A trumpet comes home: Instrument sold by RHHS band leader now in son's hands

By Andrew Dys, Columnist - adys@heraldonline.com

It took a death to bring home the music. But 41 years after his father died — and just last month his brother died, too — Brian Nicosia has something to remember both by. That something is sturdy and metal, shiny and sweet-sounding, beautiful. Brian Nicosia now has the trumpet that belonged to his father and was the inspiration to a generation of Rock Hill band students.

It's a brass beauty, this horn, an “Olds Special.” The same horn Alfonso “Mr. Nick” Nicosia used to teach so many students at Rock Hill High from 1955 until 1968, when he died way too young at age 41. Mr. Nick in those days turned the school band into a show band that had a national reputation. He was the inspiration, the dreamer, of the band. Kids starting in elementary school hoped to play for him and learned to play from him.

Sometime in 1965 or 1966, Mr. Nick sold his own trumpet, a trumpet he used to help pay his way through college by playing on weekends, to the parents of a student named Randy Hefley.

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“I was in the seventh grade,” Hefley recalled. “My parents paid a hundred bucks for it. I know it was worth far more.”

Hefley played trumpet a couple years, then quit.

“It stayed in its case under a bed for all those years until four or five years ago,” said Hefley, who works at the Bowater plant.

But one day at the plant a few years ago, Hefley heard the guy in the next office playing an Al Hirt CD. Trumpet. He walked over and talked to the guy, Mike Baker. They talked about both playing the trumpet years ago in school. Then Hefley dropped a bombshell to Baker: “I got the trumpet from Mr. Nick.”

Baker played trumpet under Mr. Nick from middle school through graduation in 1961. Mr. Nick is not some teacher to Baker. Mr. Nick changed Baker's life.

“Mr. Nick was special, the best and greatest,” Baker said. “He took an interest in me and saw the potential in me. It was because of him I played trumpet for so long. I still play trumpet.”

Baker bought the trumpet from Hefley.

For the past few years, every so often through months at a time, Baker would pull out the old trumpet and play it. He would look at it. He would think to himself what a great man Mr. Nick was.

He could have sold the trumpet but never did.

Baker knew Mr. Nick had been dead since 1968. He didn't know that Mr. Nick had two sons, Gary and Brian. Then a few weeks ago, an obituary ran in The Herald for Gary Nicosia. Hefley saw the obit. Baker saw the obit. They both saw that there was a Brian Nicosia still alive. Baker went on the Internet and signed the electronic guestbook, writing that he had Mr. Nick's trumpet and would love to give it to his only surviving son.

“It was a sign, God telling me that is why I had this trumpet and kept it and it needed to go home to his son,” Baker said.

Baker and Brian Nicosia met and talked for hours. Baker gave that trumpet to Brian Nicosia, in the original case.

They are now fast friends. Baker found out that Brian Nicosia, like his late brother Gary, also played trumpet. Brian, who was just 8 years old when his father died, has something to take out of that old case every so often. Those memories of his father now are more than in his mind. The memories are in the horn.

Brian is out of practice, but he can blow a few notes on the horn. Mr. Nick's horn. The trumpet that after 40-plus years, came home.