Newswise — David Reynolds remembers hearing the report on National Public Radio in January 2002: Keith Clark, the bugler who hit a wrong note while playing taps at President John F. Kennedy's funeral, had died at age 74. It made Reynolds angry enough to sit down and write a letter chiding NPR for zeroing in on that one flawed note in Clark's otherwise fine career as a trumpet player. Now, as head of the Music Department at South Dakota State University, Reynolds is offering a closer look at Keith Clark's famous moment in presidential history. Reynolds has just published an article about that performance of taps for The South Dakota Musician, the state's music journal. "This 'wrong note,' or what people were calling a wrong note, followed him for the rest of his life," Reynolds said. "I've been intrigued through the years with Keith Clark's story and I wanted to set the record straight somehow about what happened that day. My thesis for this is that a lesser trumpet player in that same situation would have not even come close to playing as beautifully as he did." Reynolds is uniquely qualified to write about Clark because he fully understands a military bugler's mission. A trumpeter and bugler himself, Reynolds served, like Keith Clark, in the prestigious U.S. Army Band — called "Pershing's Own" — the premier musical organization of the U.S. Army since 1922. Reynolds was part of the U.S. Army Band from 1987 to 1991, specifically as part of an ensemble called the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets. Like Clark, Reynolds' duties required him to play taps on some formal state occasions — notably the burial of the first American soldier to die after the invasion of Grenada. In addition Reynolds became friends with Clark in the 1990s while attending annual conferences of the International Trumpet Guild. That's why Reynolds eventually felt enough at ease to ask Clark about what happened the day of Kennedy's funeral. After a lengthy discussion, Reynolds went back to his hotel and wrote down every word he could recall, convinced it was valuable first-person history. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. Clark was assigned to play taps when the slain president was laid to rest on Monday, Nov. 25, 1963. He cracked the sixth note in that now famous performance. In interviews afterward Clark attributed it to the pressure of the occasion. But Reynolds thinks that Clark shouldered too much of the blame. His own conversations with Clark make Reynolds think there were at least four factors at play: hasty planning, military protocol, cold weather, and temporary deafness. This is what Clark told him: * Keith Clark learned only in the very early hours of that morning that he would have to play taps at the funeral that day, leaving him very little time to prepare mentally. There had been some thought that since Kennedy had been in the Navy, a Navy bugler would perform. It was only after midnight that it was decided that the Honor Guard at the funeral would be joint services, meaning it would represent all five branches of the military — the Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, Navy, and Marines. In those situations the senior branch supplies the bugler. * After a haircut and breakfast that morning, Clark had a briefing with a high-ranking officer. Then he was immediately transported to Arlington National Cemetery, where he had to stand for four hours in close-to-freezing temperatures waiting for the funeral procession to arrive. For a trumpet player, that length of exposure to cold would have made his face stiff, making it difficult to form notes properly. * Clark wasn't allowed to wear an overcoat, only his dress uniform. * Clark was placed immediately next to the firing squad at the request of the camera crews; normally the bugler would have been at least 20 yards away. That proximity to the firing squad meant that Clark was temporarily deafened by the three volleys they fired. In addition to all those factors, Reynolds said, Clark had to contend with memory — recalling how he'd played for his president just a short time earlier under better circumstances. "Keith told me that he had played taps for John F. Kennedy on Veterans Day, just two weeks before, just 200 yards away from the burial site at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He said that was one of the things that ran through his head right before he started to play." Ironically, Reynolds said, that "wrong note" struck the rest of the nation as being just right. One media report afterward spoke of that flawed note as a tear, as though the bugle had been crying. Reynolds takes a similar view. "Everything else that day had gone perfectly. There needed to be a moment when things weren't perfect, because we as a nation were grieving," Reynolds said. "Even though the rest of the world views that performance, that rendition of taps as being appropriate for the time, Keith never really did forgive himself." In later years Clark taught brass instruments at a community college in Florida. Today, Reynolds notes, there is a display on Keith Clark in the Arlington National Cemetery Visitors' Center. Reynolds visited that display this past May. The trumpet that Keith Clark played that day is there. So is the uniform that he wore. "The world has not only forgiven him, but his efforts have been memorialized through that display," Reynolds said. "He was an excellent trumpet player. But this one note at one point in history really changed his life."
Photo: http://agbiocom.sdstate.edu/photos/IMG_6662.jpg; David Reynolds, a trumpeter and head of the South Dakota State Music Department, brings long overdue recognition to the difficulties encountered by the trumpeter playing taps at the burial of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
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