Ray Ware
Lead Trombone
Ray is a native of Snyder, Texas, where his parents were advised by a doctor to have him play a wind instrument as therapy for childhood asthma. A call to relatives soon turned up an old slide trombone in the family. So at age 10 Ray began a life-long love affair with music and the trombone. He played in school bands through his high school years, and in 1941 he began to play in a really bad dance band. The experience scarred him for life! He was drafted into the Army in 1943 and placed into radio operator training (because even mediocre musicians routinely scored very high on Morse code aptitude tests). Ray carried his trombone into combat in the Asiatic-Pacific Theater, and after the fighting subsided, he joined one of the USO-like entertainment groups made up of musicians, singers, and stand-up comics. After WWII Ray played in dance bands at the University of Texas, Austin, and at UT Medical Branch, Galveston. Then his trombone went into the closet for a 35 year hiatus. During the trombone's exile to the closet, Ray accumulated a wife and two children to support, so he joined the Air Force for internship at Wm. Beaumont Army Hospital. He was then assigned to the USAF School of Aviation Medicine, San Antonio, where as an Air Force flight surgeon he taught and did research on physiological measurement methods for use on air crew members in flight. Several years later, he left active duty and joined Southwest Research Institute to do medical instrumentation R&D. Ray left SwRI to join the VA Hospital System as a research administrator. After so many years of doing such fun things, it was time to go to work for a living, so he specialized in Nuclear Medicine and found that to be even more fun! He worked as a "nuke" in VA Hospitals at Kerrville, San Antonio and Dallas, there reaching the level of his incompetence as an administrator. After retirement 5 years ago, Ray finally was able to study music theory and take some private trombone lessons, learning immense respect for real musicians in the process.