Clarence Earl Bushman

The following information about Clarence Earl Bushman was written by his brother, Robert Bushman, December 23, 2005:

Clarence Earl Bushman Life Sketch....

Clarence Earl Bushman was born on the 11th of February, 1937 in Snowflake, Arizona, in the home of his grandmother, Eliza Hunt. He was proud of the fact that he had the same birthday as Thomas Edison, because, no doubt, he rightly sensed he was just as blessed.

He was “born in the covenant” to his father, Garland Foscue Bushman, son of Preston Ammeron Bushman and Anna Smith Bushman, and to his mother, Glennie Smith Bushman, daughter of Hyrum Smith an Eliza Tenney Hunt.

He wrote: “It is to be counted a special privilege that I was born in Snowflake, Navajo County, Arizona, in the United States of America, to parents who very well represented the best examples and teachings of their parents.”

He was the third of three children in his family: There was his older sister by 6 years, Anna Eliza, and his older brother by 3 years, Charles Foscue. His mother Glennie, widely known as a lovely, talented, lively, and loving lady, fell untimely ill and passed away in 1938 when Clarence was only one-and-a-half years old. Consequently, like his own father, he had no personal memory of his birth mother.

While his father traveled in his work as a representative of the Heinz food company in Arizona and New Mexico, Clarence was cared for by his grandmother, Eliza Hunt in Snowflake, and later by his Aunt Claradell DeWitt.

He wrote: “My father’s occupation took him for extended periods of time from our eyes, but his devotion, prayers, and very frequent letters kept us very close to him.” A few years later, while traveling on business and attending church on Sunday in Douglas, Arizona, his father met Elsie Fern Schwantes, who attracted his attention.

Elsie Fern, the second in a family of nine, worked as a nurse in the local hospital, and seemed to be well qualified for his father’s new wife and mother of his three children. His father courted her and they were married 1942 when Clarence was age five. As his father was then traveling principally in New Mexico, he and his new bride brought their three children there and established their home in Albuquerque.

The next summer, in 1943, Clarence and his siblings were taken back to Arizona to visit family. During this visit, his older brother, Charles, was killed in a tragic incident with a horse, which, Clarence wrote with amazing drollness, “…dimmed my enthusiasm for ranch and farm life.”

The very next year, his beloved Grandmother Hunt also passed away. To have experienced so much personal loss at such a tender age could only have been a convincing demonstration to him of the tenuousness of mortality.

The young boy, Clarence, was certainly in culture shock after being transplanted from a small rural town into a big, sophisticated city, and suddenly finding himself with a new mother. He wrote: “For some time, Albuquerque seemed like the dark side of the moon to me.”

He endured merciless teasing from other boys in his new neighborhood for his country speech and manners, for which he quickly compensated. In due time, there were born two new brothers to him: Robert and James.

Clarence was baptized and confirmed at the age of eight by his father. Music formed an important part of Clarence’s family life and enjoyment. His father sang and his sister Anna played the piano, which she had learned from her mother. Clarence also began to learn the piano, and sang in the ward choir with his father, and in the St John’s Cathedral Boys Choir in town.

When he entered junior high school, he found that he was expected to take a class of physical education, for which he had little interest. When he learned, however, that he could take band instead, it was an easy decision to do so. He showed up for band without an instrument or hardly an idea of what he would do there. When the band director saw that Clarence was somewhat larger than the other boys, the director pointed to him, and said, “Bushman, you take the tuba.” And so was the beginning of his long and affectionate association with symphonic performance.

At his junior high school, he was president of his student council, and active in city, regional, and state student councils. During his summers, he mowed lawns for spending money and participated in extra-curricular music training programs with Albuquerque Public Schools and the University of New Mexico.

He excelled at playing the tuba, and as a junior high student, auditioned for and was seated as a tuba player in the Albuquerque Civic Symphony, in which he played for many years.

The family would visit relatives annually in Arizona, which offered the opportunity of some great adventure to the boy Clarence, especially with his cousins on the unfettered stretches of his Uncle Rans Spurlock’s ranch, where a very young teenager might experience the exhilaration of driving a vehicle for the first time. Clarence musthave known where the accelerator was, but not the brake, as he quickly tumbled his Aunt Georganna’s new retaining wall. From that time on, Clarence was never renowned for his driving skills.

After one year of high school in Albuquerque, he was interested by a friend in the adventure of leaving home and continuing his high school education at the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, New Mexico, which he did and did well. Military character may not have been one of Clarence’s noticeable attributes, and some have well asked how he was able to survive the rigors of military life and discipline at the military academy. His response was only that he found it relatively easy after the training he had received at home from his new mother.

At the military academy, Clarence’s unit was cited as the academy’s superior unit. He was awarded medals for expert marksmanship, took a prize for oratory, and represented the academy at state-wide debate competitions. Thus we see the early manifestations of his famed silver tongue.

At the academy, he also continued his interest in music, playing piano in the dance orchestra, organ in the cadet chapel, tuba in a brass ensemble, and also, of course, tuba in the marching band.

In his summer after graduation from the academy, Clarence continued his study of the organ, and in the fall of 1955, entered Brigham Young University at Provo, Utah, where he played in the Cougar Varsity Marching and Concert bands.

He wrote: “I was the university Carillonneur bell master up on top of the Carl F. Eyring Science Center, surviving the great intrigue of two Friday-night phantom bell-ringing episodes and the thorough investigations of President Ernest L. Wilkinson with his able campus police staff.”

Clarence continued his study of music in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico, where he was in the university symphony orchestra and various brass ensembles. He also played tuba again with the Albuquerque Civic Symphony. During that time, Clarence was called as a district missionary, Albuquerque not being a stake at the time, as which he served under district mission president, Henry (“Hal”) Eyring, now in the highest Church councils, with whom Clarence maintained a life-long acquaintance.

The next year, in 1957, Clarence was called on a full-time mission to the East German Mission – Berlin, at the time the Soviets controlled that part of Germany. This at first caused him some apprehension, but his mission passed without incident. It passed actually with distinction, with proselyting assignments in West Berlin and in the northern German cities of Lübeck and Hamburg. With his head-start in German at New Mexico Military Institute, and with his finely-tuned musical ear, Clarence quickly mastered German and was frequently mistaken as a native.

On completing his church mission, Clarence returned to BYU, declaring music as his major.

He wrote: “Within a few days, I met a terrific, sweet Finnish girl in my German class. I became a German major so I could sit next to her and keep an eye on my major interest, Leena Kyllikki Mäkipaja, from Jyväskylä, Finland. We became engaged in April of 1960.”

That summer, both Clarence and Leena worked in the San Francisco Bay area, where Clarence helped install a pipe organ in the Oakland-Berkeley Interstake Center.

Before he could complete college, however, he was drafted by the US Army in August, 1960, and sent to Ft Hood, Texas for basic training. There, however, Clarence was on familiar turf and was consequently recognized as an outstanding recruit. On finishing basic, he took leave and married Leena in the Salt Lake temple, on 22 Dec 1960. The ceremony was performed by a friend of his father, Elder Delbert Stapley. Receptions were held afterward in Salt Lake City and in Albuquerque.

While Leena returned to BYU in 1961 for another semester and graduation the following June, the Army shipped Clarence off to Germany, where he was assigned as a clerk in the headquarters section of an infantry battalion at Worms am Rhein. But Clarence quickly gravitated in another, more familiar direction, and soon become the concert manager for the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart, which had been a goal of his since his mission times, when he had coincidentally met the commanding officer of that symphony.

That summer, Leena was able to join him in Germany, and they found accommodations in a small apartment in Stuttgart. Leena worked locally while Clarence enjoyed touring Europe, working for and also playing in the symphony.

On December 27th, 1962, their first child arrived: a son, who they named Preston Vilho, in honor of their respective grandfathers. Soon after, Clarence completed his tour with the Army, and the family returned to Albuquerque, where he resumed his study of German at UNM.

During that time, he worked as a bank teller for the First National Bank, and as a concert announcer for the local fine arts FM radio station. Though a student, he played in UNM Faculty Brass Quintet, and served as a counselor in an Albuquerque ward bishopric, having been ordained a high priest by another friend of his father, Elder Spencer Kimball.

In January of 1964, Clarence returned to Provo, Utah, with his family to finish his baccalaureate in German. While there, he helped organize and teach missionaries called to German-speaking missions, before the Language Training Mission was created there. He also interpreted Church General Conference talks into German, and helped Tabernacle Organ technicians install six new pipe organs in BYU’s new Harris fine Arts Center.

He wrote: “Our sweet little Lea Kristiana arrived on the 5th of December, 1964, at Utah Valley Hospital. What a doll she has always been!”

After graduation, Clarence got a position with the Wicks Pipe Organ Company in Highland, Illinois, as an installer and voicer of pipes. Later, both he and Leena taught German at two secondary schools in that area. He also played with the St Louis Philharmonic and sang with the St Louis Bach Society Chorus.

For reasons of Preston’s health, they left that area, returning to Provo for Clarence to begin a masters program in musicology. He received a teaching assistantship in music theory, and played concerts with the BYU Faculty Brass Quintet and his own Historical Instruments Ensemble. He also worked as the announcer of a classical music program for BYU’s FM radio station, as vice-president of the Utah Valley Symphony, and served on the High Council of his Stake.

Clarence was fond of quoting one of his music professors, who told him that he was, “…too busy with music to study music.” And indeed, finishing his degree did prove problematic.

Before graduating, Clarence was hired to direct a school orchestra in American Fork, Utah, and then, with characteristic fortune, to be the Principal of the Foreign Study League Resident Institutes in Switzerland and France, which of course, gave the family the chance to visit Leena’s home again in Finland.

Lea notes that when her mother and father wanted to discuss something private, but with the children present, they would do it in German. However, in doing this, they would inevitably resort tousing some key word in English, which would unwittingly tip their hand to the children. To preserve their advantage, the children, of course, never let on that they actually got it.

Afterward, both Clarence and Leena taught for public schools and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Panguitch, Utah, and in Kayenta and Tuba City, Arizona, where Clarence served on the High Council of the Page Arizona Stake.

Clarence then received an appointment as music director and chairman at the newly created Northland Pioneer College, conducting its symphony orchestra and oratorio choir with musicians from northern Arizona, and concretizing in Winslow, Holbrook, Show Low, and in his home town of Snowflake.

While living in Snowflake, he and Leena hosted a native American daughter in their home for six years—Anita Bedonie, from Red Lake.

Clarence and Leena also enjoyed other teaching positions for public schools and the BIA in Arizona at Chinlee, Many Farms, Mesa, and the White River Apache School, and in New Mexico at Zuni and Tohatchi.

In 1976, Clarence’s father, having recently retired from a career in international sales with Texas Refinery Corporation, became restless and invited Clarence to accompany him back to his old sales area in the Carribean to work together. Clarence accepted. In those halcyon days together, father and son greatly deepened their bond. They sold successfully, studied the scriptures together daily, and attended local musical events in the evenings. Wherever they traveled, on Sundays they would seek out an appropriate place of worship, with Clarence often finding himself at the organ, accompanying the singing, which he thoroughly enjoyed.

After his father’s death in 1984, Clarence continued to travel and work in the Carribean. Though Spanish was not his forte, when he would listen in his mind to the memory of his father’s sales presentations in Spanish, he would inevitably know what to say. And with his famed linguistic alacrity, he also worked the Carribean in French.

Clarence experienced many adventures and misadventures along the salesman’s trail, including enduring a serious hurricane and being imperiously jailed merely for want of a certain piece of documentation.

Following the example of his father, Clarence became a Rotarian, making local meetings during in his travels. This greatly extended the already broad circle of his acquaintances.

The progressive neuro-muscular disorder of his son, Preston, preoccupied much of Clarence’s attention, and he constantly sought the help of the finest physicians to be found, unfortunately without positive result.

In the late eighties, Clarence developed a painful headache and loss of vision in his right eye. It was diagnosed as a tumor on his pituitary gland, which was then successfully removed by surgery. Shortly after the surgery, two blood veins broke in his brain stem. This situation healed of itself, but further slowed his recovery and may have had more long lasting effects.

In the late 1990’s, while driving, he and Leena were hit by a driver running a stop light, causing a triple fracture in Clarence’s pelvis, and breaking several of Leena’s ribs. This injury further slowed Clarence’s motion.

In 2000, Clarence became the coordinator of organists for the Chapel and Baptistery of the Arizona Temple. He also conducted the Udall Ward Choir, played in the Mesa City Band, and taught piano and organ students in Phoenix, Tempe, and Scottsdale, and at his home in Mesa.

In 2003, while climbing a hill, Clarence lost his balance and fell backward. Though not apparently serious, the incident seemed to accelerate Clarence’s physical decline. Thereafter, he began to experience serious vertigo or dizziness, which impaired his ability to walk and even stand. At the same time, he suffered from diabetes. Its multiple effects, coupled with his other conditions, made it impossible for him to continue to care for himself and his wife, and just a few months ago, they chose to sell their home in Mesa and move into an assisted care facility.

On a Monday morning at that home, December 19th, 2005, Clarence experienced weakness, the need for supplemental oxygen, and a sudden drop in blood pressure from what was later found to be a cardiac arrest. As he was receiving assistance, he stretched forth his arms as if addressing an unseen presence, and said, “I’m going now.” And he was gone, at the age of 68.

Clarence was a large presence in many lives. He exemplified many of the best qualities of his father and grandfather: He had an unconditional generosity of heart. He deliberately avoided complaint and criticism by always looking on the bright side of life. No matter what the circumstance, he was consistently cheerful and upbeat. He was, to the core of his being, a teacher and an uplifter. In that way, he was an effective exemplar to his children, his younger brothers, and to all who knew him.

Clarence was also a famous schmoozer. He could never have a brief conversation with anyone about anything. Even a casual encounter with a clerk in a convenience store would merit his personal interest and attention, and usually some mirth as well. Because of this, he had a wide and varied circle of friends and acquaintances.

Clarence seemed to map his world in terms of musicians and musical events. For many, a conversation with Clarence may have seemed like an exercise in free association. But when you thought about it, you could see underneath it all that he was a connector: the kind of person who enjoys connecting people together, even if only in a tenuous way. For him, life is a rich tapestry woven from us all, with each strand of color important. He valued everyone, and included them all in his life, without regard to age, station, race, belief, physical or mental attribute. For him, we are all one, as truly we are.