Father Lach’s 1937 European Band Tour

Jerry Banik, January 2024

In the summer of 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt was our president.  The United States was working its way out of the Great Depression.  A civil war raged in Spain.  In New Jersey, the Hindenburg crashed.  Amelia Earhart disappeared.  And sixty-five young men from Whiting, Robertsdale and nearby, spent eighty-four days crossing the Eastern U.S. by bus, and the Atlantic Ocean by steamship, to play music all across Europe.

This symphonic band’s European tour was organized by Father John Lach, the pastor of Whiting’s Immaculate Conception School and leader of I.C.’s band.  Adam Lesinsky, who was the instrumental music director at Whiting High school, was the tour band’s conductor.  Among his many accomplishments, Mr. Lesinsky was also the president of the National School Orchestra Association.  His wife, teacher May Coleman Lesinsky, accompanied the band on the tour along with nurse Ann Luptak of Indiana Harbor.

 L. to R., below: Fr. Lach, Mr. Lesinsky, Mrs. Lesinsky, Ann Luptak

The tour left a legacy of pride for Immaculate Conception Church and School, Whiting citizens, and for local Slovak Americans.

The events of that tour, compiled from accounts and diaries of adults on the trip, as well as from two of the band members, were published by Mr. and Mrs. Lesinsky’s daughter, Tanya Lesinsky Carey.

“Imagine,” the book begins, “taking 65 boys to Europe for eighty-four days with three chaperones!” 

In 1936, Fr. Lach had been planning and preparing for a goodwill tour of Czechoslovakia with the band.  The band would be made up of thirty-five players from the Whiting High School band, twenty-one of whom were former I.C. players, along with some of Mr. Lesinsky’s best former students from Hammond, Gary, Hobart and Cicero, Illinois.  The youngest was twelve years old, and the oldest twenty-four.  Conductor Lesinsky wrote that, in preparation for their tour, the band rehearsed for two hours, once a week, for two years, and performed in many Indiana cities.

An employee of the National Broadcasting Company in New York heard the band and convinced Fr. Lach to book the band not only in Czechoslovakia, but throughout Europe. Fr. Lach and a booking agent traveled to France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Yugoslavia, and Italy to book the concerts, where, in the summer of 1937, they would perform the music of John Philip Sousa, Franz Liszt, Schubert, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, and other great composers.

Performances in Europe were booked on a 60-40 basis, with the band getting 60% of the proceeds, and the sponsors 40%.  Still, each band member needed to put up $50 of his own money for the trip, despite the hardships of the Great Depression. 

Fr. Lach raised donations through the largest Slovak newspaper in the U.S., which he owned, and put on a series of contests to pick a queen for the tour.

The girl who sold the most tickets, Elizabeth Harcar of Bentleyville, PA, was crowned queen and would travel with the band.

On June 14, 1937, Fr. Lach celebrated Mass at the I.C. church in Whiting, where some 2,000 people gathered outside at the grotto to send the group off.  They boarded two Checkerway buses, and with a baggage truck behind and a police escort with sirens blaring ahead, off they went to perform in five towns on their way to New York.

Along the route, stops were made where various Slovak-American groups served them traditional, old-country food.

In their dark blue, double-breasted coats trimmed with gold buttons and red sleeve stripes, over the next 84 days they were to play 17 concerts in the U.S. and 56 more while on passage aboard ship and in European venues.

On June 19 in New York City, the boys were given their passports and tickets and boarded the steamship Ile de France.  Among the fellow passengers of the lucky boys were the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, who were on their way to Paris to dance at the World’s Fair.

Almost all of the boys reportedly suffered seasickness on the ocean passage, but each day on the ship they rehearsed.  They also performed two concerts, one for the touring class of passengers, and another for first class.

On June 25 they arrived in Le Havre, France and set out by bus for Paris.  Over the next six weeks they played concerts in Zurich, Salzburg, Prague, Venice, Rome, Munich, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels and other great cities in concert halls and plazas all across the continent.

After the band’s final performance in Europe, they boarded the steamship Paris, where they could dine one last time on French cuisine on the return trip to America. 

Once back in the States, they played ten more concerts enroute from New York to Whiting.

The band received a triumphant welcome when they got home.  On September 5th they were greeted in Wicker Park by a crowd that the Hammond Times estimated at 25,000 people, including the mayors of Whiting, Hammond, East Chicago, Gary, and Hobart.  There they played their final concert, hurried to find their parents, and returned to their homes.

What a summer for the boys, Immaculate Conception, our Slovak community and Whiting! Mrs. Lesinsky had kept a detailed notebook on the tour.  In it she noted that she never thought the tour would take place because it was so difficult, but for Father Lach there had been no doubt.  After the tour he wrote a letter to each of the band members, in which he said, “Our dreams came true.  We realized our ambition to make a European tour.  It was a financial failure but a great moral success.  The European tour gave you an advantage that is not enjoyed by one boy in millions.  Carry on, and whether you choose to follow music as a profession or not, you will never regret keeping up your music.”