For the Love of Music

by Andrew Nemethy

Dick Ellis is to music what Johnny Appleseed was to trees. The Vermont native has planted and nurtured the sound of music in the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire with matchless dedication.

Ellis’ accomplishment and philanthropy, spanning seven decades, has played out differently from what he might have imagined. Growing up in the 1920s, he was introduced to music by his father, a contractor who played clarinet. Later, Ellis took up saxophone and fell in love with music, but when a guidance counselor told him he couldn’t make a living at it, he went to the University of Vermont to study engineering.

Fortunately, the call of his muse was too strong to resist. It was the heyday of Big Band swing, and he hit the road with his saxophone, touring with famous bands all over the East Coast. Yet, when the first of his four children was born to Polly—now his wife of 62 years—he decided to leave the road behind.

“It was everything I expected, but it wasn’t something I could see doing for the rest of my life,” Ellis says. He then enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and learned to play wind instruments, from trumpet to trombone. In 1954, he returned home to the village of South Royalton (pop. 2,603) determined to make a living teaching music. Thus began the life of Vermont’s pied piper.

“I had 60 to 70 students at one time. I was the only teacher around,” he recalls, describing how he worked 12-hour days at different schools and gave private lessons at home.

A problem then in Vermont was that kids had almost no school bands in which to play. In response, Ellis helped establish half a dozen school bands. And so student musicians would have a place to play once they left school, he founded the South Royalton Town Band, which still performs on the town green each Thursday during the summer. “This will be my 58th year,” says Ellis, who conducts the band.

“A number of the members of the band are my old students,” he adds. “They often come back when they come to bring their own children to play in it.”

Today, Ellis estimates the number of kids who caught his love for music numbers in the thousands. He’s proud of having taught them something challenging, rewarding and inspiring that they can do for the rest of their life.

Teaching full time and starting up bands would have been plenty of work for most, but Ellis discovered another obstacle to music education: wind instruments were expensive and hard to come by. So early on he began buying used instruments for students to rent. Of course, that helped fill out the bands. It also eventually filled up his house, which turned into the bustling nerve center of a rental business. “As our children moved out of the rooms, we took them over for the business,” he says with a laugh.

In 1986, he built a new building in the nearby town of Bethel to house the business. Today, three of his children run the company, Ellis Music, which almost single-handedly is responsible for making band and orchestral music possible in the region. Ellis Music rents around 4,000 instruments to practically every school in Vermont, and many in New Hampshire.

Although officially “retired” at 80, Ellis still spreads his love of music, performing with the South Royalton Town Band and The Keynotes, a group formed more than 50 years ago. “I play seven instruments in that band,” he says. “In fact, among the six of us in the band, we play 22 instruments.”

It’s been a remarkable life, but Ellis remains a soft-spoken, modest man not about to toot his own horn—except in a band. All he’s done, after all, is what he loves to do, which is make music.

“I think I’ve enjoyed making a living more than most people,” he says, with just a hint of a smile.

Andrew Nemethy is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

first appeared: 7/25/2004