ED. NOTE: The broadcast was pre-empted Friday in the Eastern Time Zone. Click to view segment.
Bowling Green resident and retired BGSU director of bands Bruce Moss is scheduled to appear with the Wheaton Municipal Band Friday, Aug. 15 on the CBS News segment “On the Road” with Steve Hartman between 6:45 and 7 p.m.
It’s possible, Moss said, for an encore airing on “CBS Sunday Morning,” which airs from 9-10:30 a.m.
The program is a tribute to military band director Colonel (ret.) Arnald Gabriel, who served as director of the United Air Force Band from 1964 to 1985. Gabriel turned 100 this year.
Gabriel was a frequent guest conductor for the Wheaton Municipal Band in Illinois, which Moss directs.
Moss wrote that: “We had a running joke that he planned not only to conduct on his 100th, but that he would conduct this group, so I sent him a contract over 20 years ago to do this.”
Health problems, however, made it impossible for Gabriel to travel to Illinois, so Moss arranged to have a video made of him conducting two patriotic anthems.
That video was then projected during a concert in Wheaton with the band playing those tunes and following his conducting.
For the segment, Hartman visited with Gabriel in Washington D.C., and to Bowling Green to interview Moss.
Moss has conducted the Wheaton Municipal Band for 46 years. He served as a substitute conductor for one concert in 1979 when he was a band director in Elmhurst, Illinois. He was contracted as the director the next year.
The band was founded in 1930 and is now recognized as one of the outstanding municipal bands in the country. It was featured on a PBS celebration of the music of John Philip Sousa.
Moss taught at BGSU for 30 years from 1994 until his retirement in 2024.
