Had it not been for Fred odds are I would have dropped out due to bordem and work. In my 9th grade year I took band as a music requirement, never thinking I would go any further, then I met this being, this presence, this force, for no single man could have that much presence, that much charisma in front of the class. From that day onward I got out of bed, dragged my trombone onto the schoolbus, and went and put up with English teachers talking about books I had read years ago, sat in classes and learned the dates of the revolutionary war again, and braved all other classes just till I got to band. If that wasn’t enough, I was already working, sometimes working 40+ hours a week, and it would take it’t toll. I remember during my senior year, I had come into drop off my trombone and Fred told me to go lay down in the “vault” and get some rest. He told my teachers that I was doing work for him. He taught me more in a month than most teachers taught all year, not just about music, but about life, about being a good person, and even gave me some really great advice about girls.

Now I am a teacher, not of music, though I originally went to college to do so, but of computers, and every day I take a little of what Fred taught me and bring it out, “Learning should be fun.”