A warm and lovely sound filled the air at Farmers Market this Sunday. It was Tuba Christmas. Somewhere north of forty musicians played a concert of Christmas music on tubas, euphoniums, baritone horns, and sousaphones. The bell of one of the sousaphones even sported a Christmas wreath. As usual, the performers seemed to be having as much fun as the audience, whom conductor George Thompson educated and amused. He opened his jokes with, “What do elves learn in kindergarten?” No one knew. “The elfabet,” he told us. After the audience response, he added, “They don’t get any better, folks,” and he was right.
The last time Ann Arbor had Tuba Christmas was two years ago, before the pandemic began. The day of that performance was clear, bright, and unseasonably hot. Sunburn was a concern. Not this year. Sunday was grey, blustery, and cold. Cold enough to freeze valves on brass instruments. Mr. Thompson didn’t mention that challenge, but present and former musicians in the audience were wondering about it while sipping their hot chocolate.
The concert was one of many Tuba Christmas concerts that, barring a pandemic, take place around the world in December, under the aegis of a larger TubaChristmas organization. Musicians of all ages are welcome to join the low brass throng. Ann Arbor’s youngest this year was twelve years old. Musicians at the other end of the spectrum were less willing to disclose their age.
Musical selections ranged from sing-along carols to Bach to the piece that’s been in my head for five days now: “Santa Wants a Tuba for Christmas.” I tracked down the name of the composer, Norlan Bewley, but couldn’t find the lyrics on line. The gist is that Santa’s never gotten a present for Christmas, he’s heard that tubas are fun, and he’d really like one. Good news, he gets one, and plays it in some nice showing off. Brendan Ige, of the music faculty at Eastern Michigan University, did the honors on Sunday. The concert was highly entertaining. Nippy, but entertaining.
Wednesday night, my husband and I trekked again to the Yankee Air Museum at Willow Run Airport for another history talk. Naval aviator Jack Weber gave this one, on how the US Navy established the Pacific Barrier in the early days of the Cold War, with the goal of preventing World War III. Following the end of World War II, the US Air Force built radar stations every sixty miles around the Arctic Circle, but the stations couldn’t cover the area over the North Pacific.
So the Navy flew specially-equipped Lockheed Constellations continuously from Midway Island to the Aleutians and back–a three-thousand-mile, fifteen-hour journey. There were four of these planes in the air at all times, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This program continued until 1965, by which time satellites could cover the area the Navy had been defending.
The Constellation’s radar could detect anything in the air or on the surface, for a distance of two hundred fifty miles on either side of the airplane. Jack was a radio operator. If the crew on his plane contacted something on their radar, they would hand him a message, which he would then relay by Morse Code to Hawaii. Hawaii relayed the message via teletype to Colorado Springs and NORAD. Jack said that, usually within fifteen minutes, the crew received a response identifying what they’d found. Fighter jets from Alaska or Hawaii investigated anything that remained identified. Jack said the Russians used to try to break the barrier, but couldn’t. Neither could the patrol planes our Navy sent to try the same thing.
When asked what armament the Constellations carried, Jack answered, “We had one gun on board. A flare gun.”
Jack opened the floor to questions at intervals throughout his talk, and there were a lot of them. This was a highly knowledgeable audience with a keen interest in his subject area. He fielded all the questions with aplomb, his own knowledge base clearly deep. When the last query had been dealt with, he posed a question of his own. “What was our country’s longest war?” There were many guesses, but none matched his answer: the Cold War, which lasted from 1947 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. He asked the audience to leave without applause once he had played the final video segment of his presentation: a list of military personnel who lost their lives defending the Pacific Barrier and in other Cold War activity. We filed out in silence, better informed about what the Cold War entailed and what that longest war cost.
9 December 2022