Karl King - Life After Circus Bands

Life After Circus Bands

King hoped to join John Philip Sousa at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station during World War I. With no openings on his staff at the time, Sousa suggested King apply to the army as bandmaster at Camp Grant. The war ended on his reporting date so King did not serve on active duty.

King remained in Canton to as director of the local band. He began a music publishing business, the K.L. King Music House in 1919, the same year his only child Karl L. King, Jr. was born. The first publication of his new music company was “Broadway One-Step”.

After a year in Canton where he directed the Grand Army Band (1919) King settled down in Fort Dodge, Iowa. This was in 1920 (age 29) and for the next fifty-one years he conducted the Fort Dodge Municipal Band, which featured future American Bandmasters Association president Joseph Hermann on clarinet. The band became known as King’s Band.

King was instrumental in the passage of the Iowa Band Law in 1921, which allowed cities to levy a local tax for maintenance of a band. He commemorated this with one of his marches, “Iowa Band Law”. In 1960, King would direct “Iowa Band Law” with the largest mass band ever assembled: 188 high school bands and nearly 13,000 musicians at a nationally televised University of Michigan football game.

He was given a testimonial dinner for 250 people in 1951 at the age of 59 where band world luminaries including Glenn Cliffe Bainum, Albert Austin Harding, Paul V. Yoder, and William H. Santelmann attended (as well as William S. Beardsley, the governor of Iowa).

Karl King died on March 31, 1971 of acute diverticulitis at age 80 in a Fort Dodge, Iowa hospital. He and his wife Ruth I. (Lovett) King (June 10, 1898-July 4, 1988) are buried at North Lawn Cemetery. Their only son Karl L. King, Jr. was born in 1919 and died November 19, 1987.

A physical description of Karl King in the 1951 Who’s Who in Music: brown eyes, brown hair, 6’1” in height, 200 pounds.