EXCHANGE: Music was a life-saver for man

AMBOY, Ill. (AP) - It was the trumpet that saved his life.

Ted Fredenhagen was just a kid - a Marine in California who had joined up fresh out of high school, age 18, in August 1943.

He had been recruited, in a way, pulled from the general populace of young kids away from their parents for the first time: singled out by the base band for his fluid ability when it came to playing “the horn,” as he calls it while sitting across from a reporter some 70 years later in a newsroom in Northern Illinois.

Ted grew up in Naperville; his father was one half of the iconic Prince Castle fast-food chain, a facade of which can still be seen on the waterfront in Dixon, now home to a chicken restaurant.

The Fredenhagens lived on a farm, where they raised strawberries.

Ted’s mother was an accomplished pianist, classically trained. She had intended to make a career of it, but as Ted tells it, marriage and children got in the way of all that, so she kept herself busy giving lessons and playing for friends and family.

Ted, however, had no interest in piano. Well, maybe a slight interest, but nothing compared to the way he felt when he first heard the trumpet.

He was in the sixth grade the first time he joined a band, and played with much older kids, high school aged. It was called The Men of Swing, which is kind of cute when you imagine little 11-year-old Ted blowing away on his horn.

Anyway, the experience and the love he felt for that horn was formative. And, once he joined the Marine Corps, it was a life-saver.

“I got to know one of the fellas (in the base band), a trumpet player,” Ted says. “So, we’d go back to the barracks, and we would have a good time playing duets. There was an opening in the base band, and why, I fit right in the slot.”

That base band was a 63-piece marching band, plus a bugle corps. And inside of that, there were two dance bands. Ted was part of one of them.

Then one day, he was in his barracks with all his Fourth Marine Aircraft Wing buddies when they got the call. They’re destination? Iwo Jima.

“Yes, I know what it was like to march with a sea bag over my shoulder and march down the dock and wait to board the ship,” he says. “I can still remember. I got right up to the gangplank, and a staff guard came down this long, long, long pier and called my name. He said I was supposed to be in the band. I didn’t know that they had actually made me a permanent member of the band; they never told me a thing about it.”

So he got pulled out of line, and back to the base he went.

“My closest buddies were in the Fourth Marine Air Wing, so I was disappointed to be leaving them,” he says. “You develop that Marine comradeship, so to be separated from your group, well, you’re a little unhappy about it.”

So, how did they fare in Iwo?

“Not well,” he says. “Not well. It was one of those snafu deals; that’s what they used to call it, a snafu. They got in on one of the wings that went into Iwo, and everybody got shot up. They were, really, they had not been trained for invasion tactics. They got heavy casualties.”

And he would’ve been there if it weren’t for the trumpet.

“That’s what my father always said. He said, ’That trumpet saved your life,’” Ted says.

Pretty soon he got out of the Marines, but his love affair didn’t end there. In 1946, he came back to Illinois, got married, had children, took charge of the family business, and all the while kept playing that horn.

Now, at age 90, he lives in Amboy on a farm, where he has resided since the late ’70s.

His new band - well, not new, but his current band - is called Class Act II, formed of four trumpets, four trombones, five saxophones, a keyboard, bass guitar, rhythm guitar, and a female vocalist. Ted directs now, though sometimes he plays still.

“I never thought out here we would have the quality musicians that we had in the suburban area of Chicago,” he says. “But I was delightfully surprised.”

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Source: The (Sterling) Daily Gazette, https://bit.ly/1HBXnLR

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Information from: The Daily Gazette, https://www.saukvalley.com