Lincoln’s Music Man
Mr. DC Marches Into Retirement
It’s a sunny Friday afternoon on Memorial Day weekend 2008. The Lincoln Middle School Marching Band stands in the middle of Madison Street, taking a break during preparation for a Disneyland performance a week hence. Dan Dooha-Chambers, the band director, is talking to about 150 band players about their trip.
“Instruments up. Mark time, mark, one, two, three, ready, go,” he says with his booming voice. The band begins to play and march. Dooha-Chambers marches alongside, swaying to the samba music, barking out commands and blowing on his whistle, occasionally stepping into a row to adjust an instrument’s angle or a player’s position in line. “I want you to strut as if you’re the only band in the world. ‘I’m the best me that ever was,’ ” he tells them to think.
“We did more together today than I thought you could do. Great rehearsal,” he says later in a post-rehearsal critique. “This practice is why they’re successful. They could be at home, playing X-Box or Wii, or IMing their friends. But they’re here, practicing.”
Under Dooha-Chambers’ direction, the band has become one of the most successful junior high school bands in the Bay Area—if not California—and has played at Disneyland six of the last seven years, and it’s the only middle school band to play before the iconic Main Street Electrical Parade there, a parade warm-up spot reserved for high schools and colleges and an accomplishment Dooha-Chambers claims as his greatest achievement.
Dooha-Chambers is in his ninth year as band director. And it will be his last. Well, almost. He turns 60 in January 2009, so that’ll be his actual departure date.
“I’ve worked hard to build up this band. Kids want to be part of this band because it’s good. It’s the Lincoln band,” Dooha-Chambers says. “It’s like a brand name—Coke, Apple and the Lincoln band.”
Trombone player Emily Cooper, 14, remembers sixth grade with Dooha-Chambers as a turning point. “He was really hard but it made you successful,” she says, noting she made sacrifices in her social life to be in the band. “But it was worth it in the long run.”
Students and parents call Dooha-Chambers “Mr. DC,” a name he gave himself so kids could have a way to address him less formally.
In class or at public performances, Dooha-Chambers is half teacher and half comedian with a constant stream of comments and jokes. But he was reluctant to clown it up at the beginning of his career. The turning point came when a Cal State Hayward music professor guest conducted his band in 1977. “He was standing there and suddenly broke into an English accent and was acting silly a la Monty Python, and he had them. “I thought, ‘I want to be like that.’ It opened the door for me. I was negating half myself,” he says.
Along with humor, Dooha-Chambers says teachers need to keep up with cultural trends to reach kids. “Teaching is the last of the vaudeville shows. What worked yesterday may not work today. You’ve got to know what’s going on in the world. If you’re not interesting, exciting, they’re not going to be with you,” he says.
Dooha-Chambers had his work cut out for him when he arrived at Lincoln in 1999. “The first year was very difficult. I was the fourth band director in a year. The program was in shambles,” he says.
Lincoln principal Keith Nomura hired him. “He’d been in a marching band himself, so he knew what a good marching band could do for the school’s esprit de corps,” says Dooha-Chambers. “In my interview, I said, ‘I’m going to build you a really good marching band, and someday we’re going to play and march at Disneyland.’ ”
He started with 55 students and had to teach a choir class to fill out his schedule, but he recruited kids from the elementary schools and began to build the band’s reputation. In school year 2007-2008, Dooha-Chambers had 220 band students—24 percent of Lincoln’s total student body. “It went from a handful of kids to kids clamoring to get in,” says Lincoln eighth-grade teacher and band assistant Rick James, who arrived the same year at Lincoln as Dooha-Chambers.
Born and raised in San Rafael, Dooha-Chambers earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Sonoma State University and worked as a teaching assistant in Marin County before taking his first job as a band director in Livermore.
Both of his parents had a musical influence on him. His mother loved Latin music while his dad listened to Dixieland and Ragtime. On Saturday mornings, his parents put on stacks and stacks of old 78s. Dooha-Chambers was a typical eighth grade boy in many ways, involved in band and sports. But when a congenital knee condition forced him to stop playing sports, the trumpet and band became his focus.
Being part of a team is what the band experience is all about at Lincoln, says Dooha-Chambers. “I had one of my old students come by recently. She said she really missed ‘it.’ Well, she wasn’t talking about this old band room. She was talking about the feeling it gave her to be part of the band. It’s a great, magical time where we’re one unit, one family working toward a goal,” he says.
In addition to the trumpet, Chambers plays 13 other instruments, and he arranges all the music for the band, mostly popular tunes and songs he puts his own fun twist to, which earns him respect from students and parents alike.
He’s left his mark on many kids. Jesus Romero, whose son, Michael, 15, is now a 10th grader at Alameda High School and a member of its symphonic band, attributes his son’s turnaround to playing for Dooha-Chambers. “Playing music made him eager to go to school. He’s now immersed in music. … It’s done wonders for his self-esteem.”
Dooha-Chambers is demanding, and when he doesn’t feel the kids are performing up to his standard, he lets them know it, James says, characterizing Dooha-Chambers as an exceptional teacher. “The kids respect and love him to death. I see it all the time. When his kids come back to visit their old teachers, he’s one they go to see. That’s how I measure his success.”
After retirement, Mr. DC will pursue his lifelong dream of working with animals as a docent at the San Francisco Zoo. But he won’t let up on the throttle until he closes the band room door for the last time. It will be a final semester filled with classroom teaching and public band performances at Thompson Street for Christmas and a winter concert. He plans to arrange music from The Pirates of the Caribbean to challenge the kids. “I’m going to throw new music at them. We’re going to max it out,” he says.
After 37 years of teaching, Dooha-Chambers says he will miss the kids most of all. “I’ll miss that constant stream of input from kids, what they’re eating, doing, watching and listening to,” he says.
—By Keith Gleason
—Photography by Philip Kaake
