Children reunited woman, long-lost sax
Published: January 18, 2006
Just after the beginning of the year, Margaret Katter appeared at a practice session for the New Horizons Band, sat down and once again tried her hand at playing the saxophone.
The band is designed for seniors who always wanted to learn to play a musical instrument, or who played once, but gave it up and want to play again.
By the end of the session, Katter had changed her mind. Yes, she’d like to play the sax – again – but it would take a lot of time to get her chops back in shape, as she put it, and she didn’t have the time right now. So she left. Maybe she’d be back someday.
The real story, though, isn’t necessarily Katter’s desire to play again, but the story of her saxophone and how it changed her life.
Katter was born in Lynnville, one of those tiny dots of a town in Warrick County in the hilly coal country on the south edge of Indiana. Her father was a coal miner who was always either saving his money in preparation for the next coal strike or trying to recover from the last strike, Katter said. Money was tight.
But Katter lived a decent life, going to school and taking piano lessons.
As a pianist, though, it seems Katter was dreadful, and her piano teacher told her as much. Why don’t you try the sax, she suggested. She had one she could lend her.
Katter loved it.
Eventually, Katter’s parents made a fateful decision. They would buy Katter her own sax. So one day in 1952, they took a trip to the big city, to Evansville, went to a music shop and picked one out, a new Selmer alto sax. She was only in seventh grade, so she didn’t realize it at the time, but buying that sax was a major sacrifice by her parents.
Katter learned to play the sax well. She wasn’t in a marching band. Her school didn’t have one. It didn’t have a football team, either. But at basketball games the small school band would set up on the stage and play at halftime.
There were music contests, and Katter would travel to bigger cities, such as Booneville, to compete. She accumulated a few medals she won in competitions, playing solos and in small ensembles.
Her saxophone, though, really began to open doors when it brought her to Indiana University for band day. High school bands would go the school, and one member of the Marching Hundred, IU’s marching band, was assigned to escort each band. It was Katter’s first experience out of her little coal town, her first experience with a university, she said, and it was a stunning experience. Katter said it made her realize there was more out there in the world than she ever realized, more than just Lynnville, “and I wanted some of that.”
Katter would go to college. Her father wanted her to go to a college in Evansville, but Katter wanted to go to Purdue. Her father finally relented, and with scholarships, Katter said, Purdue proved to be less expensive. When she left for school, though, not realizing there would be plenty of opportunities to use her saxophone, she left the instrument at home.
Scarcely three months after she left for Purdue, Katter came home for Thanksgiving, and immediately went for her sax, intending to bring it back to school. But it was gone. Her parents had sold it for groceries. Katter said nothing. It must have been hard for them to have to sell it, she said.
But Lynnville is a small town. Nothing ever leaves a town like that, Katter said. Things just circulate through the town, from one person to another.
Katter graduated and became a home economics teacher. She got a master’s degree in economics and management and later took administrative courses, eventually becoming a principal in Fort Wayne.
Whenever she returned to Lynnville to visit, though, people she knew would let her know into whose hands her old saxophone had most recently passed.
Then decades after Katter’s sax disappeared, Katter’s children went on a hunt for the instrument – and they found it, but the person who owned it didn’t want to sell. So they reached a deal. We’ll get you another sax. Let us have that one.
It took a year of searching garage sales, but Katter’s children found another sax, and a deal was finally struck. Katter’s original sax was sent to the factory for refurbishing, and one Christmas, her kids pulled the spiffed up old horn out of the closet, completely repaired except for a small dent that Katter was responsible for, a dent that was preserved just for her.
That was some time ago, though. It wasn’t until recently that Katter, busy as a mother and grandmother and then school principal, tried to take up playing again – in the New Horizons band – and decided it would still have to wait a little longer.
For now, her grandson plays that sax. He’s pretty good. He keeps it at home, though. In school, he plays what Katter calls a beater.
Katter might not be playing it. But at least she can hear it now, when her grandson plays.
And she’s glad to have it back, nearly 40 years after it slipped away.
“So much of who I became is wrapped up in that sax,” Katter said. In Lynnville, the only opportunities were working in a gas station or a grocery or a tavern or marrying a miner. In the 1950s in Lynnville, most girls had their graduation gowns, wedding gowns and maternity clothes hanging in the closet at the same time, she said. The people, like most things, never left Lynnville either.
That old saxophone made the difference for her. It represents both sacrifice and the opportunity that if offered, opening doors and introducing her to life in other places and a different life for herself.
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