Mr. Leighton’s last Noel: Beloved music teacher announces retirement

MOSES LAKE — At 3 p.m. Tuesday, there are only a few hours left before showtime, and Dan Leighton flits about Moses Lake High School’s gym trying to get everything in place.

Unbeknownst to the hundreds of parents and students about to file into the gym for the annual Christmas music program, a fixture of the community for decades now, Leighton, a music teacher in Moses Lake since 1988 and himself a fixture of the town, will soon be taking his last bow.

After 31 years with the Moses Lake School District, nearly half of his lifetime, Leighton is retiring from his position as a music teacher at Garden Heights Elementary School.

It’s been a longtime since Leighton first crash-landed in town. A Central Washington University graduate, Leighton started his teaching career with a short stint in Thorp, followed by a 10-year hiatus from teaching which ended with Leighton’s arrival in Moses Lake.

From there, Leighton got to work teaching the music program for the school now known as Midway Elementary, which at the time was still a kindergarten, three days a week for his first nine years in town.

“I just loved the little kids, and I’d have such a ball,” Leighton said in between setting up chairs Tuesday afternoon.

Later, as the school district continued to build new schools and rehabilitated Midway as an elementary school, Leighton moved on to Garden Heights Elementary.

Though he was once offered a position teaching high school choir, a coveted position for public school music teachers, he couldn’t leave his younger students. Leighton, an energetic man with a self-admitted touch of ADD, found himself right at home bouncing around a classroom with his students, he said.

“They laugh at my jokes and I do silly stuff,” Leighton said, laughing and cracking a wide grin.

Though he’s now renowned for his blockbuster Christmas program every year, Leighton brought his lighthearted energy to all of the activities with his kids. During the school’s annual Jog-a-Thon, Leighton said he would bring out his large speakers and dance with his kids for an hour or more.

The annual Christmas and spring programs, however, are peak Leighton. No two programs are ever the same, with the veteran music teacher writing new scripts and a handful of new songs each time.

Along with his wife, Leighton would spend considerable time each year crafting props, large and small, that fit that year’s program. One year, Leighton made a number of four-and-a-half foot Christmas trees out of paper.

“And when I handed them to teachers, they’d go, ‘what do we do with these?’” Leighton recalled, chuckling. “And I said, ‘I don’t know, decorate them!’”

By mid-December, each class had decorated its own tree, all of which ended up lining the stage at that year’s Christmas program. Some teachers had decorated their trees with snow, others with gingerbread. Leighton fondly remembered that one of the teachers, knowing Leighton was an ex-firefighter with a good sense of humor, had burnt the edges of their tree as a joke.

Another year, the program built a gingerbread house that stood taller than the kids, and the kids walked through the confection to make it to the stage.

“My wife is very artistic, so I started traditions of making big props, things like that,” Leighton said.

The Christmas events have long been huge affairs in the community, and over the years they have outgrown the auditoriums first at Garden Heights and then at Frontier, before finding their current home in Moses Lake High School’s Chiefs Gym.

“We’ll have grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, last year even the postman brought somebody,” Leighton said. “My tradition is, we have a big big family event.”

With around 500 kids involved in his music programs, the events have a number of acts with rotating grade levels — second and third graders start, then kindergartners and first grade, etc. — with the program’s first three songs revolving around the central narrative of the play. Then, at the end, all of the students, hundreds in all, stand up and take part in a grand finale to end the night.

This year, the songs were set to a connecting narrative of “My first Christmas in Hawaii.” More traditional props of hot cocoa and pine were replaced by handmade surfboards and cardboard palm trees, as the students reminisced about their hometowns through song.

Along with a deluge of larger props, the Leightons create hundreds of small crafts each year for every performer to take home with them. In past years, those crafts have ranged from tiny Christmas trees to Christmas lights, all cut out from paper.

This year, the Leightons spent an entire day cutting out the facade of a paper cup, before hot gluing on a “straw” — actually a pixie stick — and a little paper umbrella. Five hundred in all.

Though the Christmas program has become the biggest musical event of the year for Garden Heights families, the music program also throws a somewhat smaller program each spring.

During one of those late May, early June productions, Leighton recalls the program centered around the story of an alien that crash lands — in a spaceship the Leightons built with glue and aluminum foil, of course — in America. When the alien asked about the strange land they had arrived in, an auditorium full of school children responded with a series of patriotic songs that exemplified the nation’s ideals.

During a lull in the middle of a song, as the singing died away just momentarily, a military jet buzzed just overhead, punctuating the silence with the growl of its engines. After the show, Leighton was asked how he managed to time the fly-by, which had in fact been a total coincidence.

It was a testament to the expectations Leighton had built up over the years for his energetic and creative shows, and Leighton, never one to skip a beat, didn’t miss a chance to claim credit.

“Oh, I just called them up,” Leighton recalled responding. “They were actually supposed to be here two songs ago!”

Though Leighton announced his retirement Tuesday, he will be sticking around for the rest of the school year and will be organizing one last spring program before he dons his own Hawaiian shirt and starts traveling the world.

It’s been hard, Leighton said, coming to terms with his own departure. He’s going to miss his fellow teachers, but most of all, he’s going to miss his kids, who he credits for his youthful demeanor.

“Every day I come to 500 kids, moving, moving, moving, all around,” Leighton said. “Not being around 500 kids is going to be hard. I mean, I’m an active guy, we’ve got a 25-acre farm, we’ve got farm stuff to do, so I’ll busy myself. But being around 500 kids keeps you young.”

“It’s been a fun ride, but I need to spend more time with my family and go visit my sister in Florida,” he added. “And I just need to go out while I’m still strong and not be coming out of here in a wheelchair.”

Though he has one last show in him before calling it quits, Leighton wanted to make the announcement during Tuesday’s event, which is consistently the year’s biggest.

Shortly before the program’s finale, when the announcement was made, Leighton turned from where he had been conducting the performance and faced an audience of his students, their parents, and perhaps the postman.

With tears in his eyes Leighton said thank you, and goodbye, to a full house.

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.