21 minute read
The Brian Bolam Mentor & Life Coach Awards
Brian Bolam
“I worked as a guide for this ‘American Sportsman’ show. They used to use all these celebrities as their hunters and fishermen. People like Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Phil Harris.”
“Tell me how you got into the band?”
“Okay, I started in 1943. My father worked in the Burrard Shipyard in North Vancouver. He bought a trumpet from a sailor down on the wharf, who had won it in a poker game. He paid seven dollars for it. It was a very narrow long model Conn. He brought it home and my mother said to myself and my brother,
“The first one that comes home from school gets to play.”
I came home as quick as I could from school. My brother didn’t come home for four days. He didn’t want to play. So, I went up to the North Van schools band, as they called it in those days. Arthur Delamont was there and I came in with this trumpet and no case. My mother said,
“Brian wants to join the band.”
I was eight. He says,”
“What’s he doing with an instrument? I’ll decide what he plays.”
“Oh he can make quite a bit of noise on this already,” my mother said. So, I played it a bit.
“Oh, all right,” he says, “but I like to decide what the kids play and what I need.”
Arthur was very inclined to assess you, as to what kind of a character you were, in those days. Being a little pugnacious character as I was, my mother sent me to school until I was fifteen, in short pants and I was very small. I was not perhaps, as pleasant to get along with as a lot of kids because I used to get picked on for wearing short pants. My brother did too. My brother became a wimp and I became a fighter!
Delamont found that out pretty quick. We used to lock horns quite a lot. Although we had a great deal of respect for each other in many ways, he would want to beat me on the head and I would want to return the favor and he didn’t like that much. We always got along, for the type of characters we were. We both had a fair bit of confidence and a little cockiness but as I got older and played in the North Van band, I became the lead player in the band, which was a big deal for a kid of twelve or so. Arthur Delamont asked my family about me coming into the Kitsilano Boys’ band in late 1947. They were going to go to Calgary the following summer. It caused a fair riff with one of the other trumpet players. He was a couple of years older than me. He thought he was better but he didn’t get asked to go into the band. I had no idea why I was chosen and he was not.
Later it donned on me. I was quite small and quite short. I played quite well for a kid. Delamont used to have me stand on chairs, playing solos, when we went on tour. I used to
play some of the hymn tunes and other things. I remember in the 1948 music festival, at the Pacific Ballroom in Vancouver, we played an overture called the ‘March of the Spanish Soldiery.’ Part way through it, he pointed at me to play the solo. I had no idea I was going to play it. We were in a festival with adjudicators.
He knew I could sort of pull it off. I didn’t have a lot of nerve problems. I played it and it was okay and we won. He used me for that sort of thing quite often. It was because I was small. It wasn’t because I was a better player than the other guy. It impressed the adjudicators.
Delamont spent a lot of time patterning himself after John Philip Sousa. He saw him live a couple of times. He followed his style of programming. He followed his style of uniforms. He followed his style of how to entertain people. He had a great deal of ability to do that. He had the same sort of character. Just an interesting time as a young guy.
I grew quite a bit on the 1950 trip. I grew about four or five inches. I still wasn’t very tall. I played through that year. My father got quite ill. He eventually died. I had to drop out of school and go to work. I faded out of the band about 1951. I would have liked to have gone on the 1953 trip. It was probably the best balanced band he ever had. There were several great musicians in that band, Bill Trussell. Bill Good’s drumming skills were outstanding.
I joined the Musicians Union in 1957. Started to play Parks Board concerts with Arthur in the band or with Arthur conducting. I got to know him quite well over the years. I had a lot of respect for him. He was a fine musician himself. People maybe do not realize that he was very good but
when you hear some of the stuff he did early on and some of the abilities he had, he was really a fine trumpet player.
A lot of those early Salvation Army trained people were musically so well attuned to the music because they made them play in three and four sharps all the time, or flats, and they had a real ear for harmonic sounds and blended beautifully. Anytime I hear a Salvation Army band, I always think of how he played and why he played the way he did.”
“Tell me about squirt?”
“Squirt, ya, well that was that little guy. Arthur dubbed me squirt early on. It was one of his beckonings.
“Squirt come out here,” he would say.
“Squirt, the audience can’t see you. Stand on the chair. Now, this little guys going to play the solo. He might muck it up,” he says,
“But you got to give him a chance. He’s just a little guy!”
In 1947 or 1948, the MacMillan Club of Canada, had a competition. One of my teachers at school entered me when I was 14. I won the junior division of this festival. The next year I got entered again but not in the junior division. I was right in there with up to university level kids. But I was 15 and it was 1950, in the spring before we went to England. I was going to play Nola. Arthur heard about it and said,
“You fathead, you can’t play that. I’ll give you something to play.”
He gives me this tune called ‘Don Quixote.’ I was accompanied by a young lady named Susan Cates. Her family owned Cates Towing in North Vancouver. She was a very good pianist. Having learned from Arthur a little bit of stage deportment, I went out and didn’t have a music stand. I
memorized it. I guess I played pretty well. At the end of it, I got applause from the audience and the adjudicators had their heads down. I turned to my accompanist to acknowledge her. Apparently that really impressed the adjudicators because no one else had done that in the contest. I won that contest and the Arthur Delamont big Silver trophy. When I got back to the Kits band, he said to me in a gruff voice,
“What happened? It couldn’t have been any competition. Fathead. You can’t have won that, you were playing against players from UBC.” I didn’t know I had won it and I didn’t think I had won it. After I had played the piece, I got on the ferry and went home to North Vancouver. Then, I got a telephone call about 3:00 pm.
“Where did you go?”
“What do you mean where did I go?”
“You left the hotel. Why did you do that?”
“Because I finished playing and I went home.”
“But you won the competition. You should have been there to get presented the award.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think I could have won.” The end result was, I had to get presented this trophy by Sir Ernest MacMillan himself, at Malkin Bowl, in Stanley Park, about a month later. That was even better! Arthur was quite disgusted that I won.
“Couldn’t have played it that well,” he said.
“We are in England on the Embankment in Bath, on the 1950 trip. Part way through a concert, he starts giving out music. We didn’t know what he was doing. He gave it out to everybody, except me. He had written an arrangement of an accompaniment to ‘Don Quixote.’
I hadn’t seen it or thought about it for three months. He starts it off, going like mad. The tempo was about twice what I was used to and I screwed it up a bit. He stops the band and gets on the microphone.
“This young man thought he was a good trumpet player. We will give him one more chance at it but he sure mucked it up that time. He won this trophy that I am not so sure he deserved.”
“According to Bob Cave, I looked daggers at him. When he started it again, Bob said,”
“You never looked at the music, you looked right at him, right through him and you played it flawlessly!”
“He put it away and we never saw it again. He was like that! He would test us. He would do that. He was never complimentary to people. Years later in the pro band, when I played the post horn for the first time, he turned to me and said,
“That was quite good!”
I almost fainted on the spot!
I was a bit of a nasty little character. I had been picked on at school, by everybody, over the short pants. I always had a little chip on my shoulder and he and I tried to knock each others chip off a few times over the years. We always got along well but there was always a little test of wills. He was very interesting.
As I say, I didn’t realize in those years, how well he played until I started to go back and think about how he did simple things. Nothing he played was terribly difficult, although he did play the Carnival of Venice in a contest, with Kenny Douglas pretending to play in front of a curtain. It was 1947 or 1946. It was in a competition, in a theatre, where the band was entertaining but there were some featured entertainers, competing on different levels.
Delamont thought it would be a lark, if Kenny stood out in front of the curtain and pretended to play the ‘Carnival of Venice.’ Kenny was a pretty good actor and he would do it! Part way through, he was supposed to put the horn down and people would see he wasn’t playing. But it didn’t happen. The horn didn’t go down and he won the competition. I am not sure why but no one was ever told. But the point is that Delamont played the Carnival of Venice very well.
When he played things like the Lost Chord, it is a simple thing to play except that when you gliss down from a middle G to a low D, below the staff and try to keep it in tune on a cornet, it is difficult to do because cornets are notoriously sharp on low D. He controlled this instrument so well in that type of setting. He knew how to play. Very demanding!
Alan Colette was the lead trumpet player when I joined the band. Bruce Alsbury was second. Cyril Battistoni was third or fourth. Glen Startup was in there. The band was really good. We went to the Calgary Stampede. Alsbury and Colette were on that trip. We had a really strong band of probably about fifty pieces.”
“Did you do a lot of marching on the 1950 trip?”
“No, we did some in Holland for the competition. The interesting thing was, they didn’t care how you looked. The adjudicators stood between the rows and listened to you go by. They wanted to know if you could play.”
“Any thoughts about the 1950 trip?
“Chris Stockwell had it set up so that we were on the
BRIAN BOLAM ~ 187
c1950, London, England, Sylvester Bolam, the Editor of the London Mirror Newspaper with his nephew Brian in London. His Uncle gave him a Hardy reel and a fly fishing rod. Brian became a pro fly fisherman and sports guide.
ABOVE: Brian playing in the Firefighter’s band (middle).
go all the time, I guess, two hundred and fifty concerts in one hundred and fifty-six days.”
He arranged transportation. He arranged all kinds of things. Bill Good and I were on the luggage committee. There are probably a million little stories here and there.
One interesting story was the trip over to Dublin, on a small vessel, similar to the Union Steamship vessels. When we arrived at the theatre, the marquee read, “Dead On Arrival,” the Kitsilano Boys’ band, which we nearly all were because the trip over had been so rough! I couldn’t stand the smell of diesel and people being sick, so I went outside on deck and one of the bigger fellows grabbed my belt and put it through the railing and back into my pants or I would have been washed overboard. There was water coming down the funnel. We were on the side of a trough and when we looked horizontally, we saw the other side of the trough. We thought the boat was going to fall into the hole. The waves were thirty-five feet high. It was just incredible. If you have ever seen one of those storm pictures of the North Atlantic at its worst, that’s what it was like. It was an amazing trip!”
“What else do you like to do, besides play trumpet?”
“I do a lot of sport fishing. I got a telephone call one day to go down to Florida to do some tropical fishing with this guy. He turned out to be a no show, I couldn’t believe it! So, I missed out on my tropical fishing adventure. A friend of mine last year said,
“Come to Cuba with me! It’s marvelous. It’s cheap. And it’s very good fishing”.
“I thought why not. I tied a lot of flies. I got my gear ready. He was absolutely right. It was a marvelous trip. The people were great. The food was good. Guides were excellent. Equipment was awful. The government issues them boats. Outboards are terrible. We had one jump right off the end of the boat. It had no screws to hold it to the transom. It jumped right off and landed in the water.
Fishing, I do a lot. I have done some guiding as well. I guided for a friend of mine. I was a Fireman here in Vancouver for twenty-five years. Firemen have a lot of time off. They always get into trouble. Either they have a side line job or they chase girls. Or they play trumpet. I did everything.
A friend of mine, who was a Fireman, his brother-in-law worked for ABC in New York. He worked for this “American Sportsman” show. They used to use all these celebrities as their hunters and fishermen. People like Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Phil Harris.
It was done with three cameras and a very technically advanced crew that had been all over the world. They were very good at what they did. They wanted to come to British Columbia to hunt grizzly bears and do a coho fishing show at the same time. I did a lot of fishing in those days. My friend’s brother-in-law called, wanting to know if he knew anyone who could help out with the trip. They had had the name of two guides in Bella Coola and wanted to know which one to choose. One was a guy named Rob Fisher and the other was a guy named Clayton Mack. He told him to telephone me. He told him that I could help him out.
He said I knew all about hunting and fishing. So, he called and said,
“We need to know which of these two guys is the right guy to do the job. Could you research that for me?”
“I said, “Sure!”
I did some leg work and found out one was not so great but the other guy, an Indian, was probably the best guide this country ever produced. They asked,
“Would you fly up to Bella Coola and get him to sign a contract?”
I said, “Okay.”
I flew up to Bella Coola with the contract and they had offered him fifteen hundred dollars for twenty days. This was 1969. He was supposed to supply his boat and a helper. They said,
“He’s going to get all this advertising. Be on television.”
“I talked to this fellow and I liked him. He was just a delightful character. He was really, really smart and probably the best known grizzly bear guide ever in the history of grizzly bear hunting. I thought, this was a bloody insult, fifteen hundred dollars. I telephoned them back and said,
“No, he won’t sign it. He wants more money.” We didn’t even discuss it actually. So, I said,
“How is twenty-five hundred or three thousand dollars?” He says, “Okay!”
I changed it and got him to sign it. This guy kind of liked me because of what I did. He thought that was quite a decent thing to do, so we did this show and I went along.
Then he calls me up and says,
“Can you get me a good size boat that will house twelve or fifteen people for twenty days? We need to charter it. We need a skipper and we need a cook.”
I did some leg work. Found out what and who I needed and put it together and sent it up to Port Hardy. It worked
fine and again, I wound up going on the trip. And so it went! Getting back to the grizzly bear trip, I did a lot of shooting in those days, as well. When we got up there, Rick Jason, who was on the TV series ‘Combat’ in the 1960’s, he was the hunter. All he did was brag about this custom built rifle he had along. I had a pretty plain jane factory turned out model, I had had for a number of years. We get up there and they send me across to the other side of the Dean River, where we are going to do the Grizzly show, with a cameraman who was so scared, he was shaking. Soon, Rick Jason got a grizzly in sight. Boom! Down it goes and up it got and it ran off.
It’s going up a bank about two hundred yards away from me. I went, BOOM and I dropped it. Down it went. These guys all said,
“Wow, what a shot!”
“I don’t usually shoot at anything more than forty yards away. I consider myself a hunter not a shooter. I was the hero for shooting the bear. Rick Jason is now getting static from one of the head cameramen who said,”
“You’re suppose to be so good and you can’t even kill a bear with it?” Rick Jason says,
“It’s a way better rifle than that thing he’s got!” The cameraman says to me,
Where is it shooting?” I said,
“It’s shooting right on at one hundred yards.” He says,
“Can I borrow it?” I said,
“Yes.” They had a contest. The cameraman waxed this custom built rifle, which upset Rick Jason even more. On this same trip, a guy named Joe Brooks, who was an outdoor writer for ‘Outdoor Life’ for years, a very famous
fisherman,
“He was with us for the coho part. I know a lot about fishing. We got into this situation, where we were suppose to fish for coho in the saltwater in Kivatna Inlet. The river had come up with the rain and the fish had gone into the rivers. They said,
“What are we going to do?” I said, “Well, that’s okay!
Never mind. I thought that might happen.”
I had lures and flies for the river. The flies worked to some extent but it was slow fishing. So they switched to lures and used spinning rods. He says,
“Have you got any lures?’ I said, “Yes.”
I pulled out a box of thirty-six of my handmade lures, everyone of them identical and gave them to him. He says,
“What if they don’t work?” I said, “They will work!”
He cast them out. He was into fish right away. He says, “Man, these things are great!” I said,
“I told you that!”
For the next several years, I got called every May. They would say,
“Okay we’ve got September tenth to October fifteenth. We want to do a show” on this or that.” It was great!
“Tell me how Arthur influenced your life.”
“I would say he influenced many of us in that he set standards of deportment and character that stayed with us a lifetime. One thing he did do to some people, Doug Holbrook, as an example, is scare them half to death. Doug is still scared of him and Doug is seventy-six. I didn’t have that problem. I had a great deal of respect for his talent and what he did with his life. He used the talent he compiled so well. He made us play way over our heads.
We had no business playing as well as we did. In many cases, under somebody else, we never would have achieved that level. He just made us confident of the fact that we could do these things. He also had a way of editing music that made us look pretty shiny. As far as the standard of playing, I don’t think any of us were as dedicated as he was, as he practiced every day right up until the end.
There is a story I tell, of when we both played in Dal Richard’s Lions band. I looked over at him one day. He was about sixty-eight years old and I said,
“Arthur, why don’t you get that horn replated? It looks terrible!”
He sort of smiled and said,
“Gosh, dang, bust it all! I should get my horn replated at my age? Why would I do that?”
But he took it in and got it done. He got it all re-lacquered and it looked great! Ten years later, he is seventy-eight now, we are in the BC Lion’s band. He’s marching along and I say to him,
“Arthur, you should take that horn in and get it relacquered!”
He just smiled at me and shook his head in disbelief that I would ever suggest it again. He had so much acid in his system that the lacquer peeled off quickly. It looked pretty bad!
Most people called him Mr. D out of great respect. But in the pro bands, he was Arthur. He was just another trumpet
player, who was a good player, who played in the sections. Usually, he would play second or third and did it very well. He never got up in the lead chair, Arnold Emery and I took care of that. He was no slacker! He played his part and played it well. Even in the later years. He still had the ability to play awfully well. He had a lot of influence on all of us. Always! We always had enough respect to show up on time for jobs properly dressed and that stayed with us all our lives. When I played at the Hotel Vancouver, I was always there early, properly dressed. I was on time. I was always able to help, set up chairs, put things out. We took care of business. All the guys I ever played with were exactly the same; Sandy Cameron, Ted Lazenby, Bill Trussell. We were always on time!
One of the funny stories that Judy would tell you was, I was playing the Hotel Vancouver one night and Bill Trussell asked me if I could give him a lift home. Marlene Trussell telephoned Judy about one in the morning and said, “Do you know what’s happened to Bill?”
She says,
“No, I don’t but he’s with Brian. They will be talking.” And we were! We were sitting in the White Spot at Park Royal until five in the morning, reminiscing. Talking about fishing, building boats, playing instruments. Bill and I were in different years in the Kits Band. He came in later, yet, we played together a lot over the years. Judy says, “They’re not drunk and they are not chasing girls!”
