On Saturday, the Northport Public School auditorium stage filled with over 60 members of the West Virginia University marching band, alongside members of the Northport Community Band, there to honor former band director Don Wilcox who lived in Northport and died in May.
Over the years, countless band alumni ventured Up North to visit Wilcox and his wife at their Leelanau County home, forging a bridge between West Virginia and northern Michigan.
The concert was planned months ago with the hopes that Wilcox himself could be in attendance. But after his death, the WVU alumni band decided to continue with the concert as a tribute and celebration of Wilcox’s legacy.
The program featured many of Wilcox’s own arrangements.
Wilcox trained many musicians who went on to direct their own bands at the high school, collegiate, and professional levels — among them, Joan Palmer, who traveled from Moundsville, West Virginia.
“You would be working with your own band, and you could hear things he said to you as a student, and it would come out of your mouth the same exact way,” she said. “We all excelled because of him.”
“You would be working with your own band, and you could hear things he said to you as a student, and it would come out of your mouth the same exact way.”
Joan Palmer
Moundsville, W.V.
Wilcox directed the Northport Community Band after moving to Northport in his retirement. There, he worked with musicians of all ages and skill levels.
Ted Kroll, a member of Northport’s band, said “he did not demand perfection. He inspired us to play at our best.”
Wilcox was the first director at WVU to admit women into the marching band, in 1972. This was shortly after the adoption of Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibited sex discrimination in public schools and universities, and it was the year that many public universities brought women into their marching bands for the first time.
In an environment that had been dominated by men for so long, alumni say Wilcox was steadfast in his commitment to welcoming women into the bands’ ranks.
Palmer was a member of the fourth class of women in the WVU band.
“I cannot imagine what the first class went through, because it was not easy,” she said. “Even coming in the fourth year, there were still a lot of gentlemen that would rather not have us around.”
But, Palmer said, Wilcox was encouraging.
“He had his own daughters, and I think he was looking to the future, that he wanted them to be able to have the same opportunities,” Palmer said. All of Wilcox’s children, and many other family members, were themselves members of WVU’s marching band.
Lt. Cmdr. Kelly Cartwright, the current executive officer of the U.S. Navy Band in Washington D.C., said she wouldn’t be where she was without the environment Wilcox fostered at WVU.
“When I came to WVU in the mid 90s, I had many women to look up to,” Cartwright said before conducting one of Wilcox’s arrangements on Saturday. “Some of those early trailblazers are on the stage here with me dating back to the 1970s, and I can honestly say that I wouldn't be here without the culture that he and these women built together at West Virginia University.”
