It was a perfect storm that has brought Ted Lemen to the first annual Fox River Ragtime Festival. As a young man, his father sang with a family octet at church, and later with various barbershop quartets and choruses, eventually taking up tenor banjo. His mother played violin in the high school orchestra and was always a great singer around the piano. The house was filled with music, specially when aunts who knew how to play came over on holidays and found themselves crippled by the spinet keyboard with a few less than 88 keys. The piano had been purchased for his sister’s lessons, but she wasn’t interested, so Ted taught himself two fingers at a time starting with barbershop classics and hymns. His interest in trains began with a cousin and an uncle who worked for the railroad and the piano-playing aunt rode the Rock Island to a from work. First though, his dad bought an American Flyer train one Christmas and it ran in a circle under the tree. His dad also took him on a New Years day roundtrip from Chicago to Milwaukee on the speedy North Shore Line electric interurban just days before it ended service. His aunt took him on his first steam engine excursion from Chicago to Galesburg in the late 1950s, his first experience with high-speed steam engines. Years later as a college student, Ted launched a campaign to save that same popular Burlington Railroad steam excursion program in February 1966, as its end had been announced in Fall 1965. While the campaign failed, it had attracted lots of interest from those who wanted to see some steam engines continue to run. So, the group then bought a little steam locomotive in Indiana and brought it to Illinois, starting what became the Monticello Railway Museum, which opened to the public in 1972. To increase ridership, Ted started the World Championship Old-time Piano Playing Contest & Festival in 1975, now in its 52nd year and taking place in Oxford, MS. He has emceed every year and has also won the New Rag Contest for composers twice. Now, gratefully, a second rail-located Ragtime event for Northern Illinois aficionados will take place under the leadership of one of our Junior Division contestants, Anderson Pries, a dedicated electric railfan.
Listen to Ted Lemen: