Sterling Weed, 104, band leader

ST. ALBANS, Vt. (AP) — Sterling Dorwin Weed, the nation’s oldest known active bandleader whose Weed’s Imperial Orchestra played from the early 1930s to this summer, died Sept. 11 at his home. He was 104.

Mr. Weed studied piano as a youth. He said in an Associated Press interview in 2001 that his public career began in 1912, when he was 11.

The stories of Mr. Weed’s travels around northern Vermont and southern Quebec — where much of the region’s nightclub business was focused during Prohibition in the United States — were legion.

Weed’s Imperial Orchestra played at inaugural balls for three governors. His band was playing the night in 1943 on the Lake Champlain cruise boat Ticonderoga when Edward and Ione Keenan of Essex Junction, Vt., had their first date, and it played at their 50th wedding anniversary in 1994.