STERLING WEED AND THE CRASH OF 1929

[Henry]

Sterling Weed


The Roaring Twenties were boom years for Sterling Weed. He had, like so few other Vermonters, attended college, traveling to Indiana to learn piano tuning and repair.

His hometown of St. Albans was a bustling rail town at the outset of the 1920s. Hundreds of men worked in the yards, maintaining tracks, building boxcars and locomotives.

Weed's musical talents were well known. Almost everyone in town knew of the boy who'd traveled by train several times a week to Burlington even before World War I -- for flute lessons! Each day, upon his return, there'd be a group of a dozen or so, asking him what Burlington looked like, felt like, smelled and sounded like.

Soon after he returned from college, town leaders asked him to provide something sorely lacking in Taylor Park at the heart of the city: Live music for the gazebo.



Weed assembled an orchestra that included his older brothers, full-time dairy farmers in Enosburgh. Weed played the saxophone. His oldest brother played trumpet and violin; the middle brother played drums and trombone and sang. Their park performances consisted of waltzes, patriotic tunes, marches -- whatever the crowd fancied.

The band also traveled northwestern Vermont and Quebec, performing at dances that, in the earliest days, might net them $5 -- total. Weed supplemented the income teaching music in high schools, and he was paid to play music during the silent motion pictures showing at the movie house. He tuned a piano now and again.

The stock market crash of 1929 didn't make big news in St. Albans that Sterling Weed could recall. That was far away. He was 28, busier than ever with his music enterprises, especially because the reconstruction after the floods of 1927 was rapidly reopening roads and replacing washed-out bridges, giving the Weed orchestra access to more and more dance halls.

By 1933, the economy's wrath came to his doorstep. The $10,000 savings account he'd been slowly accruing at the local bank was lost -- uninsured and irretrievable.

The banker's apologetic explanation Weed still recalls today at age 103: "It's just not there anymore."

He continued playing music and became a legend. He plays his saxophone every day in his home of many years in St. Albans, which is cluttered with the relics of a century.