Republican-Eagle: "Learning by the seat of our pants" - Memories of the early days of Band Instrument Repair
Special Section: MSC Southeast 50th Anniversary
By Katryn Conlin
Photos - Anderson visited campus in September 2023; Craig Anderson in 1975.
A lot has changed in Red Wing since Craig Anderson was a student in Band Instrument Repair at the Red Wing Area Vocational Technical Institute (now Minnesota State College Southeast).
In those days, and the Sheldon was still a movie theatre and many of the college students had part-time jobs in construction at the St. James Hotel, which was being gutted for renovation.
A native of Cumberland, WI, Anderson attended college at Gustavus Adolphus for two years, majoring in music performance. But one day his advisor pulled him aside and said, "You're not happy here."
Anderson had to admit he didn't see a future as a professional musician, and he didn't want to be a music educator. But he still loved the field and wanted to find a way to stay involved.
That's how he landed in Red Wing in Fall 1977. It was only the second year of Gene Beckwith's new Band Instrument Repair program.
"We were all learning by the seat of our pants! There was no organized manual. We learned by copying information about every little bit of horn history and repair we could find," Anderson said.
"We were pulling together everybody's resources to try and help Gene make the program better," he added. "Everything was so new that we were really helping him build the program."
The band instrument repair lab was much smaller then and didn't have any windows. Brass and woodwinds were housed in one small room, and it was very tight with 18 students lined up along two rows of narrow workbenches.
"That winter we had 79 straight days of no sun, so we had to find anything creative to do the stay sane," Anderson remembered.
A lot of the students played brass instruments, so they put together a Christmas concert and played it out in the Student Commons area.
After finishing school in Red Wing, Craig Anderson worked for a short while in Gallup, NM, then moved to Flagstaff, AZ where he had his own shop serving school districts across northeastern Arizona.
He then joined the team at Allied Supply, a company that provides parts, accessories, tools, and supplies to band instrument repair techs and music stores. Anderson worked there from 1992 until his retirement in 2020.
This week Anderson made his annual trip to Red Wing give an inspirational talk to current students about the life lessons he has learned in music. "Dream big - anything is possible!" he said in a slide show covering his own career and the evolution of the band instrument repair industry.
As a lifelong learner and innovator in band instrument repair, he closed his talk by quoting Dr. Grace Hopper: "The most dangerous phrase in the language is 'we've always done it this way.'"