Two strangers sent him to college. 30 years later, their gift marches on

Band director Ernest Stackhouse tries to draw it out of his students. He preaches to them ways to become more than they may appear, more than they might imagine ever being: powerful instruments uniting, marching as one.

In his own life, other people, including two strangers, intervened early on and gifted him with an ethos of self-worth that strides in lockstep with greater good. Now he works to pass it along.

For the moment, however, the Marching Cobras — two dozen strong when everyone shows up, and one of the tiniest high school bands around — blare dissonance. They are butchering an arrangement of singer Johnny Gill’s 1990 hit “Rub You the Right Way,” a tune they’ll feature in this football season’s halftime shows.

“I said be big,” Stackhouse says. “Not loud and nasty. The secret to sounding like you’re a big band is not by blowing louder.”

The trick, Stackhouse says, is getting on and off notes together.

“Working,” he says, “in unison.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

‘Never give up’

Stackhouse believes the band offers students structure, a family environment, an infusion of self esteem and teamwork skills.

“By them being a part of my band program, they are held to a higher standard as far as their academics and their behavior in school,” he says. “I don’t allow them to not do well in school and still be a member of the band. I don’t allow them to be discipline issues and then travel with us. So they know if they want to get on the bus on Friday night, they’ve got to behave all week long.”

On occasion, band parents, when their children aren’t minding at home, call and ask Stackhouse to speak sense into them.

“These kids know that I care about them and they know that I’m going to be here for them,” he says. “They trust me. They listen.”

Stackhouse’s students know some of his backstory.

“He lets us know he didn’t come from a lot,” says sophomore trumpeter Trinity Coley, a drum major.

“I can’t speak for everybody, but it makes me work a little harder,” she says. “Because I’m kind of like that too.”

When Stackhouse was young, his parents split up. His dad was a brick mason and a truck driver. His mother was a hotel housekeeper. He and his younger brother and sister lived with her in what he remembers as “a very dangerous area.”

Stackhouse became an Eagle Scout. Instead of turning to mischief in the Westside Apartments of Georgetown, South Carolina, he led his school’s Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.

His mother’s advice echoes still: “Listen to your teachers, work hard and never give up.”

Throughout his youth, his family had no car. He and his siblings walked everywhere. His mother took a cab to the supermarket. His family was on welfare. Their apartment had no telephone. It wasn’t uncommon for him and his brother and sister to arrive home and find the electricity cut off because the bill hadn’t been paid. More often, there would be little to eat. They did what they could to stave off hunger until the next day’s school lunch. A lot of times, dinner was a pot of rice mixed with ketchup.

One day when Stackhouse was in middle school and playing outside his apartment with friends, they heard gunfire. A man lay bleeding. “I’ll never forget standing there,” he says, “looking at a guy dead on the sidewalk.”

When Stackhouse was 17, an acquaintance of his mother’s assaulted her during a fight in their apartment. The guy had been there drinking. Stackhouse shoved the man out the door. He remembers a neighbor grabbing a crutch and smacking the man in the head so hard it knocked out an eye.

In 1995, late in his senior year of high school, Stackhouse’s future hung in the balance: college on a partial band scholarship with the Marching 101 at South Carolina State University, maybe; or the Army, the sure-fire career path?

He passed on the latter but had no clue how he would be able to afford college.

By chance, a newspaper article changed everything.

‘The toilet bowl’

At times, it is as if Stackhouse, who is 47, bald and built like a sousaphone, is willing his Marching Cobras to harmony.

“You guys have got to be a band first,” he tells them during an early practice session. “Birds fly. Fish swim. Bands play.”

To keep the beat, he clacks metal drumsticks. His ears detect the slightest of instrumental shrieks. He coaches through them. Sometimes gently. Sometimes not.

During a July rehearsal of “I’m So Glad (Jesus Lifted Me),” a gospel piece the band has fashioned into a sing-songy school anthem, Stackhouse tells the trumpets, “Please put some air in the instruments. Like a car needs gas, a horn needs air.”

At another preseason practice, when other horns bleat the 1978 disco hit “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” Stackhouse chides the group: “Articulation is trash. Our volume level sucks. This is the introduction! You’ve got to hold the audience’s attention. They saw you marching out. They’re like, ‘Oh, snap! OK!’ And then you’re all, ‘Blah-bluh-bleh.’ When you’re playing, ‘Blah-bluh-bleh,’ that’s not exciting. That’s elevator music. You’ve got to jam.”

Practice resumes but there’s an errant shrill. Stackhouse makes the band play it again. There’s another screech.

“A piccolo player,” Stackhouse says. “One of y’all is missing the pitch. Piccolos, they can make you or break you. You get four of them and you can hear them over a 300-piece band. We’ve got two. You can make us or break us. Right now, you’re breaking us.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Stackhouse knows these midsummer classroom sessions will carry the band only so far toward musicianship, and that marked improvement might take a year or two. It is something he plans for.

Some band members are middle schoolers. A trombonist named Kinsley Kellem is a seventh-grader. She’s 12. Her instrument is taller than she is. Yet Stackhouse welcomes her and others her age. They learn to play and at the same time boost the band’s numbers and, perhaps as importantly, amplify its sound. Considering the school’s enrollment —223 students in ninth through 12th grades — there is no other way to build a band in such a pint-sized place.

Twiggs County straddles I-16 above the Ocmulgee River. It lies in what is technically the geographic center of the state. It has 7,691 residents and nary a red light. It is known for kaolin and timber. Less than 7% of its population graduated from college.

Stackhouse and his wife, a human resources executive for a national sporting goods chain’s massive warehouse here, live in neighboring Houston County.

Stackhouse is the mid-1990s product of a high school band roughly the same size. He was raised in coastal South Carolina. Stackhouse played the tuba because it was the one instrument his school provided for free.

It was white and fat, and every day he lugged it half a mile home to the housing projects.

His buddies poked fun at his jumbo, fiberglass horn.

They dubbed it “the toilet bowl.”

The thing was so loud he couldn’t practice indoors. So he stood in an open field and honked away daily, for weeks, months.

After a while, the teasing stopped. Folks within earshot grew to appreciate the bass he pumped.

To his surprise, he realized he was good at it.

“I mean really good,” he would say.

Once, when he overslept and was late for a symphonic band appearance, his director, Tyrone Singleton, with the entire band in tow, guided a bus to an embarrassed Stackhouse’s apartment and rousted him.

Singleton, a father figure to Stackhouse who propelled him toward college and arranged his audition at South Carolina State, wasn’t about to leave his star tuba player behind.

Today, Singleton, 66, says Stackhouse “didn’t have much, but he used as much as he could.” He says his former student paid attention. “I just gave him direction.”

Speaking of Singleton’s influence, Stackhouse says, “When you see me in front of my band, you see Mr. Singleton. I wanted to be just like him.”

‘They need to think’

The newspaper article about Stackhouse ran on the front page of the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, a city just up the shore from his hometown.

It was published the morning of March 20, 1995, 22 days before Stackhouse’s 18th birthday.

He was the lead item that day, color photo and all, rifle in hand, commanding the Georgetown High drill team. The write-up was part of an occasional feature about unsung locals titled “Making a Difference.”

The article told how he was from the projects, how he had “witnessed violence and drug dealing” and was carving a future for himself as a band director.

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

Stackhouse had by then decided not to join the Army. It was band or bust.

The newspaper piece had gone on to note that Stackhouse was a B student and that he spoke to elementary school students about staying the course. It described him as a young role model “achieving success.” The story quoted him on what it took to attain that while resisting the tug of the streets.

“Everybody wants to be tough,” he’d said. “They need to think about what’s behind it all. They need to think farther.”

A retired couple in a nearby town read the paper that day.

They did not know Stackhouse. Or that his acceptance at South Carolina State, mentioned in the article, had come with only a partial scholarship. Ronald and Dorothy Chappell more or less decided on the spot, as their daughter Susie Swatzel recalls, “We’re gonna send this guy to college.”

The Chappells called his school. Weeks passed before his principal, Richard Summey, caught wind of the offer. Summey informed Stackhouse and his mother, Chris Ann.

“No one thought it was real,” Stackhouse says.

Summey, who died in April at age 81, drove the mother and son to the oceanside town of Murrells Inlet to meet the Chappells.

Ronald, a Korean War veteran and ham radio buff, had worked for the FAA. Dorothy was an elementary school teacher, a gardener, a soup kitchen volunteer.

“They said they wanted to help me,” Stackhouse recalls.

He and his mother accepted the offer to pay the balance of his tuition and his room and board, which Stackhouse now figures amounted to at least $25,000.

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

The Chappells set up his first bank account. Every so often, they made deposits. They covered his living expenses, too, anything so Stackhouse could focus on music and not worry with part-time jobs.

Aside from paying for the education of their own children, two sons and a daughter, they never sent anyone else to college. Ronald died at age 75 in 2007. Dorothy died 13 years later. She was 90.

Their daughter recalls how Ronald collected jars of quarters. He gave them to Stackhouse from time to time.

“He said it was for if Ernest needed to wash his clothes or take a girl out for a hamburger,” Swatzel, 64, says.

At the beginning of his freshman year, the Chappells drove him to college in Orangeburg.

“They were,” he says, “my lifeline.”

From time to time, Stackhouse visited his benefactors. They treated him like a son. He felt like one.

“My mom and dad genuinely did love him,” Swatzel says. “They thought the world of him. Please tell him that he did them proud.”

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

‘A miraculous process’

At least five of Stackhouse’s former students are now band directors.

One now leads the 180-strong Marching Falcons of Darlington High in South Carolina, where Stackhouse began his own directing career.

Around 2007, Brendan L. Johnson had no plans to go to college. He assumed he’d work in a factory or join the armed forces. Stackhouse led him to a music scholarship. Johnson dreamed of being a drummer. His family couldn’t afford to rent a drum kit. Instead he took up the tuba. It was free. And Stackhouse taught him to play.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

“Mr. Stackhouse has a gift for making people feel valued,” says Johnson, 33. “That gift of bringing that thing out of you that you didn’t know you had.”

Stackhouse, a father of three, realized he had found his calling when he learned that Johnson graduated college and became a band director.

“That sealed the deal,” Stackhouse says. “I get to see what they become when they stick with it and they keep climbing. That is a miraculous process. To see that on a yearly basis, that’s like a paycheck.”

His drum major last season, trumpeter Cameron Pearson, is now a freshman at Georgia Tech, the first student from Twiggs County admitted there this century.

“Mr. Stackhouse wants you to focus on harder pieces to build you up as a great musician,” says Pearson, 18, an electrical engineering major who led last year’s concert band at Twiggs County to a superior rating. “In band, you’ve really got to strive for greatness.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

When Stackhouse speaks of “this band thing,” as he likes to call it, he isn’t talking about sound, but rather a medley of backgrounds, where marchers from all walks get mixed.

“I get the really, really smart kids and kids that are just struggling to get by,” Stackhouse says. “But by them being in this environment with these really, really smart kids and learning about hard work and teamwork and sacrifice and perseverance, they end up being good kids, good students.”

Twiggs County principal Risé Jenkins says Stackhouse “refines the talent that’s already in students.”

Teachers take an annual bus tour of the area. Some of the scenes of ramshackle houses are wrenching.

“That changes everybody,” Stackhouse says. “Once you see what (students) have got to go home to, the shacks, shotgun houses, dirt in the yard. It’s horrible. You kind of look at it differently when you’re giving those assignments. And you’re expecting them to do this assignment tonight? … Some don’t have running water.”

It reminds him of his own childhood.

As a teacher, he once went to a student’s house to meet a mother about the child’s disciplinary problems in class.

The family lived in a single room with a mattress on the floor, clothes strewn.

“I was so shook by what I saw that I couldn’t talk to her about the discipline,” Stackhouse says. “I actually gave them some money before I left.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Finding their boom

On a mid-August Friday evening, a few hours before the season’s first football first game, the Marching Cobras are in the band room warming up.

They belt out renditions of “Boogie Oogie Oogie” with enough oomph to rattle the windows. They’re ready. It has taken a month. Though one of their two tuba players has left to help anchor the football team’s offensive line, the Marching Cobras have found their boom.

Even so, there is time for one more lesson.

Someone has left a uniform jacket crumpled on the floor.

The black-and-gold topcoat, a Twiggs trademark, and others exactly like it have boogied beneath stadium lights for almost a generation.

Stackhouse sees the wadded jacket in a heap and is incensed.

The outfits cost upward of $500 apiece.

Stackhouse can’t mask his dismay.

He tells the band, “You probably will not wear something this expensive until well into adulthood.”

He says he doesn’t own clothing worth that much.

“That’s a Gucci!” he says.

The uniforms were donated more than a decade ago when Stackhouse first revived the band in his early days at the school, back when he was hired to bring back the musical arts. At the time, the only electives offered were gym and computer lab.

Stackhouse would go to basketball games and pass an old fur Busby hat to raise all the loose change he could in hopes of funding new threads for his band. Somehow word got out that he was miles short of the goal and, voilà, a single donor wrote a check for $70,000.

The donor was anonymous. To this day, Stackhouse has no idea who it was.

The students in the band room on this evening know little of that. And Stackhouse doesn’t inform them.

What he imparts is more important: To make the most of what you’re given.

And this, which is something he knows more than a little about: appreciation.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.