Above: THE NEW ULM Orchestra as it looked at its opening concert at old Turner Hall in 1926. Paul Yanda is the conductor.

He took the old violin out of the case and drew the bow across the strings.

A little scratchy but he didn’t mind. Brahm’s Lullaby.

“It’s what my grandmother used to sing to me,” Frank Heck said with a smile.

He likes that old violin. He wants to play it again.

BEFORE THE FIRST Great War,when he was five, his uncle took him to see the Chicago Philharmonic Band when it played New Ulm at the Armory.

Below: FRANK HECK, a retired school administrator,bows away on the violin his uncle bought him when he was in high school. (Photo by Marc Hequet)

“I heard the violins play and the piece that comes to mind was the beautiful ‘Blue Danube’,” he said.””It sounds like water,’ I said to my uncle.”

Young Frank never stopped wanting a violin after that, and years later his uncle walked into a Minneapolis pawn shop and bought him one. Made in Germany.

HECK TOOK it with him to New Ulm High School and six weeks later was second string in the school orchestra, the one that Harry Dirks used to direct.

“If somebody offered me a million dollars he couldn’t buy it because it’s part of me. What would I want with a million dollars that the violin couldn’t give me?”

IT DOESN’T give as much as it used to, though. So Heck is looking for people to join him in a New Ulm orchestra, one like the city had for a few years before World War II.

He played in that group, and with his own little quartet, until 1929 when money was hard to come by and people went their separate ways looking for jobs.

Heck took positions with a country school between Springfield and Comfrey, later moving to New Ulm in charge of Brown County schools.

Retired three years ago, he still works maybe two days a week as a reading consultant for that system.

“I feel too young to turn up my toes completely,” he said. “I’m 68 but I feel too young to quit.”

HE HASN’T given up the violin completely, though his bowing hasn’t been regular for years. He plays for church groups, and for a while played regularly in the church Christmas Eve.

But now with a crowd of grand-children over by Eau Claire, he and his wife go east for Christmas because it’s easier to move just the two of them than all the children.

“BACK IN THE 1930s when there was no television, people had to make their own entertainment, “Heck said.

So, you “get the gang together” for chamber music, or if you’re the ambitious type, a symphony or opera.

A St. Paul group came down from time to time, he recalled for presentations like “Fledermaus”(“The Bat”), which Heck remembers because it was funny, even from the orchestra pit.

He played in that New Ulm orchestra that provided the music for the opera company, but kept a little group of his own on the side: William Brown (of Brown’s Music) and Ray Meidl (director of the Cathedral High orchestra) would man the violins, W. T. Eckstein the cello, and Heck the viola.

MOZART WAS a favorite of theirs,but they would select other composers from Eckstein’s large music library. Heck has a small library of his own, he said, but nothing com-pared to Eckstein’s.

“It was very loosely knit,” Heck said.”We didn’t have a name, we just got together.”

He managed sometimes to get together with groups as large as 10 or 20, playing sometimes for church groups, playing at the Indian pageant at the Brown County fairgrounds, at churches for plays, or wherever they could.

“WE ALWAYS played for fun,”‘ he said. “And it was always for nothing. We just were happy to play.

That kind of music is gone from New Ulm now. Heck called it a “void” and said he would like to see it filled.

“New Ulm has such a rich background,” he said, “but there is only one thing that’s lacking and that is orchestra.”

He said he knew of at least one young musician who practiced violin for three years and then put it away because there was no longer any reason to play it — no companion, as Heck put it.

“She quit because there was no one to play with,” he said.

It is a reasonable generalization,he added, to say that the same thing happens to many high school musicians.

To join orchestra

SEARLES — Want to get together for some chamber music, or anything else you can do with a violin?

Frank Heck, retired school administrator and violinist, is looking for people to play with. If interested,contact him at 675-4321.

Heck’s goal is to reorganize the old New Ulm Orchestra, but says that for the moment he will be satisfied just to play for fun with people.

New Ulm Daily Journal

Dec. 28, 1975