Bill Albrecht had two good reasons to celebrate this month.
Not only did the street he’s called home for 56 years hold its 50th Annual Block Party, but he received a surprise visit from the Naperville Municipal Band, with whom he’s played for an astonishing 75 years.
Albrecht, who has lived in Naperville since he was born in 1933, has taken part in 150 parades but admits that these days, “I can play and I can march, I just can’t play and march anymore.”
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The retired chemical engineer grew up on Sleight Street, only a few blocks away from his current home. He attended grade school, junior high and high school in one building at the end of School Street.
“When I was born, the population of Naperville was around 5,280 and up to about 8,000 by the time I was in high school,” he said. “It grew fantastically in the ’50s and ’60s. Folks on the edge of town could walk to a cow pasture when I was small, but by 1960 it was a whole new subdivision.”
In his early days, Albrecht said he knew everyone in town and has fond memories of summers at Centennial Beach. He started playing trombone in first grade.
“My teacher suggested it because I had long arms,” he said. “I had to work at it and my mother was driven nuts by ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ being played over and over in her living room.”
By the late 1940s there were not enough adults to play in the Municipal Band so the director, Elmer Kerner, picked children from the high school to fill in. Albrecht joined in 1948.
“In those days we only had a summer program, which we began practicing for in March,” he recalled. “We took part in the Memorial Day parade and were dormant (after) September. There was no Labor Day parade back then.”
Apart from a few summers when he was in college, Albrecht has been playing with the band ever since. Although he went to school at Oberlin College, famed for its music conservatory, he didn’t even take his trombone with when he decided to study science instead.
It was in 1963 or so that Albrecht decided his growing family needed a bigger house. After choosing a lot on Anne Road, he and his late wife, Lynn, had a house built for themselves and their three daughters and son.
“Anne Road was gravel then,” he said. “But over three or four years, the Royal Oaks subdivision grew. We had wide open spaces at the back so we had a lot of wildlife. We had deer and coyotes. One day I looked out at our apple tree to see nothing but cores hanging off it. Woodchucks had eaten all the apples.”
With only 10 to 15 original families at the time, the first block parties were small events but that didn’t make them any less fun.
“The little rug rats played games and the adults, volleyball, because they were all fairly young too,” Albrecht said. “We had water balloon tosses outside my house. In those days you could barricade the entire street so we took our grills outside to cook.”
This year’s celebration was attended by about 50 people, he said.
“Unbeknownst to me, it was arranged that the municipal band would make a surprise appearance,” Albrecht said. “My daughters made sure I was sitting in just the right place and gave me a crown to wear. Then I saw Ron Keller leading the band down the street. I said, ‘What the heck is going on?’ It was a surprise to celebrate our 50th and my 75th.”
Albrecht gave up marching with the band when he was in his 70s, but still enjoys playing in the summer concert series in Central Park.
“It’s different playing on stage to being in the audience, of course,” he said. “You hear some sound from the crowd, but mostly I just hear what’s next to me. I concentrate on reading the notes and doing what the director tells me to do.”
Albrecht enjoys marching songs the most because “they’re fun to play.”
“I have enjoyed listening to some great service bands and guest bands,” he said. “I will play for as long as I can.”
Hilary Decent is a freelance journalist who moved from England to Naperville in 2007.
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