Missing just about everywhere in this 2020 pandemic year, cities canceled the parade that brought Santa Clause to town. Love a parade. Still remember the Hardin-Simmons University Cowboy band. Made our West Texas town famous at several Presidential Inauguration parades.
Memorable, because at the front of the Cowboy Band parade there were six coeds dressed in white, riding six white horses and carrying the six flags of Texas. Look the six up. Old professor going to give a quiz.
When we graduated from Abilene High School in 1946, some of our AHS band boys went to the west side of town, enrolled in Hardin-Simmons, put on white cowboy hats, tied a scarf around their gold shirts, donned chaps. They marched in cowboy boots, didn’t lift their feet and shuffled to a fast cadence.
Remember five of the 40-some band players and horse riders. Frank Everts and John Crutchfield on drums. Arthur Hall played trombone. William King blew the trumpet. Jessica Myers rode one of the six white horses. All five did well—jeweler, lawyer, two dentists, and Champion horse rider in rodeo barrel race Jessica.
I asked Arthur, didn’t the band’s fast shuffle wear out the soles of their boots? Yep. He said he rotated three pairs of cowboy boots, and one pair was always at the shoe repair shop getting a half-sole.
Sure we shuffled. But Dick, you don’t want to lift your foot and step when you are marching behind six white horses
Photo courtesy of Hardin Simmons University
