US Army
During World War II, Stewart Fischer was drafted and served three years in the U.S. Army where he worked his way up to the Army Service Forces Bands. He entered the Army at Camp Barkley, Texas, just outside of Abilene, where, after basic training, he chose to enroll in cooks-and-baker school. While working for a company kitchen, Fischer began sitting in, both on saxophone and trumpet, with the local Medical Replacement Training Center Band. From there, the Army transferred him from the kitchen to the band. It was at this time that he formed a lifelong friendship with jazz saxophone/clarinetist Al Drootin (b. 1916) from Boston. Eventually, a general, on the recommendation of a warrant officer who headed an Army band at Camp Reynolds, Pennsylvania, pulled Fischer from a pending overseas transfer and, instead, sent him to Camp Lee, Virginia, home of the band training unit for the Armed Forces.
Fischer spent six months at Fort Lee where instructors such as Gil Evans and Sanford ("Sandy") J. Siegelstein (b. 1919) were assigned. There were 250 musicians there, not just American, but from the Allied forces, too. Although Fischer took an arranging course taught by Gil Evans — who had been drafted — he already knew and was practicing what Gil was teaching.
Fischer spent time playing with an all-black military big band in Pennsylvania. When the Army still segregated soldiers by race, music helped Fischer bridge the gap.
Read more about this topic: Stewart "Dirk" Fischer
Famous quotes containing the word army:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“Why not draft executive and management brains to prepare and produce the equipment the $21-a-month draftee must use and forget this dollar-a-year tommyrot? Would we send an army into the field under a dollar-a-year General who had to be home Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays?”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)