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Philip Spiess
ONCE ON THE CORNER WITH KETTLE AND BELLS
In days of yore, when we were young, there occasionally were found, on the streets of our cities, small bands of eager musicians. Woodwinds, brass (the trumpet and trombone were notable here), the tambourine, and, above all, the small foot-pedal pump-organ would suddenly appear on a given street corner downtown and begin to play a medley of old church favorites (Christian and Protestant). It was, in short, the lads and lasses of the Salvation Army making their presence – and their crusade -- known.
Shortly after William Booth began his ministerial career in England in 1852, he became disaffected with church pulpit preaching and took his Christian gospel message directly to the people, preaching in London’s streets to the poor, the hungry, and the homeless. He was joined in this endeavor by his wife, Catherine Booth, and they trained evangelists to help them in their work, particularly in London’s notorious East End (the eventual scene of “Jack the Ripper’s” murders). By 1865 their organization, which had grown, was operating under the name “The Christian Mission,” its converts preaching and singing in the streets of London and other English towns.
In 1878, the Rev. Booth, reading a report which referred to his Mission as “an army of salvation,” changed its name to The Salvation Army and he himself became its General. Its volunteers were dubbed “soldiers of Christ,” and other activities of the group took on a quasi-military flavor. (Its downtown Cincinnati headquarters when we were growing up was, if I recall, on the north side of Central Parkway just east of the central YMCA at the corner of Elm Street; its building, which looked to be half chapel and half castle, was named “The Citadel.”)
But the intent of this article was to talk about the Army’s music, not its salvation. George Bernard Shaw, an eminent British music critic before he became a world-famous playwright (he wrote the earliest definitive musical and philosophical analysis of the operas of Richard Wagner), wrote “the Salvationist . . . [was] always in the wildest spirits, laughing, joking, singing, rejoicing, drumming, and tambourining. . . .” No doubt this was one of the many aspects which inspired Shaw to write one of his most popular plays, Major Barbara (1905), about the Salvation Army, a play which Walnut Hills High School put on circa 1959, starring our classmate Dougie Dupee (Trumble)’s sister Debbie as Major Barbara and our classmate Teedee Spelman’s brother Jon as Sir Andrew Undershaft, Major Barbara’s father, the "notorious" munitions manufacturer.
And, of course, the street corner foot-pedal pump-organ made its distinctive appearance in the play, played by my own sister, Barbara Spiess (Neel); no Walnut Hills auditorium’s great organ console for the fledgling Salvation Army! I, too, in due course, had my chance to play the Army’s foot-pedal pump-organ, every Wednesday night during the summer of 1961 or 1962, at the Boy Scouts of America’s Camp Edgar Friedlander near Milford, Ohio. Billy Netting, the younger son of our Presbyterian minister in Clifton, Dr. Robert Netting, was officiating as Chaplain at the camp that summer, and he needed an organist to play at weekly Vespers. I was the lad. It took all my patience and stamina to play that little portable organ: when I pressed the foot pedals to pump air through the bellows to make the organ sound, I found myself pushed backwards (tipped, actually) in the folding chair on which I sat. At the same time, I had to press outward with my knees on two folding wooden arms or armatures which controlled the organ’s volume (at least this outward pressure kept me from falling over backwards!). And, of course, all the while this was happening, I had to be playing the music the Scouts were supposed to be singing. Some of it I knew, and I could wing it by playing it by ear; other pieces I had to start practicing by sight-reading at the beginning of the week. I give credit to all of those Salvation Army organists – if such still remain – for the heroic efforts they put forth on the public pavement.
Indeed, do Salvation Army bands still exist? The Internet says they do, even here in Washington, although I haven’t seen or heard one on a city street corner in years. When my grandparents were still living on Terrace Avenue in Clifton (they moved to Finneytown in 1954), a Salvation Army band of at least five or six players would come around occasionally on foot and serenade us. Prominent was the tambourine – prominent for not only keeping up a clattering, clinking rhythm, but also essential for passing around at the end of the performance for the collection of donated coins (and possibly some folding stuff as well). No bells or kettles present.
But that all seems to have passed and is now a part of the past. “General” William Booth died in 1912, and the next year the American poet Vachel Lindsay wrote his famous poem “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” (1913). Booth’s seventh child, his daughter Evangeline Booth, helped establish the Salvation Army in the United States and was its national commander for thirty years before returning to England to become the fourth General of the Salvation Army international (she died in 1950).
So today, in most communities, the Salvation Army band has been replaced, on street corners and in shopping centers alike, with the constant ringing – at least at this time of year -- of Salvation Army handbells and the ubiquitous Red Kettles replacing tambourines for donations. Yet I remember the bands well: my memory is firm and my head’s as clear as a bell -- in fact, I hear it ringing.
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