On Monday, I attended the Moorhead High School senior honors concert. The administration at the high school should be extremely proud of their music faculty and students.
I’ve been to many nice concerts where the students performed well — but Monday’s was a night to remember. I cannot aptly describe the interaction between the students, their teachers and the audience. The music was exceptional and the delivery even more exceptional. The men and women in the various groups delivered with the energy and focus of true professionals.
The Concert Choir, Chorale, Vocal Jazz, Combined Men and Combined Women, coupled with the Senior Class and Combined Choirs put on a show that would be the envy of Broadway!
You can’t fake that caliber of enthusiasm, love of music and pure enjoyment. The show was pure, awesome entertainment, and the friendship within the groups was self-evident.
While it’s true the audience consisted of parents, grandparents, siblings and friends, I daresay that anyone attending that concert would have come away humming, doing a little jig, being thankful for the students and their interactions, and grateful for this magical time free of the political discourse that has been bothering many of us.
Watch for next year’s concert, and make plans to attend. It’s free. You will not be disappointed.
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Moorhead also has been favored with an exceptional police chief in David Ebinger, who has announced his pending retirement this summer after 40 years of dedicated service to law enforcement. He came to Moorhead from Little Rock, Ark. Arkansas’s loss was certainly Moorhead’s gain. He has served with distinction and set an example anyone in enforcement would be proud of.
A certain federal judge named Ronald N. Davies spent a month in Arkansas well before Chief Ebinger was a lawman there, and I sure hope it made the chief’s job easier when he subsequently joined the city’s force.
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Minnesota State University Moorhead’s Center for the Arts is hosting an exhibition called “Bearing Witness” through June 29. It’s a mix of photographs provided by the Three Musketeers of Photojournalism at The Forum. Bruce Crummy, Dave Wallis and Colburn Hvidston III are providing news photos that span the time from the early 1960s through October 2017, when the last of them, young Wallis, retired.
I know each of these men well. They are not only true journalists but very nice men. They have total recall of their work.
I went through grade school and two years of high school with Colburn, fondly known as CH-Three, before my family departed to Fargo when my dad was named judge. That darn Hvidston has one memory burned into his brain that he reminds me of every time we meet, which is often, since we’re both now in Fargo.
It seems I took a lovely gal named Jackie Brooks to homecoming at St. James High School in Grand Forks in 1954. We were freshman and, as Colburn reminds me, my brother, Tim, drove us to and from the dance because I didn’t have a driver’s license of my own.
Well, the beautiful Jackie Brooks is now Mrs. Colburn Hvidston III; with this article, I’m trying to convince him that I know I took her to the dance. Ye gods! It’s 2018, and he still bugs me about that! Someday I’ll write a column about what an adventurer and entrepreneur he was back in high school … but that’s for another day.
When we moved to Fargo, friends had a going-away party for me at the Brooks family’s home. I jumped the fence to get in and was met by their Doberman pinscher, which promptly bit me in the a*s , ripping my pants and eating my brand-new billfold. Fortunately, it was empty. Now, if CH-Three would remember that, he’d know he had his revenge long ago. Stay tuned. Amen.
