Bill Havers And the Beaver Boys
By James Donahue
I was hanging around with friends in the hall at Harbor Beach High School one noon lunch hour when there suddenly came the sound of live piano music from one of the classrooms. It was the amazingly wonderful boogie sound; something I doubt if I had heard before. Everybody rushed to the room and there, seated at an upright piano, sat a scrawny little fellow with thick glasses, his body bent over the keyboard and his fingers dancing over those keys. That was the day I met Bill Havers, a man who was going to have a major impact on my life.
Bill was the son of William and Blanche Havers, the owners and operators of the IGA grocery in Harbor Beach. I never learned where or how he learned to play, or whether his talents just came naturally, but Bill, at least to my ears, was an accomplished musician while still in high school. After he played the boogie, he launched into a piano rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, playing it totally from memory. Not only that, but once he had an audience, Bill unexpectedly dropped to the floor, crawled under the front of the piano, and then started playing with his hands crossed, reaching over the keyboard from underneath. We had never seen anything like it.
I think the noon concerts continued for a while after that, but eventually the school administration decided it was inappropriate for students to be gathering in a room to hear boogie on a piano, and began locking the door. By then, however, I was hooked on a whole new kind of music and I had a new and interesting friendship.
It was at about that time that we were discovering Country Western music on our car radios. We found that after the sun went down at night, we could tune into WCKY Radio in Cincinnati, Ohio, and catch the sounds of Hank Williams, Ernest Tubbs, and all of the other early greats hanging around Nashville. And then, one magic night, we heard Elvis Presley for the first time. He was singing “Heartbreak Hotel.” We fell instantly in love with Rock and Roll. It was a great time to be a teenager in America! And the music was so much a genre of our time; it followed us everywhere.
I think I made friends with Bill right away after that day at the school. I remember going to his house and drinking coffee in the kitchen with his parents. They served Yuban, which Bill assured me was the finest coffee available on the market. I learned that Bill also played just about every stringed instrument there was. He had a guitar, a banjo and ukulele and, although he was left handed and had to string the instruments in a special way to meet his needs, he was constantly making music. I remember that he especially admired the musicians in Spike Jones’ band for their amazing abilities to clown around and do it with musical skill. For example, Jones had a tuba player that recorded “Flight of the Bumblebee” and he never missed a note.
We both enrolled at Central Michigan University after graduation from high school. Strangely, I arrived at college confused about my career goal. While it would have been natural for me to go into journalism, my father, a research chemist by trade, discouraged this. He said there would be no money in that field, and that I would be better off studying science. He believed success was measured by the amount of money a person could earn and accumulate. For a brief time I took his advice, set a course in science, and after getting through the basic freshman classes, saw a counselor and got set up on a program to teach biology and mathematics. That was a terrible mistake. If I hadn’t acquired good grades in my freshman year, I might have flunked out of school in a single semester.
I was living off campus that second year, with about 13 men in a three-story house owned by Peter and Grace Mogg. We jokingly called it Mogg Hall. My roommate was Phil Benson, a senior ROTC Major, who was clearly heading for Vietnam as a second lieutenant in the Army after graduation. Phil was married, with a wife living in his home town, so he kept his nose in the books. I also spent hours in my books at first, struggling with advanced trigonometry, slide rule and human anatomy. Luckily I had, on pure impulse, enrolled in an English Literature class, a sociology class and a beginning class in journalism that semester. Those three courses saved me. I didn’t do well in the English class because it required volumes of reading, and the math assignments took all of my spare time. But I usually always aced the sociology classes because I enjoyed the study of human behavior and the journalism class proved my salvation. I was back in a realm where I truly belonged.
I worked that semester washing dishes for Barnes Hall, a men’s dormitory, and a student union that was attached to the same building. I discovered that Bill Havers was living in Barnes Hall, and one day I visited his room. He was more than glad to see me. He was studying music and introduced me to some of his musical friends. I remember Tom Strof, a short blond-haired muscular man who shocked us all by climbing the outside wall of Barnes to the second floor where Bill lived, and came in through the window. It turned out Tom could climb just about anything. Tom also played a very good trombone. Also there was Gary Cardin, a lean, somewhat nice appearing man with ultra thick glasses, who was a master at the trumpet. Bill was, at the time, organizing a Dixieland band and they had picked the name Beaver Boys. Even though I had no instrument and was nothing more than a drummer, and probably a poor one at that, Bill wanted me in the group. Thus I was initiated into the mock fraternal order of the Beaver Boys of Central Michigan University.
We did a lot of drinking together that winter, and that had an impact on my studies as well. One day I was confiding in Bill about my struggles with math and science, and explained how I really loved journalism. Bill scolded me for listening to my father. “Don’t try to be a hero,” he said. “Go back next term and take all English and Journalism classes. Take the easy stuff and get your grades back up.” I followed his advice, and by the end of my sophomore year, I was back in good scholastic standing.
When we entered that spring term, the room across the hall at Moggs opened up and Bill and I decided to move in together. Thus we became roommates and part of the Mogg Hall legend at that school. By then the Beaver Boys Dixieland Band was reality, and from there was born my love of Dixieland music. Bill switched between piano and banjo, Sroff played trombone, Cardin on trumpet. They had a bass player and drummer, and sometimes got a clarinet player to sit in. But these people came and went and I do not recall their names.
Thus began a new era of pure monkey business the likes of which one might never believe could have gone on among students of an academic institution such as ours.
By James Donahue
I was hanging around with friends in the hall at Harbor Beach High School one noon lunch hour when there suddenly came the sound of live piano music from one of the classrooms. It was the amazingly wonderful boogie sound; something I doubt if I had heard before. Everybody rushed to the room and there, seated at an upright piano, sat a scrawny little fellow with thick glasses, his body bent over the keyboard and his fingers dancing over those keys. That was the day I met Bill Havers, a man who was going to have a major impact on my life.
Bill was the son of William and Blanche Havers, the owners and operators of the IGA grocery in Harbor Beach. I never learned where or how he learned to play, or whether his talents just came naturally, but Bill, at least to my ears, was an accomplished musician while still in high school. After he played the boogie, he launched into a piano rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, playing it totally from memory. Not only that, but once he had an audience, Bill unexpectedly dropped to the floor, crawled under the front of the piano, and then started playing with his hands crossed, reaching over the keyboard from underneath. We had never seen anything like it.
I think the noon concerts continued for a while after that, but eventually the school administration decided it was inappropriate for students to be gathering in a room to hear boogie on a piano, and began locking the door. By then, however, I was hooked on a whole new kind of music and I had a new and interesting friendship.
It was at about that time that we were discovering Country Western music on our car radios. We found that after the sun went down at night, we could tune into WCKY Radio in Cincinnati, Ohio, and catch the sounds of Hank Williams, Ernest Tubbs, and all of the other early greats hanging around Nashville. And then, one magic night, we heard Elvis Presley for the first time. He was singing “Heartbreak Hotel.” We fell instantly in love with Rock and Roll. It was a great time to be a teenager in America! And the music was so much a genre of our time; it followed us everywhere.
I think I made friends with Bill right away after that day at the school. I remember going to his house and drinking coffee in the kitchen with his parents. They served Yuban, which Bill assured me was the finest coffee available on the market. I learned that Bill also played just about every stringed instrument there was. He had a guitar, a banjo and ukulele and, although he was left handed and had to string the instruments in a special way to meet his needs, he was constantly making music. I remember that he especially admired the musicians in Spike Jones’ band for their amazing abilities to clown around and do it with musical skill. For example, Jones had a tuba player that recorded “Flight of the Bumblebee” and he never missed a note.
We both enrolled at Central Michigan University after graduation from high school. Strangely, I arrived at college confused about my career goal. While it would have been natural for me to go into journalism, my father, a research chemist by trade, discouraged this. He said there would be no money in that field, and that I would be better off studying science. He believed success was measured by the amount of money a person could earn and accumulate. For a brief time I took his advice, set a course in science, and after getting through the basic freshman classes, saw a counselor and got set up on a program to teach biology and mathematics. That was a terrible mistake. If I hadn’t acquired good grades in my freshman year, I might have flunked out of school in a single semester.
I was living off campus that second year, with about 13 men in a three-story house owned by Peter and Grace Mogg. We jokingly called it Mogg Hall. My roommate was Phil Benson, a senior ROTC Major, who was clearly heading for Vietnam as a second lieutenant in the Army after graduation. Phil was married, with a wife living in his home town, so he kept his nose in the books. I also spent hours in my books at first, struggling with advanced trigonometry, slide rule and human anatomy. Luckily I had, on pure impulse, enrolled in an English Literature class, a sociology class and a beginning class in journalism that semester. Those three courses saved me. I didn’t do well in the English class because it required volumes of reading, and the math assignments took all of my spare time. But I usually always aced the sociology classes because I enjoyed the study of human behavior and the journalism class proved my salvation. I was back in a realm where I truly belonged.
I worked that semester washing dishes for Barnes Hall, a men’s dormitory, and a student union that was attached to the same building. I discovered that Bill Havers was living in Barnes Hall, and one day I visited his room. He was more than glad to see me. He was studying music and introduced me to some of his musical friends. I remember Tom Strof, a short blond-haired muscular man who shocked us all by climbing the outside wall of Barnes to the second floor where Bill lived, and came in through the window. It turned out Tom could climb just about anything. Tom also played a very good trombone. Also there was Gary Cardin, a lean, somewhat nice appearing man with ultra thick glasses, who was a master at the trumpet. Bill was, at the time, organizing a Dixieland band and they had picked the name Beaver Boys. Even though I had no instrument and was nothing more than a drummer, and probably a poor one at that, Bill wanted me in the group. Thus I was initiated into the mock fraternal order of the Beaver Boys of Central Michigan University.
We did a lot of drinking together that winter, and that had an impact on my studies as well. One day I was confiding in Bill about my struggles with math and science, and explained how I really loved journalism. Bill scolded me for listening to my father. “Don’t try to be a hero,” he said. “Go back next term and take all English and Journalism classes. Take the easy stuff and get your grades back up.” I followed his advice, and by the end of my sophomore year, I was back in good scholastic standing.
When we entered that spring term, the room across the hall at Moggs opened up and Bill and I decided to move in together. Thus we became roommates and part of the Mogg Hall legend at that school. By then the Beaver Boys Dixieland Band was reality, and from there was born my love of Dixieland music. Bill switched between piano and banjo, Sroff played trombone, Cardin on trumpet. They had a bass player and drummer, and sometimes got a clarinet player to sit in. But these people came and went and I do not recall their names.
Thus began a new era of pure monkey business the likes of which one might never believe could have gone on among students of an academic institution such as ours.