Ferris Clarinetist Wins Spot With Marine Band

Nathan Smith, 18, is off to Marine boot camp in August.

But his worst fear doesn’t involve draconian drill sergeants or dry rations. No, Smith is afraid he’ll lose his lips.

Smith, a senior at Ferris High School, is a crack clarinet player. And when he auditioned for the Marine Corps band representative in January, he earned a perfect score - which is unheard of.

But about those lips.

“There will be no time to practice my clarinet in boot camp,” Smith said, sighing.

Camp runs from Aug. 4 to Thanksgiving, nearly four months.

“If you don’t play for a long time, your lips just die,” Smith explained.

Smith is the first clarinet player in the state to be directly accepted into the Marine Corps’ 1st Division Band, the No. 1-ranking band of the corps’ 14 bands.

Smith has been playing clarinet for eight years, practicing five hours a day. Every day, it’s one hour practicing scales; one hour, etudes; one hour sight reading; one to two hours, solo performance.

But all that practice and talent has paid off in a big way.

“Nathan is a very, very talented clarinetist, has worked hard and deserved what he’s achieved,” said Dave Weatherred, band director at Ferris.

This year, 25 students in the Spokane area auditioned for a spot in one of the Marine Corps’ bands, but only Smith was chosen.

At 18, Smith is also one of the youngest clarinet players to earn a spot in the 1st Division band. The band plays at presidential and congressional functions in the nation’s capital.

“I’m the first one to fill my spot in my age group in the past 20 years,” Smith said.

Smith competed against a 20-year-old and a 23-year-old clarinet player for the 1st Division position.

Smith’s mother, Dawn, is a cellist and teaches at Hutton Elementary School, and his father, Wayne, plays cello with the Spokane Symphony.

After boot camp at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, Smith will take 10 days off for recovery and enter the armed forces’ prestigious music college in Norfolk, Va., where all branches of the military train their musicians.

Someday Smith would like to play for the Boston Pops, the St. Louis Symphony or the New York Philharmonic.

After graduation from Ferris, Smith will spend part of the summer gearing up for boot camp and two weeks in July helping budding musicians from middle school for two weeks in July at Ross Point Music Camp in Idaho.

Outstanding sophomores chosen

Andrew Rigsby from Ferris High School and Lindsay Lyman from Lewis and Clark High School have been selected by the Hugh O’Brian Youth Foundation as their high school’s outstanding sophomore.

The foundation recognizes outstanding 10th-grade leaders.

The students were chosen by their high school sophomore counselors. The award recipient is picked according to leadership abilities, grades and school activities.

Rigsby and Lyman will join 87 other sophomores from high schools throughout Eastern and Central Washington as ambassadors to the Eastern Washington Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Seminar to be held June 5-8 at Gonzaga University.

Ambassadors will participate in a four-day leadership and business seminar where they will meet with more than 40 state and local leaders, and volunteers from business, education and government.

ROTC scholarships awarded

Three students from Medical Lake High School won four-year college Air Force ROTC scholarships, worth $55,000.

They are seniors Steve Groke, Matt Steele and Chris Welch, , said Senior Master Sgt. John Foresman, ROTC instructor at Medical Lake.

In addition, the Air Force Junior ROTC Program named Medical Lake High School’s ROTC program the Honor School for the Northwest for the 1996-97 academic year.

There are approximately 16 junior ROTC units in Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Montana and Northern California.

“The students were exemplary in their inspection they had, wearing uniforms properly, doing well in their classes, and performed their drills well,” said Assistant Principal Chuck Boehme. “They just did a good job during the year in relationship to their ROTC programs.”

The honor allows Medical Lake to nominate five students to the Air Force Academy and three students to the U.S. Military Academy and the Naval Academy. Those students have not yet been named, Boehme said.

The unit is inspected once a year by an active-duty Air Force officer, Foresman said.

“They spend a day with us. They check us on how we look, our supply accounting procedures. … They listen to the instructors, myself and Lt. Col. Paul Means,” he said.

“They evaluate us on our teaching methods and quality of instruction.”

“It’s quite an honor for us. The last time we were so honored was 1979,” Foresman said.

, DataTimes MEMO: Education Notebook is a regular feature of the South Side Voice. Please let us know about interesting programs and activities, and the achievements of students, teachers, administrators, staff and volunteers at schools on Spokane’s South Side and in Cheney, Medical Lake and the Liberty School District. Contact Janice Podsada, South Side Voice, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210. E-mail to janicep@spokesman.com. Or call 459-5439. Fax 459-5482