This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
02/08/2017 07:30 AMWhen George Hauer was 8 years old, he and his father, who had won a Bronze Star for his service as a military surgeon overseas during World War II, went to a parade in New York City for Decoration Day, which is now called Memorial Day.
“There was a heavy-set guy missing his right leg,” George says, “and I can still see him sitting in his wheelchair. He was wearing a VFW hat, and he had two tin cups in front of him. One had the red poppies, the other had in front ‘Donation: 25 cents, please.’ My father put a five-dollar bill in his cup.”
As they walked away, George’s father told him, “If you see a disabled vet and they need help, do it. Don’t ask questions, because without them you wouldn’t be here.”
George took that advice to heart. For the past 11 years, he has been helping disabled veterans through Operation: Music Aid, a charity that donates musical instruments to hospitalized veterans in the hope that playing music will help their psychological and physical rehabilitation.
“We have sent over 3,500 instruments to military hospitals all over the country and to units in Iraq and Afghanistan,” George says. “If you want to break it down, it’s almost one a day.”
George founded the organization with Clark Knicely, a fellow Madison resident who was a customer of George’s at the Madison Music Center, George’s music store on Orchard Park Road. A guitar player and disabled veteran of the first Gulf War, Clark told George about his experiences in military hospitals.
The men decided to reach out to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and offer a donation of instruments, but they met with some bureaucratic resistance.
“Enter Dr. Gerald Curran,” says George. “He lives in Madison. He’s now a retired colonel in the Connecticut National Guard. He’s on staff at the VA hospital in West Haven. He made a phone call down to Walter Reed, and doors opened, and the rest is history.”
George contacted representatives of the instrument manufacturer Yamaha, which donated a dozen guitars and some keyboards. A Madison woman donated an electronic keyboard that had belonged her late husband, a British military veteran.
George and Clark hadn’t yet worked out their delivery procedures.
“We were contacted by an Air Force vet who had been in Iraq who’s an ambulance driver now for the Waterford Fire Department,” George says, “and he persuaded the chief to donate their box ambulance for the day, but the ambulances can’t leave the jurisdiction without a chief’s car present, so we had a three-car entourage down to Walter Reed.
“We went to therapy,” says George. “There were amputees. One of the guys who was with us, a six-foot-eight Waterford policeman, when we came out of that ward, he was shaking. He told me, ‘I’ve pulled bodies out of cars on I-95, but I’ve never seen anything like this.’
“There was a very, very pretty young gal, I would say she was about 22, sitting in a wheelchair, missing both legs mid-thigh down. I asked her, ‘What branch of the service are you in?’ and she straightened up in her wheelchair and barked out, ‘I’m a Marine, sir!’
“What are you gonna do?” says George, shaking his head and smiling.
“We gave out the guitars and some of the keyboards in therapy,” he says. “The main keyboard we had brought down, we heard from the chaplain, was installed in the main chapel, and it turned out the first use was Easter Sunday morning.”
Taking his father’s advice not to ask questions, he doesn’t try to learn the identity of the recipients of the instruments or to follow up on their musical progress. George’s contact with the soldiers is essentially limited to thank-you letters, some of which are reproduced in Operation: Music Aid’s brochure.
One soldier wounded in Afghanistan wrote, “There was a long time when I was over there that I wondered if Americans really cared about what we were doing for them. This guitar is a reminder to me that there are those that do truly care about soldiers and what they try to protect.”
George has received some official recognition. Congressman Joe Courtney participated in a ceremony at the Madison Music Center when Operation: Music Aid donated its thousandth guitar. Just last Saturday, the Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution gave George an award for outstanding service to veterans at its 125th anniversary gala in Wallingford.
But George diverts the credit away from himself. He praises the companies that have donated equipment to the charity or have sold it at a steep discount. Besides the guitars and keyboards from Yamaha, Operation: Music Aid has received guitars from Gibson and SHS, straps from Levy’s Leathers, strings from D’Addario, cases from Access, harmonicas from Hohner, tuners from Danelectro, and instructional books from Alfred.
Local groups that have provided financial support include the Lions Club, the Rotary, the Madison Chamber of Commerce, and the Knights of Columbus.
George believes that the retail value of the goods that the organization has distributed is more than half a million dollars.
A Start in Music
George’s connections with the music business are the fruit of long, varied career. Born in 1939 in New York City, he says he got a head start in school because his mother, a teacher, would seat him in the back of her classes when she couldn’t find a babysitter.
He started college, at Syracuse University, at the age of 16, and earned bachelor’s degrees in history and broadcast journalism. He had taken a few courses toward a master’s degree in broadcast journalism when he had a chance encounter with a concert promoter who was having a hard time selling tickets to a Kingston Trio concert at a venue near the university.
George told the promoter he could help.
“I went to every social chairman and president of the 35 fraternities, and said, ‘Here’s the deal: You two guys get a pair of comp tickets, if you get 50 pairs from the fraternity,’” George says. “I sold out the house.
“They hired me to do that for other groups and so on,” he says, “and I got to see the inside life of many performers.”
Over the years, George would work with performers including Harry Belafonte, Mort Sahl, Victor Borge, Jimi Hendrix, and Richie Havens—but he prefers to keep their inside life off the record.
His subsequent jobs included working as a radio DJ in Syracuse, running traffic at a TV station in Washington, D.C., managing rock acts, and serving as the manufacturer’s representative for Sunn Amplifiers in the Northeast, a job that brought him to Madison.
He worked for a year and a half for The Source as a sales rep while also writing a column called “The Wry Side.” In 2001, he opened the Madison Music Center.
In 2011, George authored, with Robin Whitney, a photo book called Two Scoops of Hooah! The T-Wall Art of Kuwait and Iraq, which collected images of the murals that American military personnel had painted on the protective barriers around their bases. Proceeds from the sales of the book, which can be ordered at www.schifferbooks.com, go to Operation: Music Aid.
George sold the Madison Music Center a year ago, but he says he still stops by to help the new owner learn “the ropes.” The store continues to serve as Operation: Music Aid’s base of operations.
George, who is divorced, has three grown children. For the past 20 years, he has been with Ethel Anne Chorney, whom he calls “my significant other.” Between them, they have 11 grandchildren.
George has helped bring music to thousands of people, but he doesn’t play an instrument himself.
“I was born deaf in one ear,” he says. “I could never pick up the notes.”
Although Clark Knicely has moved away from Madison and is no longer involved with the charity, George says he plans to keep working with Operation: Music Aid “as long as I’m physically able to.”
He has some good role models, the disabled vets themselves.
“It’s quite something,” George says, “to see these kids—and they are kids—missing limbs, parts of limbs, still having the guts to carry on.”
To nominate a Person of the Week, contact Tom Conroy at t.conroy@Zip06.com.