This year, for the 40th year in a row, the Jasper Junior/Senior High School Band will hold its turkey dinner fundraiser.
The popular event is a chance for Jasperites to chow down on a plate of succulent turkey with all the fixings, while listening to the musical stylings of the senior band. But it also acts as one of the band’s biggest fundraisers of the year.
Even before the band was upgrading equipment and taking trips—like the one to New Orleans this May—the money brought in by the dinners was incredibly important.
In fact, in a lot of ways, the high school band owes its very survival to that money.
According to Janet Barker, who was on the school board the year the high school band was started, for years the money raised at the turkey dinners helped pay off the nearly $25,000 debt that Arts Jasper took on to make the band possible.
Barker explained how in the early 1970s she had pushed hard to start a band program in Jasper. And despite the fact that the school board had next to no money, in 1975 it hired Wes Cummings as a musical director for the high school.
The problem, of course, was that the school had no instruments.
“What they used for band instruments when they got here—I think it was a little bit of music, a few uniforms and very few instruments that were scrounged from the neighborhood to get started,” said Joyce Butler, who was a member of Arts Jasper at the time.
It was her and other members of the newly formed organization who showed up at Barker’s door one night with a plan to get a high school band started in town.
At the time the provincial government was offering interest-free loans for communities looking to start, not high school, but community bands. Their idea was to apply for the loan and buy instruments to start a community band led by Cummings.
Those instruments would live in the high school and would be used primarily by the high school band, of course, but Arts Jasper didn’t think the government would mind.
“I couldn’t believe it, they came to my house one night and said ‘you’re pushing for a band, there’s no money, we’ll buy the instruments,’” Barker remembered. “Imagine: they borrowed the money to buy them.”
Not long after that night, Butler and Pat Wilson signed the papers, borrowing $23,138.05 in the name of Arts Jasper from the provincial government.
Butler still remembers standing beside Wilson when they signed the contract for the loan. The two ladies looked at one another and both thought: “is this ever going to be repaid?”
It took Arts Jasper until 1983, but the organization did eventually pay off the loan, thanks in large part to the money raised through the turkey dinners, which were started under the tenure of Principal Neil Fenton the year after the band formed.
Ann Thomas, who today takes the lead organizing the dinner each year, said that the deep tradition behind the fundraiser makes it a special event for both the band and the community.
“Not only is it a really good fundraiser ... but it’s a community tradition. It’s an event that people look forward to,” Thomas said. “Who doesn’t love turkey?”
Barker said that the community of Jasper was—and still is—tremendous in its support of the band and all its fundraisers over the years, and she is still proud of having had a hand in starting it.
“Oh my gosh the band has made a big difference in town,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing, it’s a part of my heart.”
This year’s dinner will take place March 19 at the Jasper Activity Centre.
Trevor Nichols
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