Wayne Erik Larsen
From Philosopedia
Larsen, Wayne Erik (7 October 1946 - 20 April 1996)
Larsen was an honor graduate of Henry High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He conducted the high school "pep band," played the euphonium, and received "A" ratings in state contests. He also received a scholarship to attend the prestigious Interlocken Music Camp in Michigan.
An enlisted Marine veteran, Larsen served in active duty in Vietnam.
A graduate of Columbia University, earning a bachelor's degree, he majored in music history, while working his way through school. He became Assistant Manager of New York City's Goldman Band. With his creative ability, he designed and built himself an adjustable music stand/cabinet.
Larsen conceived, organized, and worked as President of the International Sousa Society, Inc., which also is known as the International Arts Olympics, but was unable to realize the group’s successful completion because of his ill health.
The Detroit Free Press (6 August 1975) wrote about the Sousa Society and Larsen's interest in music:
- Larsen was in Detroit last week to spend a few days with close friend, Leonard Smith, and to conduct
- that famed Detroiter's Concert Band. It was a privilege that he obviously cherished, for more than one reason.
- "It is a superb band," he said with all the enthusiasm he could muster. "Dr. Smith really has done more to
- carry on the (John Philip) Sousa tradition than any other person in the world."
- Asked to define the Sousa tradition, Larsen was quick to reply.
- In terms of a concert, the John Philip Sousa tradition has been to present programs that will entertain and be inspirational. Many associate Sousa simply with marches and marching bands, but he also composed about 15 operas, many of them excellent, and he wrote several novels, poetry, and at least 300 songs and symphonic suites, plus conducting a band for more than 40 years. It's thinking in terms of human enjoyment, of music, that touches a lot of people, of programming that is not of the ivory tower variety.
- Many people don't realize that when the "Olympics" originally started, they were devoted to the arts, that athletics took over later. The "International Arts Olympics" would be structured to bring forth the greatest talents in the world in 24 different cultural areas, from music and dance to sculpture, to the theater, and so on. Arts are not inferior to sports. They're one of the most exalted of human endeavors, and we feel it's time for something new to help call attention to that fact.
Larsen was an active member of a New York AIDS support group, AASH.
Larsen, an admirer of Ayn Rand, whom he had the good fortune to meet when he resided in NYC, was a follower of her Objectivist philosophy. He also had an interest in secular humanism, which he learned about from Warren Allen Smith, who met him in the hospital in the early 1990s. A naturalist, Larsen was inspired by Northern Minnesota's wilderness area.
Upon his death from Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS), his mother - Ella J. Opdal - and family members scattered his cremains in New York, Oregon, and Minnesota in his honor by his family, which made an AIDS quilt in his honor.
Postscript by Warren Allen Smith
In the earily 1990s from Tizard, Oregon, Wayne Larsen's mother, Ella Opdal, telephoned the Manhattan Secular Humanism organization and asked if they had the equivalent of a priest or minister who visited sick non believers, and Warren Allen Smith answered the phone call and said that he, himself, would go visit Wayne. Always thinking that a visit to a hospital should include bringing a little humor, I entered the very sick ex-Marine's hospital room and to his astonishment said, "Hi, I'm your long-lost Uncle Bert." Suspicious because I had no Norwegian accent, he soon caught on to my trick and we became immediate friends when he learned how his mother indirectly had sent me. Learning he had KS, I invited him to be in AASH, the support group I founded where non-believers shared their experiences about which doctors and hospitals and medicines to avoid, which to like. Upon his death, for his mother I arranged a free residence at Miracle House funded by an AID's organization for family members, who could pay whatever they could afford, arranged for her son's cremation, arranged for her returning to his birthplace in Minneapolis to deposit some of the remains, then in another vial to take his cremains home with her to Oregon.
Several years ago, the fellow octogenarian and her husband, Norton Johnson, visited from Oregon, and I took them to a restaurant, Lips, where we reminisced. On the anniversary of his death, they arrived to take their son's "Uncle Bert" to dinner.
{WAS, numerous conversations; Ella J. Opdal, e-mail, 21 January 2008, 1 May 2010}
