Fort Sill Training

The Music Man

THE MUSIC MAN

by Kasey Chapman

ELMORE CITY, OKLA. - When Jim Winkle became the Elmore City-Pernell band director in 2001, he only intended to stay for a couple of years.  Nine years later, he's led the band to multiple appearances in state marching and concert contests and roles in both the Memorial Day Parade in Washington, D.C., and the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio.  But greater than his decade of success with the Badger Pride are the relationships he's made with the community and his students.  Late last year, those relationships would mean more than ever as a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma threatened to halt his band career.

After months of planning chemotherapy treatments around his morning band rehearsals, Winkle is now cancer-free - something both he and his wife, Carolyn, attribute to a miracle from God.  The 67-year-old music man did not let a diagnosis stand in the way of doing what he loves, and with another semester in front of him, the crescendo that has become Winkle's time at this small south-central Oklahoma school shows no signs of fading.