Dr. Felder, or “Doc”, as we called him, had been at Lynbrook High for at least ten years when I entered the program my freshman year. I came in a nervous frosh clarinetist and four years later, graduated a little more musically proficient, a little more confident and with my head a little higher. I’d like to attribute some of that to Doc.

Now there’s a ton of things I could say about band. In fact, you could probably dig way back in the archives of this blog and find many a band story (I was a serious band geek, no shame about that).

Doc stood 6 feet and then some, slightly balding with kind features. He was a man with high standards, having graduated with a music doctorate from UCSD (hence, “Doc”). This meant that his ensembles were invariably at the top of our district. We sent kids all over the place, from state ensembles to music conservatories.

Whether you loved him or hated him (you rarely were in the middle), Doc pushed you hard. He wasn’t afraid to let his emotions show–oftentimes, this would mean that he would raise his voice and express his frustration–“Come on, altos! Get it right!” or “Why can’t you pull this together?” For us slackers, it had a way of grinding us (reluctantly) into action. Sometimes it even pushed us to greatness.

More often than not, Doc was out and about the band room, greeting us as we walked in for fourth period Wind Ensemble, giving hugs and talking it up with his students.

I have memories of Doc during marching band season: he’d be out on the bleachers barking into a megaphone as we marched from set to set in the muddy grass.

Doc was widowed a few years before any of us knew him. He had several adult sons who’d occasionally pop into the band room and Doc would introduce with a beaming smile on his face. He never talked openly about his wife’s death, and we never dared to ask.

Now that I look back on it, Doc almost played a parental role to many of us. He’d be firm with discipline, always pushing us to reach the musical potential in us and never allowing us to compromise. And as kids usually are with their parents, we always regarded Doc with a mixture of awe, fear and loathing.

I became a section leader my junior year and I won’t forget how the weight of that responsibility felt on my shoulders. Doc chose me! I sure hope I don’t let him down! And those years as section leader allowed me to see how much he cared about the musical performance and the well-being of us kids.

I remember him pulling me aside a couple of times and just having pleasant conversations about life. It was nice knowing he cared enough about my life and didn’t always talk shop.

Sophomore year, our band and orchestra took a tour of China. That trip was particularly memorable, as Doc gave us his expectation that we be international ambassadors along with his imperative to have fun. So we laughed as he struggled with the fatigue of eating sixteen Chinese meals in a row, or made conversation with the head of the Chinese musical academy we performed at, or conducted us with his usual grace and poise.

Doc even wrote my letter of recommendation to Stanford University. We all know how well that turned out.
Midway through sophomore year, Doc remarried. His wife was a kind Japanese-American lady named Pam–his dentist, as we all found out–who had a sweet little girl who we’d see playing on the bleachers during a few of our nighttime practices.Doc didn’t have to stay with us. The man had an impressive list of musical accomplishment to his name, having jammed with many of the jazz greats in his day (Ellington, Monk, and Hancock). But he had stayed with the Lynbrook music program for over fifteen years, building it into a veritable powerhouse.

I have a horribly vivid memory of playing the alto clarinet for a piece we performed my senior year in the Wind Ensemble. The E-flat alto clarinet is the big-brother of the standard B-flat clarinet; a little longer and larger and lower. It’s also completely different instrument to play. Doc chose me to learn it for this one song (“Oh gosh! I hope I don’t disappoint!”), and so I tugged home the school’s beat-up alto clarinet and attempted to get that miserable thing to make sounds.

In the course of a month, I had a small degree of mastery over the instrument (but because that instrument was so darn beat-up, it still had its problems). One of them was squeaking. The adjustment made to my embouchure (mouth position) was too much to adjust to, and so I invariably ended up squeaking once in awhile throughout the piece. And since this was a soft, flowing melodic piece, these squeaks were not trivial.

Then county music competitions rolled around, and you can guess what happened. I totally messed it up. Our wind ensemble took the stage, and everybody was quiet, and I was sitting front-row in the center. We played, I wrestled with that blasted alto clarinet. My embouchure wasn’t loose enough. I totally messed it up.
After the performance, my glaring errors still fresh in my memory (and undoubtedly the judges’), Doc came up to me and gave me a hug. “Great job,” he told me, and grinned. Before I could apologize for anything, he walked off to congratulate others.

There are few men I respected then as much as Doc. And he’s still there at Lynbrook. They tell me he’s planning on retiring soon, and I tell myself I should go back and visit. And it will be with a mix of fear and trepidation and anticipation. I wonder what he’ll say to me, I wonder if he’ll even remember me. And I wonder if he’ll know how he’s shaped the person I’ve become.