Richard D. Helmcamp

Richard “Dick” Helmcamp grew up in Yoakum, Texas and attended Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, where he received his bachelor and masters’ degrees in Music Education. He met his future wife, Patsy Ann Albers, at the university and they married in July of 1963 in Alief, Texas.

Dick worked as a teacher and band director in Lockhart, Kountze, Ranger, and ended his career in Cleburne, Texas where he spent the last 25 years directing the Golden Pride of Cleburne High. He also dedicated his spare time to his love for theater, acting, singing, and directing stage performances and music with Greater Cleburne Carnegie Players.

Upon retirement in 1994, he and Patsy moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. In Vegas he worked as a blackjack dealer at two Circus Circus Casinos, Silver City and Excalibur. Dick and Patsy returned to Cleburne in 1997 opening Helmcamp’s Recyclepedia, a used bookstore. Dick resumed his acting, singing, and directing pursuits with Greater Cleburne Carnegie Players and Plaza Theater of Cleburne.

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The preceding was adapted from Dick’s obituary, published when he passed away in early 2022. To his students, though, this seems a rather faint sketch of his impact on our lives. When he arrived in Cleburne in 1970, there was very little in the way of a band program that provided opportunities for and incentives toward excellence. Though his hiring in Cleburne was under very inauspicious conditions (murder and prison were involved in creating the vacancy that he filled), he was determined to bring excellence to the students under his charge. Within 5 years, the band was consistently a sweepstakes band, and within 10 years was consistently competitive at the state level.

He did this nearly entirely by the force of his personal leadership – he had the ability to effectively encourage students, to effectively express profound disappointment with students, and the uncanny skill to know which students needed which of those modes of communication at which time. His students often report that they all thought they were “his favorite.” His imprint on the band program in Cleburne is still felt today – all subsequent band directors to date have been either assistants or students of Helmcamp. His students – musicians, welders, physicians, plumbers and bankers – were greatly impacted by his pushing them into cooperative excellence.

He worked hard and planned carefully, and demanded the same from his students. A representative story: at one point (early on – mid-1970’s), he had decided that he wanted to have the band perform a transcription of Orff’s Carmina Burana during concert season. To prepare for this, he noticed that Schola Cantorum, Fort Worth’s premier choral ensemble, was performing Carmina. To learn Carmina from the inside out, Dick joined Schola for that year and sang in their performance of Carmina. When he passed out the music to the band the next spring, he was ready for the piece – we were perhaps less so, but he brought us all along for the ride! In 1987, the band performed Carmina on the football field, advancing to the State Finals.

A more personal story from Kerry: when I received the text about Dick’s final illness, I was actually at the intermission of a high school band concert. This (unnamed) school is roughly the size of Cleburne HS, in a town roughly the size of Cleburne (and both of these have been true since at least the 1970’s). It was a good band, and the concert was going just fine, but nothing they were doing was stretching them, nothing was pushing them. I wondered why this was. When I received the text about Dick’s illness, it dawned on me: they had never had a Helmcamp – good, solid band directors, sure, but not a Helmcamp.