Leland Lillehaug: 'Music Can Sort of Help the Soul'

Editor's Note: This is part of a new Edina Patch series called "I've Lived A Life," where seniors in our community tell stories, in their own words, about the lives they've led. This week, we get to know Leland Lillehaug, a lifelong music enthusiast.

I grew up about 120 miles northwest of Sioux Falls, in Lane, South Dakota. I think the reason I turned out alright was we had to go through so many hard things growing up. I was born in 1927, right in the middle of the Dust Bowl. It was tough. My mother wouldn't set the table until the last moment because you couldn't keep the dust out. I remember writing my name in the dust on the table. We thought that was just what life was, and we survived.

I graduated with a class of seven. Despite being valedictorian, I wasn't offered a scholarship for kids in the upper 10 percent of their class. If there's only seven students, you technically can't be in the top 10 percent—you're in the top 14 percent. It was really small, but we had such caring teachers.

It was typical in those days in the schools you started band in the fifth grade. I had a cousin I liked who happened to play clarinet. So I played clarinet. It was that dumb of a reason. I played in my high school band and I think I did pretty decent there. I graduated in 1944 and went to college at Augustana in Sioux Falls, but had to quit school when my dad got sick.

It was at that same time my brother, Selmer, went missing in action during the war. Two months later, we heard he was alive and had been captured. When he eventually returned home, I enlisted in the Army and was stationed in Panama. I became a drum major with the band there and can recall looking out of our rehearsal room to see the ships coming through the canal. That was quite a sight to behold.

I went back to Augustana after two years with the Army and finished my degree. My wife, Ardis, and I got married in 1951, then I got what I'd call the biggest break of my career—a Fulbright scholarship to study in Vienna. I was so lucky. I got all expenses paid, then Ardis found employment with the American embassy in Vienna. We must've gone to 60 or 70 different operas while we were there.

I studied with the first chair clarinet player and the first bassoonist with the Vienna Opera House. My clarinet and bassoon teachers would take one of their students into the pit at the opera house once a semester. I got to sit alongside them, watching the opera and looking out at the crowd. It was an amazing experience. You really get to know what the world is like by doing something like that.

From there I enrolled in the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. I got my masters and PhD there, then taught three years of public school band in Waverly, Iowa, before taking a teaching position at Augustana College back in Sioux Falls. I was band director at Augustana College for many years, and then I was conductor of the municipal band for about 23 years or so.

I retired in 1991 from Augustana, but I still don't think I've done everything I said I was going to do when I stopped working. Five years ago last October, we moved to Edina, largely to be close to our three children. Our son, David, is a lawyer downtown. He was U.S. Attorney for four and a half years. Our second son, Steven, works at Regions Hospital in St. Paul. Then our daughter, Laurie, teaches fifth grade at Calvin Christian School in Edina. It's really a coincidence that they all live in Edina now. We're about six minutes from each of them in our current home.

None of my children or grandkids play music, actually. They know better. I think they saw what I did and decided it simply wasn't for them.

I have so many good memories from over the years, but there's one thing I don't think I'll ever forget. Music can sort of help the soul, I've always felt. I started playing nursing homes in Sioux Falls, and we had six or seven that had never had bands come to visit them. I remember they brought out a lady at one place, but they said said she was supposedly deaf and blind. So they brought her out and the front of the stage was metal. She put her hands down there on our stage and I looked and she smiled for almost the entire concert. I thought if one of the networks had a photographer there, it would've made the national news. You could tell she was getting some vibrations through her hands that was a pleasant sensation for her.

I'll be 85 in a few days and, even though we sometimes miss our people back in Sioux Falls, we love it here in Edina. I play pool every Tuesday over at the Edina Senior Center with a group of really nice folks and I regularly play in the Evangelical Lutheran Church band. We play about 12 concerts a year in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area, with rehearsals almost every week. Bassoons are always harder for bands to get, so I'm playing that rather than clarinet.

I've had a lot of hobbies over the years, including golf, hunting pheasant and waterfowl, bowling and just being outdoors. I told my wife when she wants to put something on my tombstone to just say, "He had fun."