-                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Monahans News article on Dan Gibbs" -- July 18, 2002         Pictures

    DAN GIBBS:  A song in his heart  -- by Bill Modisett, Editor

When Dan Gibbs is inducted into the Texas Bandmasters Hall of Fame later this month in San Antonio, there may be a band playing appropriate music – but it won’t be the same.

Only one band should play for that event – the Big Green Band from Monahans High School.  That is the band Gibbs led for 20 years and found fame and glory under his direction.  In fact, Gibbs noted with irrepressible pride, the Big Green Band was the first band to perform at Texas Stadium.  The event occurred on Oct. 23, 1971 at the invitation of the Dallas Cowboys, on national television and before a crowd that included Lady Bird Johnson and Mamie Eisenhower.

             The Hall of Honor presentation will be made at 3:30 p.m. Monday, July 29, during the Texas Band the Texas Bandmasters Convention at the Marriott Rivercenter, Salon B Ballroom.  It was an exciting first, but it wasn’t the last time the Big Green Band would perform at Texas Stadium.  The band would go back nine more times.  

            Notably, Gibbs was voted into the Hall of Fame at the age of 65, his first year of eligibility.  He should have been.  His accomplishments are many.  Among them under his direction, the Big Green Band was named Texas Music Educators Association Honor Band in Class AAA in 1972 and 1976.  Gibbs also has two state championships to his credit.  

            The honor Gibbs concedes is his favorite, however, is the fact he and his son, Tony, who is the band director at Hays High School near Austin, are the only father-son combination to ever direct the Honor Band named by the Texas Music Educators Association in Class AAA from the same school.  Before taking the job at Hays High School, Tony Gibbs directed the Big Green Band as did his father before him. 

Yet Gibbs doesn’t think of the years he was directing the Big Green Band as the “good old days,” quickly pointing out the good old days are whenever you are living.  The good old days, he said, are still occurring in Monahans which has long been supportive of its school, its students and the Big Green Band. 

Gibbs came to Monahans in 1958 as the junior high school band director. After receiving his bachelors degree from North Texas State College (now the University of North Texas) in three years, Gibbs had stayed on to earn his masters and to direct a second North Texas State band under the guidance of Maurice McAdow. 

“When I came here I was the junior high band director,” Gibbs recalled.  “The band was small.  Before I came there were only 44 in the high school band and we had to really struggle to be successful in those early years.  It was my 10th year before we got our first sweepstakes. We never missed after that. 

“So I guess the highlight has been the whole thing.  The people of Monahans have been totally supportive of the band.  Those kids in the years we didn’t win everything, it really meant a lot to them.  In fact, the Class of ‘64, they were seventh graders when I moved here ... I had them seventh, eighth and ninth, and then I became the high school director and they moved up so I had them six straight years. 

“Well, every year they have a class reunion and we go to that.  Those kids never won a sweepstakes, but they are really special.  We had great kids and still do,” he said.  A lot of Gibbs’s students went on the become medical doctors, Ph. D’s.  “There’s one particular band class where there are four doctors in that class – in one graduating class.  Not necessarily in music, but I think I’m proud of the kids that were in the band because of their accomplishments in whatever they did.  That’s just the kind of kids we had,” said Gibbs. 

There was lots of hard work, but there were those unavoidable times that always seem to happen in a program like band.  Gibbs noted that after having directed the North Texas State band, directing the Monahans High School band at first was quite a change.  In 1961, when he became the Monahans High School band director Gibbs took his first band to Odessa.  Never having witnessed a marching contest, his band marched between J. R. McEntyre’s Bonham Junior High School band and Bill Dean’s Bowie Band.  Gibbs’s band chose to end their marching show with a minstrel turn to the pressbox playing the trio to “Rifle Rangers March,” not knowing Rifle Rangers was the Bowie band’s fight song.

After hearing the Monahans band play their fight song, the Bowie band came down the field playing “King Size March.”  Gibbs noted “they were marching about 180 beats a minute, and they were blowing the grass out of the ground.” 

Gibbs chuckled as he remembered that Dean thanked him many times over the years for inspiring this Bowie band!  Not to be bested, however, the Monahans band did earn a first division rating at Odessa. 

When Gibbs and his wife, Shirley, came to Monahans, the band director thought he would be in the West Texas community for two years.  It didn’t quite work out that way, though. “The people here have just been wonderful,” he noted.  “That’s why we stayed.” 

After Gibbs retired from the Monahans school district in 1982, he devoted his attention to an insurance business, Dan Gibbs Insurance Agency, to his duties as music director of First Baptist Church, and to supporting the Monahans community and its young people.  He has led an active life in the Monahans community which he loves. 

It’s obvious that Gibbs touched the lives of his students in a very special way.  One of those students was a twirler named Kathy Reynolds, who later became Kathy Fausett and today is a Ward County Commissioner.  She said, “Dan Gibbs to a lot of us was a father figure.  He’s just a wonderful man.  He gave me a sense of direction, a sense of responsibility.” 

Through the way he taught, said Ms. Fausett, Gibbs gave the band students “a family – and he was the father figure.” 

Another of Gibbs’s students was Jeppie Wilson who became a teacher in the Monahans-Wickett-Pyote Independent School District and a Monahans City Councilman.  Wilson said he has “no doubt” that Gibbs should be in the Texas Bandmasters Hall of Fame.  “He should have been the first one they put in there,” said Wilson.

            He also noted Gibbs was the kind of instructor who was not only a teacher, but was like a big older brother or an uncle. “If he saw a need in his organization, he would treat kids like they were his,” noted Wilson. “There were times he dug in his own pockets and helped out kids to go on tour or to other band functions. And it was years later before they would find out about it. 

“He’s a good man,” Wilson added. “I can’t say more than that about him.  He’s a good man.” 

A fan of John Philip Sousa, Gibbs loved to lead his band in playing Sousa marches every spring.  But he also tried to include enough popular music that people knew or similar to what they knew in his concerts and performances.  A favorite piece to close performances was “Russian Christmas Music” and the theme from “Hawaii Five-O.”  On the “Hawaii Five-O” theme, the Big Green Band literally brought the house down with band members playing everything including the kitchen sink! 

And there were those “memorable” moments like the spring concert of 1965.  The Big Green Band was to close with “The Stars & Stripes Forever,” but members of the band had other ideas. 

“I stepped up on the podium,” recalled Gibbs, “and the kids were all up to the front of their chairs.  I raised my arms, they raised their horns and I gave a big downbeat to start that march, and they all took a big breath and nobody played a note.  I felt my arms were going to fall off.” 

The suspense didn’t last for long.  “The band captain came out and the officers gave me a pair of alligator shoes,” he laughed. 

Gibbs drove a Volkswagen Beetle from 1964 to 1972.  One spring, the band was going on a trip to Corpus Christi, Gibbs recalled, and his wife let his band kids have the keys to his car and the band hall where they would be performing. 

His band students drove the Volkswagen into the band hall, lifted it up onto the podium “and they stuffed it full of 9,000 years of The Monahans News, Odessa American, Grit.  Whatever.  You couldn’t get a golf ball in there.  Then they came and got us at 4:00 that morning for breakfast, and we went by the band hall and there was that car.” 

Laughing at the memory Gibbs recalled making the students take enough paper out where they could drive it out and lock it up.  He left it filled with paper until after the concert. 

Gibbs noted marches today are not as pleasing for people who like marching bands, but as a result the bands play better.  There are many more good bands today as a result, Gibbs says.  Concert bands are much better today.  Also, he said, there are more opportunities for young people to do really well today. 

His largest band, he said, never had more than 280 kids in it, but he noted the Monahans band has about 30 percent of the total number of students in high school in the band, which is much better than a lot of schools today that may have only have 8 or 9 percent of the student body. 

Yet band was not an end within itself for Gibbs or his students.  “I always told my students if you never play your horn after high school or college, that’s OK.  But that’s not what it’s all about.  If you do it’s great, but what you have learned can be used in other fields.” 

He noted Neil Armstrong even said essentially the same thing after his walk on the moon.  “They interviewed him and asked him, ‘How did you discipline yourself to do that?’" 

“He said, ‘I think more than anything else probably playing the baritone in junior high, high school and the university band, just the coordination it takes to march and play, stand straight and look good, and do all the right stuff at the right time.  That probably helped me more than anything else.’” 

One of Gibbs’s former students, Jerry Lewis, who now lives in McKinney, wrote in part:

“Mr. Gibbs was not just a great teacher – he was a mentor.  In 22 years of formal schooling, I’ve never had a teacher more dedicated to his mission.  The mythical Mr. Holland would be in awe of Dan Gibbs.  No student who came in contact with him could resist his magic.  When Mr. Gibbs picked up his wand, the world stood still.  The only thing on your mind was pleasing him. You knew, somehow, that by doing so, you would please yourself.  Understand, however, and understand we did, that this would never be easy.  It required us to go beyond anything we had ever done.  Mr. Gibbs pushed us to the edge of the envelope long before that phrase became popular by the astronauts.” 

Lewis added, “I have achieved much in my life since graduating high school.  Most of it has been because of grit, determination, never quitting, setting goals beyond my known abilities, and refusing to take ‘no’ for an acceptable answer.  Other teachers played large roles in refining these character traits, but no teacher did more to instill them than Dan Gibbs.  He kept and continues to keep me in a straight line – in far more ways than one. 

“Monahans and all of West Texas should honor this man above all men.  The young lives he molded, corrected, strengthened, and sent forth now form the bedrock of leadership in the communities where they now live,” Lewis stated.  “God bless the day he entered our lives.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Odessa American article on "Dan Gibbs" --   July 13, 2002  --   By Aaron Bensonhaver

    Of all the things a teacher can teach high school students, character, pride and perseverance were his focus.  If those led to winning, that was incidental.  Dan Gibbs was director of the Monahans "Mean Green" marching and concert band from 1958 to 1982. While he was director, the band was named the Texas Music Educators Association Honor Band for Class AAA in 1972 and 1976.

 Because of these and other accomplishments with the band, Gibbs will be inducted into the Texas Bandmasters Hall of Fame July 29 in San Antonio.  What makes Gibbs, 65, someone that people remember as well as their senior prom?  It's not his awards (which he has more of than he can count) or state championships (he has two).  It is his technique and attitude toward his students.

 "He taught us character, perseverance, to strive for excellence," said Lisa Watson Barr, class of 1976.

 "I didn't have all that much musical talent, but he did bring out the best in what I had," said Lou Johnston Hanna, class of 1964.

 "He allowed us to be the immature people we were and laughed with us," Hanna said.

 Former students agree that Gibbs touched their lives in ways they will never forget.   

 "From him I learned not only to march and play the trumpet, but the value of hard work, the necessity of doing one's best, the value of aiming high and the satisfaction of doing a job well done," Barr said.

 "He taught us all about life," said Jim Lambert, Monahans class of 1969.  Lambert holds a Ph.D. of Musical Arts in Percussion and is a professor of Percussive Arts at Cameron University in Lawton, Okla.

 Even Monahans students who were not in the band credit Gibbs with their strengths and outlook on life.  "Not only is Dan a marvelous educator, he is one fine individual that many MHS grads consider to be a true friend," said Al Hill, a 1964 MHS graduate who played on the football team.

 "He gave me something bigger than myself to hold on to at a time in my life when I really needed it," said Hanna, referring to the turbulent years of being a teenager.

 Barr recalled wanting to try out for the Texas Tech marching band when she was a freshman there.  She said when she told the band director she had been one of Gibbs' students, he simply told her to get a uniform because he knew she would be good and dedicated enough to play for him.

 “It was his love of music that inspired me to continue my life in music to the doctoral level," said Lambert.

 "Mr. Gibbs is the best of the best as a human being, and was one of the greatest influences in our lives," said Barr.

 "I feel I am truly blessed for having known Dan Gibbs," said Hill.

 "Dan Gibbs has my utmost respect," said Billy D. Hammitt, chief of police in Haltom City.  "Dan Gibbs, the man, personified integrity, honesty, duty and responsibility.  He taught those traits, and served as a living, daily example for his students," Hammitt said.

Hammitt graduated MHS in 1969.

 Gibbs and his bands were so revered within the state that they were invited in 1971 to play at halftime at the brand new Texas Stadium in Dallas for the first Dallas Cowboys home game.

 "That was really great.  It was the first Cowboys home game at Texas Stadium.  President Lyndon Johnson was there.  He even sent us an autographed picture when he got back to Washington D.C.," Gibbs said.

 Gibbs apparently passed on some of his musical magic to his son, Tony Gibbs.  The younger Gibbs has been named director of the Austin area Hays High School and has been director at Monahans just like dad.  He too led the band to be named TMEA Honor Band for Class AAA.  Dan and Tony Gibbs are the only father/son pair to both earn this distinction in the state.

 Above all else, Gibbs said he hoped that his students learned, "to do their very best.  Even if your best is mediocre, do it.  Don't settle for less then your absolute very best."

 The ceremony is scheduled at 3:30 p.m. July 29 at the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter, Salon B.

  Back to MWP-ISD Homepage