Live music returns: Callicoon Center Band back on stage in Sullivan
The Callicoon Center Band returned to the stage Wednesday, August 4, for the 2021 summer season. The performances are every Wednesday through Aug. 25.
Kelly Marsh, For the Times Herald-Record
Part of the allure of the 87-year-old Callicoon Center Band concerts is the homemade pie raffle. Local luminaries like a prominent doctor and a state judge have been known to wax rhapsodic over the possibility – at 50 cents per chance — of winning a blueberry or cherry pie.
Another slice of the enduring charm of the western Sullivan County institution is the cast of characters who’ve made the band as much a part of Catskills summers as the lush green mountains that seem to touch the sky.
Characters like the late Agnes Tillson – surely one of the only spoons players in all the town bands in all the land – and the late Ludwig Graner, who, with a polite bow at the waist and a sincere look in your eye, made an art of collecting donations in his Phillies Blunt and King Edward Imperial cigar boxes – for 45 years.
Those famed folks may have ascended to the great town band in the sky.
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For its first concert in nearly two pandemic-interrupted years on the evening of Aug. 4, the band moved from its pine tree-framed bandstand to an immaculately restored 1845 barn at the newly renovated Callicoon Hills resort – at the invitation of the resort. That’s where the remaining three Wednesday night August concerts will be held, says band director Jim Newton.
At the season-opener concert, the first thing you saw last Wednesday when you walked into the barn with 40-foot-high ceilings was a table with those homemade blueberry and cherry pies. Sitting there were two members of the Callicoon Volunteer Fire Department’s Ladies Auxiliary, Harriett Podbielski and Beverly Parsons, selling those 50-cent raffles.
And instead of Graner and his Phillies Blunt and King Edward cigar boxes, his protégé, Lynn Burton, was back with a Montecristo cigar box that would overflow with donations from the packed crowd of about 100 – aged 90 to nine months. Some fans even journeyed from as far away as the eastern Sullivan Town of Neversink (25 miles) for this rite of Sullivan summer in this hamlet of 200 that’s often so quiet you can hear the trickling of a stream.
These scenes were all part of the tableau that still makes a Callicoon Center Band concert “a portal back to simpler times,” said Podbielski’s daughter, Amy Dworetsky, standing next to the pie table accompanied by her two sons, John, 14, and Nick, 19.
Of course, that tableau wouldn’t exist without the musicians. Many have been with the band as long as – or longer than – many audience members have been coming to the concerts. Some in that crowd, like Pat Durkin of Callicoon Center, even remember dancing in the street with their now-grown children to the zippy polkas, marches and standards that are still a band staple.
They’re musicians who are longtime educators, like band director Jim Newton, who’s been conducting tunes like “American Patrol,” “Never on a Sunday” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” some 45 years. He was teaching music in the Livingston Manor school system when he asked his student, Gary Siegel, then 15, to play trumpet.
Siegel has been playing ever since – for 48 years. The former music director in the Liberty school district, Siegel remembers the days when the band didn’t play with quite as much pizazz and panache as it does now, when half the band started playing “My Wild Irish Rose” and the other half started playing “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” – “and somehow we ended together,” Siegel said. Throughout the decades, his late father Lee and son Max have played in the band with him.
Then there’s North Branch trumpeter and band president Chuck Sommer, who joined 52 years ago. That’s when his father Allan, who himself had been in the band since he was 9, was playing drums in the band. For many of those years, Chuck taught music at a middle school down in Montvale, N.J., – but almost always made it back for the Wednesday night concerts.
There have even been some professionals in the band, like Liberty saxophonist Larry Ravdin, who’s played with stars like Petula Clark and Paul Anka in the Concord Resort band and on Holland America cruises.
And of course, there are accomplished non-professionals like Livingston Manor’s clarinetist/fly fishing expert Judy Van Put, who exemplifies the true family atmosphere in the band during these days when “family values” is often nothing more than a slogan.
When Newton asked her 6th grade son Lee to play trumpet in the band in 1994, he discovered that Judy played clarinet. She’s been playing ever since – also joined for a few years by her son Tyler on saxophone.
When you ask Van Put what makes the Callicoon Center Band seem as enduring and inviting as those mountains that frame Callicoon Center, she answers for just about everyone who’s seen or played with the band.
“We are like a family,” she says. “I love the tradition. I love the memories. I love everything about it.”
The Callicoon Center Band performs Wednesdays in August at 8 p.m. in the barn at the Callicoon Hills resort, 1 Hills Resort Rd., Callicoon Center. Admission is free.
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