cats are now living with us in Maine. And they’re doing just fine.”
Since Blake’s trip in 1999, the Schleglerfest has started to focus more exclusively on the music. The Upper Valley Community Band’s membership continues to hover at around 80 musicians.
“It wasn’t an extraordinary life,” June Gyger said. “But I think it was a very fulfilling one for her.”