Second home

Joe Fritz has owned a house in Waseca for a long time, but he has also had a “second home” for the past 35 years: the Waseca Bluejays marching band. 

Fritz started out in St. Cloud at the city’s Cathedral High School, then moved to  St. Cloud State for the first two years of schooling, taking courses for his future career in electrical engineering. He decided to further that training at North Dakota State University. After graduating, he found a job in Chicago with Motorola; it wasn’t until a friend told him about an opportunity in Waseca that he moved here. Fritz started working for EF Johnson in Waseca in 1972; at that time he bought the house where he still lives today. 

Working for EF Johnson for 20 years, Fritz started out as engineer number nineteen. This was an impressive position according to Fritz, who claims that engineers at that time were given the same level of prestige as doctors. When Fritz left EF Johnson, there were 500 engineers on staff. Across his career, Fritz worked for EF Johnson, Itron, ABC Telecommunications, and Calahan, all while continuing to live in Waseca. 

When Fritz retired from Calahan in the late 1970s, he was approached by a former coworker and asked whether he wanted to go see a high school band concert, the annual indoor concert put on by the Waseca Marching Jays. The friend’s son was a drummer. Fritz found the show entertaining and inspiring. 

It wasn’t until 1988 when Fritz actually got involved with the band and the marching band. Fritz’s wife, Gerri, got a call from the home economics  teacher who had been working on the marching band uniforms and asked Gerri to take some home to be shortened.  Fritz went to the high school with his wife. “We walked into the band room and the room was completely full,” Fritz recalls, “There were 100 kids sitting in the chairs and Mr. [Butch] Dufault was working with the kids.” 

When Fritz entered, he was asked by Dufault to wait until they were done, so Fritz and his wife waited and watched the process. “While we were sitting there I remember thinking to myself very consciously, ‘There’s 150 high school kids in this room and they are absolutely focused on that speaker. Something is going on here that is really good’,” Fritz remembered. While Fritz was sitting in the band room that day in 1988, he started talking to Todd Dufault, a helper at the time. When Fritz asked young Dufault what was going on in the room at the time, Dufault responded, “It’s the marching band.” Dufault explained what the marching band was and how it puts together field shows. He then invited Fritz to tag along at a practice. 

“Well, I ended up getting involved and started working with the band kids. I have been at it ever since.” Fritz remembers the first year, being the “cheerleader” for the musicians and working with them while they marched. That first year was the first-ever Classic competition; Fritz recalls cheering on the clarinets in the back of the parade block as they marched from the old Dairy Queen to the Library. The next year Fritz drove the equipment truck containing the props and such used in the field show. 

The year after driving the truck, Fritz started the woodwind sectionals in the summer, calling  kids to see if they wanted to come practice. Then Butch Dufault resigned and Kim Cosens took over. At that time, Fritz was working at Itron and the workload was too much to also volunteer with the band, so Fritz stepped back from the band for almost ten years. 

At a coincidental meeting at McDonald’s in 2009, Fritz ran into Todd Dufault. After a little conversation, Dufault mentioned that there was a new director for the band, Matt Gullickson, and that they needed people on the field to help clean the field show. That next Tuesday, Fritz drove down to a practice. “I walked out on the field for the first time and I looked around and there were 79 kids. That included guard and percussion,” said Fritz, explaining his shock as he had left the band with 150 kids strong many years ago. “I kept waiting for the rest of them to come out from behind the building or something,” he said. So Fritz got back involved with the band, helping Gullickson, then Sam Boerboom, and now director Devon Lawrence. 

In 2014 Fritz retired from his working career and marched his way into many volunteer hours for the band. As a person who had played a couple of instruments and been in marching band in high school, Fritz wasn’t exactly qualified to help students fix their marching step or their playing style in the beginning, but by participating he learned what he needed to learn. Fritz was an engineer, and as he put it, “it’s not ego– it’s confidence. I have no qualms about tackling things.” 

When Fritz started volunteering with the band, he started out working the sound system and then coached the woodwinds in sections and during sectionals to work on their music. As a beginning director at the time, Fritz wasn’t familiar with the podium, but learned quickly. He knew from being a hockey coach that being a drill sergeant with the kids can be unsuccessful and that it is best to get the students to understand why they’re doing something. 

Over time, Fritz has learned and been involved with nearly every element of the band. From directing, to manning the sound system, to working on prop design, to teaching kids how to march. Fritz does it all. 

The band isn’t the only thing Fritz has volunteered with. Also on his list are Habitat for Humanity, 15 years for local civil defense, and amateur radio. Fritz knows that having his “finger in different areas” means that he’s been around a long time, but he tells people that he’s a relic– “I’m just old.” 

    Every year Fritz ends the marching season intending to give it another go in the spring when the band gets going again, but every year he asks himself if he will still be able to do it. Fritz plans to help the band as long as he is physically capable of doing so, saying that it would be nice to have someone working with him to learn and pass on some of the things he’s learned but he knows it’s unlikely he’ll find someone who would want to stick around for 35 years like he did. “I could give up the prop design, I could give up working on any of the music stuff. But not working with the kids would be the toughest part for me,” Fritz claims. 

Fritz speculates that volunteering is a dying thing but encourages people to just try it if they can. “Everyone talks about time,” Fritz says, “but it doesn’t have to be a lot of time. Even an hour twice a week is very helpful.” He encourages people to be positive and look on the bright side, especially while volunteering. As a student once said, you just need to “Beat Waseca,” which is the marching band’s motto.