When John Larson was nine or ten years old, he decided he wanted to be a drummer. His senior yearbook, which he recently scanned while making name badges for his 50th class reunion, still says so — plan to attend Millikin University and major in jazz education. Not a banker. Not a businessman. Not an IT professional. A drummer.

He wasn't wrong. He just took the scenic route.

A 1976 graduate of Galesburg High School, John went to Millikin, then completed his music education degree at Western Illinois University. He spent fourteen years as a band director, including a decade at Illinois Valley Central High School in Chillicothe. At the same time, he was doing something unusual: using computers to write music, working with MIDI technology from almost the moment it became available in the mid-1980s. He even taught electronic music classes at IVC. Something clicked in him about the parallel structures of music and code — the same logic underpinning both, just expressed in different languages.

Meanwhile, he and his wife — also an educator — were raising two young children, and the math of two teachers' salaries was becoming clear. John faced a choice: pursue a master's degree to move up the pay scale, or follow the new aptitude he'd discovered. He chose the latter.

Before he went into corporate technology, though, he made one detour to figure out whether he had the stomach for the other life. Between his sophomore and junior years of college, he flew to Los Angeles to see whether studio drumming was a real possibility. He saw musicians who wanted it way more than he did. He came home and took an assistant job helping run a marching band's drum section that summer. Fell in love with it. That decision made everything else make sense.

He started in technology at Growmark — the agricultural cooperative behind the FS brand, where his first job involved calling farmers and asking if the computer was plugged in. Growmark put him through Microsoft certification training. From there, he went into consulting, then landed at State Farm, where he spent twenty years working through seven different roles before retiring in 2020.

He never stopped teaching drums. This is his 50th consecutive year of private lessons — a fact his email address, "John Larson Drums," has been advertising since before most of his current students were born. During his State Farm years, he also directed the jazz ensemble at Normal Community High School for a decade, working evenings while keeping his day job. Music was never something he did on the side. It ran parallel to everything else, always.

The Larson family's impact in Galesburg extends well beyond the band room, through a story that begins with grief and ends with 400 pairs of shoes a year.

When John's mother passed, his father — Jack Larson, host of a local big band radio program with roughly 4,000 listeners — put on his bright yellow jacket one morning, walked across the street to Lombard Elementary School, and asked to speak with the principal. The secretary wanted to know what it was about. He'd lived across from this school his entire life, his boys had gone there, and he was looking for something to do. He wanted to know how he could help.

The first need that came up was a young girl who had moved from New Orleans with three siblings and not much else, but who wanted to try band. They asked if he'd consider covering her flute rental for a few months — about $10 a month. He asked how much it would cost to just buy the flute. They told him. He got out his checkbook.

That led to a fund for musical instruments. Then came the next question: what else does the school need? The answer was shoes. Jack opened a checking account at First National Bank of Galesburg, put "Shoe Project" on it, and used his radio show as what he called his bully pulpit — appealing to his listeners, all longtime Galesburg residents, to contribute. The program grew quietly and steadily. When Jack was diagnosed with cancer, he arranged for both funds to be transferred to the Galesburg Community Foundation so the work would continue after him. He died in 2010.

It still runs. Every year, roughly 400 children receive shoes. John shows up on distribution day when he can. He's seen kids walk in wearing last year's shoes with the soles nearly detached. One year, a little boy came in beaming — the shoes he was about to receive were the first pair he'd ever owned that hadn't been his mother's hand-me-downs. "That's why we do it," John said.

Today, John and his wife live in Normal, close to the State Farm community they've been part of for decades. Their daughter is near Seattle, directing two dance companies while raising three children and a new infant. Their son is a jazz musician based in Kansas City — New York one week, Nashville the next, Tucson the week after — touring with shifting configurations of musicians, sending recordings ahead of time for no-rehearsal gigs in cities where he doesn't know anyone yet. He has two boys from a previous marriage, John and his wife travel to Kansas City roughly six times a year to cover childcare so their son can work.

Asked whether he ever watches his son perform and wonders what might have been, John doesn't hesitate: "I kind of live vicariously without taking all the bumps."

His father said it better than anyone could. Every morning, signing off his radio program, Jack Larson offered the same words to his listeners: be good to yourself, and be good to everybody else. John grew up hearing that. He lived by it. It's still the best advice he knows.