After 35 years, Dan Merkamp has gotten pretty good at teaching. He went from a kid learning how to make every sound possible on a taped-together trumpet, to a young man surrounded by mentors whose wisdom has stuck with him. These days, he has stepped wholeheartedly into the role of mentor himself, and considers it a privilege to direct the RHS marching band. In this episode, Dan sits down with Kate to talk about teaching, musical exploration and the joy of seeing (and hearing) young people discover what they are capable of.
Transcript
Dan Merkamp: I’m Dan Merkamp and I’m the band director at Richmond High School.
Kate Jetmore: From Civic Spark Media and the Western Wayne News in Wayne County, Indiana, I’m Kate Jetmore. As a native of Richmond, Indiana, I’m excited to be sitting down with some of our neighbors and listening to the stories that define our community.
My guest today is Dan Merkamp, who’s in his third year teaching in the Richmond Community Schools. A 35-year teaching veteran, he has taught locally in the Hagerstown, Winchester, and Northeastern school systems.
He holds a bachelor’s degree from Butler University, a master’s from Eastern Kentucky University, and has studied educational leadership at Ball State University.
He’s a member of several professional organizations including the Indiana Bandmasters Association, the Indiana Jazz Educators Association, and the Central States Judging Association.
He currently resides in Fountain City with his wife, Courtney, and two of his children, Lauren and Aden.
Welcome, Dan. Thanks so much for joining me on the show today.
Dan Merkamp: Well, thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Kate Jetmore: Well, as you can gather, on the Western Wayne News Podcast, we obviously focus on people from this county. So tell me, are you originally from this area?
Dan Merkamp: I am a born and bred Wayne County kid. I grew up near Economy and I grew up on a farm. My dad was a dairy farmer and I’m the youngest of six kids.
My dad was up early every day, milking; and out late every day, milking; and working hard. My brothers were big helpers there in the milking. And I was a little bit fortunate in that I was so young that they were old enough to take care of all the hard chores and I would do the little things like feed the cats and take care of the dogs and things like that.
But I went to Hagerstown High School. I graduated there in 1985, and I was really involved with things there at Hagerstown. Mostly, as you can imagine with the band program and lots of other very social, fun activities that I could get involved with I would. So I’ve always been here.
Kate Jetmore: How did music come into your life then? And you mentioned band in high school, but did it happen before that? I’m assuming?
Dan Merkamp: So this is an interesting story, I think, and I’ve told this many times to my students. So I am the youngest of seven and none of them were involved in music, and my parents weren’t really involved in music, but I was always a really curious kid and I like to dig around into my older brother’s things, you can probably imagine.
And I remember in our upstairs we had a bedroom with a very large closet, and I liked to get in there and explore. And I was exploring one day and I found an old Conn director’s clarinet or a cornet. And my older brother, Dave, had been in the band in junior high school and I think he made it maybe a year, maybe two, and decided not to stay with it. Well, when I found this instrument, it was really shiny, it was really cool looking, and I thought, “Oh, well, this looks like fun.”
And some of my friends were in the band in fifth grade. And I was going into sixth grade and I hadn’t joined the band in fifth grade. And I went to mom and dad and I said, “Hey, can I take this cornet and play in the band?” And they were all for it.
So I took the cornet in to the band director and I found out, unfortunately it was unplayable, it was in bad shape and needed more work than it was worth.
Kate Jetmore: Mm-hmm.
Dan Merkamp: So, my band director at the time was Joe Backmeyer and he had an old Conn director trumpet sitting in his office, and he handed me that thing. And honestly, I was a little horrified because it was literally held together with rubber bands, and tape, and I thought, “Well, hey, I’m getting the short end of the stick here because the one I had in my hands looked great, and then he gives me this, but it was functioning.”
So I took that thing home and honestly, as bad as it was, I really could not put the thing down. I really had a time experimenting with every conceivable sound that you can make with a trumpet.
And many of them, as some of your listeners may be aware, were not very pleasing to hear.
Kate Jetmore: For the rest of the house.
Dan Merkamp: Yeah, I stuck with it. And the big problem I had was I was already a year behind on my peers. So I thought, “Well, gee, I’m going to have to figure this out pretty quick.”
So I spent a lot of time playing and I enjoyed it so much that I asked the band director, I said, “Hey, is there somebody around this area that I can take some lessons with?” And he pointed me toward a gentleman named Crozier Franklin, and Crozier was the principal of the Williamsburg Elementary School at the time. And so, I think I was in seventh grade, I started taking lessons with him. And he was a wonderful man. He charged me $3 for a lesson, half an hour. And it usually turned into 45 minutes or an hour.
And I just picked up so many things from him. And one of the really great things about getting to spend time with somebody like that is it wasn’t just what I learned about music, but it was just the wealth of stories and life experiences and things that I would pick up along the way. And it’s just, when you get to spend time with someone like that, it’s just very inspirational.
So he was an educator and had been after… I believe he was in the Air Force and he’d gotten out of the Air Force and went into education. So that was kind of an influence on me, but-
Kate Jetmore: Yeah, for sure. And actually that leads me to my next question, which is when you began playing your instrument, which apparently was the trumpet, were you immediately dreaming of the stage and performing, or did you know from the beginning that you would be an educator?
Dan Merkamp: I think it wasn’t really until I got into high school that I started to really think that I wanted to have some kind of career in music. And what inspired me there is I used to find every place I could go to hear a concert. And so my friends and I would find places, we’d go to concerts. And even I remember, somewhere in there I would travel to Richmond High School and hear the Richmond High School band, and I would hear Tim Love play his trumpet. I remember distinctly he played at one of the concerts in Civic Hall, and this was long before they remodeled it.
He played a Leroy Anderson piece that is called Portrait of a Trumpet. And I remember just being wowed. I did all the solo and ensemble contests, and I really enjoyed preparing solos and performing those. I was often a nervous wreck when I would play, but I still… And honestly, I liked the preparation and all that probably more than the performing. And I really found all the way through my career, I’ve always enjoyed the preparation probably more than the performances.
Some people really, they get kind of an adrenaline rush or something from performing in front of a lot of people. And for me it was always kind of nerve-wracking, but the preparation part was always the challenge, trying to figure out how to make things sound good.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah. How interesting. How interesting.
Well, as we said in your introduction, you have a long, long history directing various bands all over Wayne County and in the area, Hagerstown, Winchester, Northeastern, as we said, and now Richmond. What are the main things that have kept you in the community? And I’m curious if you ever have considered leaving the community?
Dan Merkamp: Well, it helps that my family is here. And like I said, I’m the youngest of seven, they’ve all spread out throughout Northern Indiana and Western Ohio, and they’re here, there and everywhere. They’re not too far away, but that definitely has been one thing.
But I think what brought me back, it was purely by chance. So I spent a couple of years teaching. My first job was teaching at Eastern Hancock High School, and I was not a very good teacher. I’m just going to be frank with you.
I was young and inexperienced, and I didn’t have a great relationship with the students at that time. There were a few that I did, but for the most part, they looked at me as some young guy about their age that really didn’t know what he was talking about. And they probably weren’t too far off.
And so, I had a rough time when I started teaching. And I decided I was going to go to graduate school full time. I was unattached. And so I went down to Kentucky and did my graduate work. And when I finished that, I had an opportunity to come back and teach at Hagerstown.
And when the job opened up the summer prior to the year I started there, I had helped a gentleman named Dr. Eric Chandler with the band, and he decided to move on. So I knew people at Hagerstown and I thought, “Well, this would be a great opportunity.” And so I applied for the job and I was fortunate enough to get it. And I worked there, I believe for seven years. And that’s really what got me back in the area. Because at that point, I was really open to whatever, because like I said, I was single and I didn’t really have any reason other than I was from here.
And then, I’ve been very blessed in that every time I either get the itch to move on or something happens, some big life event I’ve had, the next door has opened for me. And it’s been fortunate to me that it’s been always been a local opportunity.
And that’s really how I ended up at Richmond as well. I was not really thinking I was going to go back and teach some more, but then the opportunity came along and it seemed like it was the right thing to do.
Kate Jetmore: Mm-hmm.
Were you not teaching right before you came to Richmond?
Dan Merkamp: Yeah, right before I left teaching at Northeastern, I was thinking that I was going to be done and maybe do something else for a while. It was just time to try something else. I ended up going over and working for my brother at his business for a while just to help out.
And then I got a call from one of the teachers at Richmond and said, “Hey, we need a long-term sub for the orchestra.” And I’m like, “Well, who else is going to do this? There aren’t people that know. There aren’t a lot of people out there.” And I thought, “Well, sure, I’ll do that, and it could be fun.”
And I had a really wonderful time with the orchestra students at Richmond, and I got to meet some of the administrators and staff. And so that’s how I started. I started hanging out in the Richmond schools and now I’m having a great time.
Kate Jetmore: Wonderful.
Well, you said the word that actually I was thinking of, which is opportunity. It sounds like in addition to the pull of having family in the area, or at least sort of nearby, and in Indiana and Ohio, that doors have opened for you in this community. That, for whatever reason, there have been a series of opportunities.
Dan Merkamp: Mm-hmm.
Kate Jetmore: Is there anything else that you can think of about this community that is something you prize and appreciate?
Dan Merkamp: Well, I was always influenced by some individuals, like I mentioned Crozier Franklin. And my high school band director was Joe Backmeyer, and he ended up being one of my principals and one of my superintendents there when I was teaching at Hagerstown. And he was a huge influence on me, and I always admired him.
I had some wonderful role models. Tim Love was always someone that I really looked up to, and Steve Varnell. These people, I watched them from afar and I marveled at some of the things they were able to do with students.
And I had a wonderful English teacher who still… He’s Chuck Avery, he writes columns in the newspaper. And some of the things these people said to me were just like… They were kind of earth moving. I remember talking to Chuck Avery and he said, “As a teacher, you’re not going to make a lot of money, but you’re going to make a lot of difference.” And I thought, “Wow, that’s a powerful statement.”
And there’s another gentleman that I met that was a local gentleman. And at the time I think I was teaching at Hagerstown. And I was thinking, I at one point had an opportunity to teach at Franklin Central in Indianapolis. And they were talking to me and I was talking to this gentleman and he says, “The people in this community need the arts and they need music and they need people that are qualified people that can lead these organizations. So that’s something to think about.”
And those kind of things, it’s having a heart for the community and having a heart for trying to give the community something that’s special, and something to be proud of, and something to be involved with. And that has been one of the cores to my philosophy of not just teaching, but just being a member of the community.
And so that has been a big influence. A lot of really wonderful people have crossed my path and inspired me and supported me. And I hope at some point, in some small way that… I always wanted to be that to someone else who needed it. That encourager and that person that provides opportunity and gives direction. And so I think that has been a tremendous influence on me, maybe in a roundabout way of staying in the Wayne County area.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah, you’re really putting your work into context, to talking about some of the elders and mentors in your own life. And then, you and I are about the same age, sort of slipping into that role in your own life. And you do work with young people. And these days, these are tricky times for young people. It’s no secret that our kids and their peers, many of them are struggling with anxiety and even other mental health issues.
How do you see music and specifically band as elements that can help them face their challenges?
Dan Merkamp: Well, the first thing I want to say is to get to do what I do. I consider it to be a privilege and a blessing because I get to spend time with those students, and I get to spend a lot of time with them sometimes. And so, the opportunities come along organically to develop relationships, to connect with students, to encourage students, to try to guide them. And yes, you are right, there are many, many challenges in the community with all of our students, regardless of their socioeconomic background or anything. They’re just constantly bombarded by media. And then there are so many more pitfalls that they can fall into. And there’s pressure from the school, from home, from testing.
And it’s almost as if they’re in an unending place of being under stressed or overstressed rather. And I think they need those people, kind of like the people that I’ve talked about in my life, that can be supporters and encouragers, and help them develop connections to other people and other resources in the community that can support them.
And the wonderful thing about what I do with music is it’s relatively non-threatening, and it’s cooperative, and it’s collaborative, and it’s social, and it provides a lot of interpersonal relationships for the students where they really learn to rely on one another and help each other through difficulties.
And some other great things about music is we’re constantly solving problems. We’re constantly, we have issues with how to perform something and we have to figure that out. And we have to go, “Well, how can we work together to make this sound the way it needs to sound?”
Kate Jetmore: Right.
Dan Merkamp: So there’s some really wonderful skills. We’re developing an outlet for emotional things because music is about connection and it’s about emotion. And if you do it right, it should be a lot of fun and it should be enjoyable, and it should be something you look forward to. And it should be a place where you can be introspective and explore all those wonderful emotions that we have and all those not so wonderful emotions that we have.
And so, people who aren’t involved with music don’t understand. There are so many facets to it that it’s just so enriching to a person’s life. And if they can find that connection to music, they will always have it throughout their entire life, whether they’re a performer of music, or a consumer, or a patron, or however.
And the other thing, I always just try to provide the students with some really amazing experiences. When we do a marching band show, I’m always like, “What can we do that’s going to get the kids excited and get them engaged?”
And also the community, I want the community to understand how important the things we are doing, they’re really important. They’re part of our culture and our history. So it’s just so many facets. You brought up a question I can just go for days on.
Kate Jetmore: Yeah, and I wish you could. I wish we could go on for days.
And I actually want to highlight something you just said, which many members of the community might not know, which is that marching band, it’s very specific to the United States and even to the Midwest.
Dan Merkamp: Mm-hmm.
Kate Jetmore: I live in Spain and my son is born and raised here in Spain. And marching band is not a thing here. So there are bands, and certainly all those instruments exist, and there are orchestras. And there are even bands that play in parades and things, but it’s not the same thing. So when my son did his sophomore year in the United States at Richmond High School, he was in the RHS marching band. That’s how he met you. That’s how I met you. And he had a life-changing experience under your direction with the RHS band.
And I know there are so many other kids and parents who found a sense of belonging with you and the other directors there at the high school.
As we wrap up, Dan, what are your hopes for the music program in the next few years?
Dan Merkamp: I think my biggest hope for the orchestra, the band, the choirs at Richmond, would be that we can continue to provide opportunities for kids and for the community that are… The best way I can say is special, memorable. I like what you said, and with Lucas, that’s exactly what I hope for in my students, is that there is something very positive that comes out of it and that it can have a huge impact on their life now, or even a small one.
I just want to see something positive for the community and for the students that will really mean something to them. I think that’s probably the thing that drives me the most in this activity. And I think that’s my dream.
And it’s kind of a one day at a time thing. Sometimes it happens in the classroom and you’re like, “Wow, that just happened. That was amazing.” And other times-
Kate Jetmore: Right. Because you can have that objective, you can have that hope and even dream or vision for what you want to create for your students, but sometimes it just… I would imagine, I’m not in the classroom like you are, but I’m sure there can be a string of days where that’s just not happening. And then one day it just happens. But it doesn’t come out of left field, it happens because you’ve been laying the groundwork. And then the magic is able to appear.
Dan Merkamp: Yeah, we see growth in students in fits and spurts. And sometimes it feels like they’re moving backwards and then they’ll have an epiphany and everything. The stars will line up and it’ll be just amazing. And then the next day it won’t be, and you go, “What happened yesterday? This was amazing.”
Kate Jetmore: Right.
Well, and I’ll tell you one image that I think speaks volumes, and many of our listeners will have witnessed this before, it’s summer, it’s 85 degrees and humid, or it’s 90 degrees and raining, and you’re just out on errands and you drive by Richmond High School, and there’s the band outside, practicing. Everybody’s standing at attention, listening, paying attention, doing the choreography, or getting notes from the director up on the tower. And you’re like, “Oh, wow, great. Great job kids.” And you go to your appointment, and then you go to the grocery, and then you’ve got one more errand. And you’re driving home, same route, an hour and a half later, two hours later, and they’re still there.
And for people who don’t know, the week of band camp, they’re out there 10, 11, 12 hours and they’re out there because they want to be out there. No one is forcing them. Is it hard work? Yes. Is it hot? Are they tired and sweaty and hungry when they get home? Yes. But from what I’ve witnessed, it’s completely worth it.
Dan Merkamp: Well, it’s exciting and it’s fun, and that’s why I’m still doing it.
Kate Jetmore: Yes.
Well, Dan, I want to thank you so much for doing everything you do, for joining me on the show today. And I really loved learning more about you and what you do. And I want to wish you, your family, and the band the very best.
Dan Merkamp: All right, thank you so much.