CONWAY — Russell Langston turned 80 a few weeks ago, and he’ll celebrate again Oct. 14 and 15 with a big crowd of his Conway High School band alumni.
Langston, who led the Wampus Cats Band program from 1964-79 before moving to the
University of Central Arkansas as director of bands, is the reason for the reunion.
“We have people coming from every part [of his time at CHS], from the first years all the way up through the end,” said Jackie Lamar, a CHS and UCA band alumna who is now professor of saxophone at UCA. “We’re hoping we have somewhere between 50 and 100. We’re planning on an 80th-birthday cake.”
The reunion also coincides with Conway High School’s homecoming.
“It is kind of scary, I tell you for sure, but I think it’s wonderful,” said Langston, who continues to work on the Faulkner County Fair Parade committee. In fact, he was at the 2016 parade recently lining up all the bands.
“I appreciate so much the work some of them have done.”
It’s been a labor of love.
“He was such a great teacher,” Lamar said. “He had such enthusiasm for band and music, and he certainly helped engage us. He made us want to love music as well.
“He was also a very serious task master. He would push you as hard as he felt like you were capable of, and he made you want to work harder and harder to be the best you could be. He inspired us to want to be the best we could be.”
Langston was born in northern Missouri and grew up in Mountain Home. He played trumpet, and after graduating from Mountain Home High School, he went to what was then Arkansas State Teachers College (now UCA), but after his freshman year, he returned to his alma mater.
“As a [high school] student, I had done a lot of the work of the director, who was in poor health, and after a year of college, they brought me back with an emergency 30-hour certificate,” Langston remembered. “I was 18 or 19, and that year, I learned more than the kids did.”
After one year back, he moved to Arkansas Tech University in Russellville to finish his degree. There he met his wife, Mary, a business education major. They moved to Brinkley for his first post-degree band job and were there a year before Mountain Home called again.
“The superintendent called me and told me they’d like to have me back,” Langston said. “I asked how much it would pay. He said, ‘How much are they paying you at Brinkley?’ I think it was $4,400 or some ridiculous figure, and he said, ‘We’ll pay you $4,600.’
“We had a little baby and were fed up with the mosquitoes, so we went.”
After four more years at MHHS, Langston’s friend Homer Brown called him. Brown, director of the Wampus Cat Band before going to Arkansas Tech to teach woodwinds and then to Rayville (Louisiana) High School, had by then returned to Conway to start a long career atop the UCA program.
“My father actively recruited him to come to Conway,” said Lamar, Brown’s daughter. “They had known each other through the Dixie Band Camp (housed at UCA). At Conway High, we’d had a steady stream of so-so band directors, and Dad said, ‘It’ll help my program (at UCA) if Conway High is better.
“So Mom, (sister) Kathy and I went to Mountain Home with Dad, who was also trying to recruit a student (to the UCA Band). We stayed in a cabin, and Mr. Langston and my dad went fishing on Lake Norfork. When the job came open (at CHS), my dad went to Russell and said, ‘I want you to do it.’”
Langston chuckled as he recalled that Brown was “pretty insistent.”
“He leaned pretty hard on the [Conway] superintendent,” Langston said. “[The superintendent] called me, and I told him I was not interested in moving; I had a job I liked. I was making maybe $5,800, and when he asked, ‘What would it take to move you?’ I said, ‘$6,500, $6,600.’ He said they couldn’t do that, so I told him, ‘Thank you very much’ and hung up.”
But the superintendent called back and eventually matched the number.
“I imagine Homer worried him to death,” Langston said, laughing.
Conway provided “a real opportunity — a larger school in a larger town with colleges.”
“It was the smart thing to do,” Langston said of the move. “The program was at rock bottom, so it had nowhere to go but up. It was a building opportunity.”
He said during his 15 years at CHS, the Wampus Cat Band was invited to and march in three Cotton Bowl parades, among numerous other state and regional honors.
How did he turn around the program?
“Numbers were quite a problem when we got there,” Langston said. “The first year, there were only 27 kids on paper, and some of them didn’t show up.”
When he was hired, he was supposed to work with the junior and senior high for just one year, “but it ended up 2 1/2,” he said. Marguerite Vann was the elementary music teacher. Getting a good base built in the lower grades eventually paid dividends at the high school level, he said.
After Langston and his wife got to Conway, Mary Langston, who had taught for a couple of years early in their marriage, spent 30 years as secretary at Ida Burns Elementary School.
Lamar was in the fifth grade when Langston took the Conway job, so in his second year, as a sixth-grader, she became part of his junior high band.
“We had to go to the junior high building at 7:30 a.m. [for band], and our parents had to take us,” she remembered. “A school bus would then take us to our respective elementary schools at 8:30.”
Langston got some help, she said, when he was able to hire Joe Gunn as junior high director. Others who worked under Langston as junior high directors were Ray Vardaman, now also in Texas, and George Sparks, now dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at James Madison University. All are expected to have some presence at the reunion.
At CHS, Langston taught his daughters, Jan and Amy. Jan, an all-state clarinet player, graduated in 1977; Amy, all-state on French horn, followed in ’79.
“He was not harder on me, but he was very careful not to show favoritism,” Jan Cunningham
said of her father. “The only thing I ever did to make him mad was, we lived in walking distance of the school, and I was never ready to leave for school when he was, so I walked and was always late. I would walk into the band room as the tardy bell rang.
“That was the only time I was ever afraid of him,” she added, chuckling.
After 15 years at CHS, Langston was again approached by Brown, who by then was retiring from UCA.
“He encouraged me to put my name in the hat, which I did,” Langston recalled. “I was about the third person to interview, and the first one — the one they really wanted — turned it down. The next one, they decided they didn’t want, so I got the job and was there 16 years.”
At UCA, he was able to teach his daughter Jan again. A few years later, Lamar joined him as a colleague after earning her doctorate and starting her college teaching career in Oklahoma.
Before retiring in 1996, Langston was able to influence another generation of musicians and educators.
“A lot of kids looked up to him as a gruff sort of father figure,” Cunningham said. “He was a tough teacher but a good teacher. He was very well respected.”
Lamar said Langston left a great legacy of music teachers.
So how would Langston compare teaching in high school with college?
“They both have pluses and minuses,” he said. “In high school, you get to know your kids really, really well. In college, not so much, but it’s still pleasant and a nice experience.
“But in high school, you have a closer bond with the kids.”
All these years later, that still rings true.