After 30 years, teacher still feels the music

PALMER — It’s Thursday afternoon and classes are over for most of Palmer High School, but Stan Harris is still going, surrounded by students in the choir room.

“I’ll let you go because the Frontiersman’s here,” he says.

As the group breaks up and departs, most of them are singing.

Harris has spent his life surrounded by music, either playing it or teaching it. And it’s obvious he loves it. This year, the Palmer Arts Council honored Harris with its lifetime achievement award.

“I was actually kind of shocked,” Harris says. “I kind of think of those things as, ‘oh he died or he’s going away,’ and I’m doing neither.”

This year, though, marks his 30th teaching music to the children of Palmer. In 1983, he took over as music teacher at Palmer High School.

Ten years later he switched over to Palmer Junior Middle School. Nine years after that he came back.

Like a lot of Alaskans, though, Harris’ story starts somewhere Outside — in his case, California, more specifically the Bay Area. He said he left college halfway through to play music with an Air Force band. In the service he was able to complete his degree.

The base he was at was in Marin City, not far from his childhood home of Richmond. When he got out he went to see about a teaching job, a substitute teaching job.

“I didn’t want to be a teacher. My parents were teachers,” he said.

But despite not having any education class credits, he wound up with a job as a full-time choir teacher. Three years later he’d had enough.

“I ran away to play professionally,” he said.

He had a band, toured California, spent a year in Hawaii. He played the keyboards and saxophone, mostly rock music, but some jazz and country.

“Then I actually discovered that I missed teaching,” he said.

So he went to see about another teaching job. He found one very close to where he lived, but at the time budget constraints had instituted a hiring freeze while schools waited to see what state funding would look like. While he waited to hear, Harris said, he signed a year’s worth of contracts to play gigs with his band.

When the freeze lifted he was hired. The administrators, he said, liked the idea of hiring a professional musician.

And that’s exactly what they got — he played those shows he’d signed up for by night and taught by day.

Eventually he and his wife decided they didn’t want to raise their children in the Bay Area.

“My wife said she wanted snow and I said, ‘I know just where!’”

A trip with that Air Force band had sent him to Alaska and he just loved the place. He and his wife found a job in Anchorage playing music at Keyboards Lounge near the Captain Cook.

The deal was for three months, but they stayed for six.

“When we left I was the music teacher at Palmer High,” he said, adding that the running joke when he arrived was, “I was the music teacher they hired out of a bar in Anchorage — which wasn’t quite how it went down.”

He’d sought out the job after talking to some friends who’d recommended the area and told him the job was opening up. Harris said he believes it wasn’t ever even advertised, that he just happened to show up at the exact right time to get it.

There was a time, also, when he didn’t direct plays at the school. The time the last drama teacher departed happened to coincide with his daughters’ high school career and their interest in musical theater.

“I kind of inherited the drama thing,” he said.

And so far at Palmer High he’s been the only music teacher. Well, almost.

“There were a couple of years where they were able to get me a half-time person,” he said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.