SPOTLIGHT
Jim Bagby, Rural Route 4 (1986 champ) jbagby3@kc.rr.com
It’s Been a Lively 70 Years for Monty Duerksen The Barbershop Harmony Society is filled with singers who discover four-part harmonizing while they are young, then have so much fun that they spend the rest of their lives singing and socializing. Meet one of our longest-tenured members.
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enerable Society giant Dave Stevens always said he hardly ever met a man who didn’t wish he’d found barbershopping earlier. Kansas City’s Monty Duerksen was in his first quartet in high school about the time his voice changed, and was a Society member before he had a driver’s license. Now he’s one of about three-dozen BHS members holding a 70-year membership card. The happy-faced 85-year-old bass has seldom been without a quartet in his long and successful barbershopping career, which includes chapters in four states, a medalist senior quartet, a national network television appearance and family ties to two gold medal quartets. Now in a suburban Kansas City retirement home with his wife, Shirley, Monty is still singing—even if he doesn’t always remember all the words. His smile and enthusiasm are undiminished and his voice still strong. It was those qualities that made his Newton High School choir director, Bill Getz, recruit him to lead of the Newtones at the southern Kansas school in about 1948. Getz sang with the Central States District’s first quartet champs, the Keynoters, in 1947. Soon Getz had Duerksen visiting the Newton, Kansas chapter, which Monty later directed. Then the Army summoned and Monty wound up at Camp (later Fort) Carson in Colorado Springs. He promptly put up a bulletin board notice, seeking quartet singers to go with his now robust bass, and thus was born his first Society foursome, the Spring Singers. On a personal note, my grandfather, Mayne Bagby, was a charter member of the Colorado Springs Chapter that I visited when I was 11; the Spring Singers were on post that night instead of at the meeting. But when we got back to Pop’s house, he set up his
16 | The Harmonizer | July/August 2019 | barbershop.org
The Spring Singers of Colorado Springs (clockwise from left): Monty Duerksen, Vic Holmes, Bill Brooks, Bill Butler.
big Magnavox reel-to-reel and played the Spring Singers performing “Yokel,” complete with gags. It was my first time to hear a barbershop quartet. It was that magic moment for me. During his Army career, Monty sang with the Alexandria Harmonizers while he was