Granite Youth World Tour 1979 (Part 3 of 12)

In the Granite Youth Symphony we practiced for three solid weeks and then we had two concerts in Salt Lake. One was at Liberty Park and the other at Granite High School where we had practiced. Dr. Ellis Worthen, the head of all music instruction in the Granite School District, spoke in the middle of the concert. He told about the good grades of the students in Granite Youth as well as the high cost of the students’ instruments. It was all very impressive even though my grade point average was below the average he mentioned and I didn’t own my instrument. I borrowed it from the school.
The next day we set off for the tour. We gathered in the parking lot of Granite High School. We took two school buses, numbers 278 and 279. Someone had painted flames coming out the sides of each bus at the very front. There was also a truck which helped haul luggage and instruments. In a few minutes we were off to the first leg of our journey, Boise Idaho. We were pretty quiet that first morning. We really hadn’t had time to develop friendships with anyone yet, except for the people we already knew. By the afternoon we pulled into Boise. We were then assigned to the people who would be our hosts for the first night. I was assigned to my room mate, Gil Bennett. He was a trombone player from Olympus High School. We were both so shy that we had never spoken to each other yet, even though we had known for a week that we’d be room mates. That first night there was just the two of us staying with a family. On other nights there would be four, six, or even eight of us. Gil was a year older than me. In five months or so I’d be attending his missionary farewell. We had spaghetti for dinner that first night. That must have been a private joke because it seemed everyone else had spaghetti too. Then the host family took us to the LDS stake center where we were to have the concert. We set up and then put it on. The concert went well. Each night that we did a concert, which was almost every night thereafter also went well. Many were in LDS stake centers. But others were in schools, community auditoriums, community colleges, and one was at the lodge of a youth camp. The itinerary was un relentless and I loved every minute of it!
It was also the costom to have a dance for the youth of the area after most of our concerts. First we played a classical music concert and then a few of the guys, members of the orchestra from Skyline High School, who also had their own rock band, provided the music for the dance. Their group was called Desolation and since we were going to Canada they all had T-shirts made up which said, “Desolation World Tour 1979.”