93-year-old musician finds home in Sandpoint

At 93 years old, Les Tucker has been making music most of his life. He’s been in numerous bands and inducted into the Northwest Western Swing Music Hall of Fame. Still, Tucker, who lives at Luther Park senior living in Sandpoint, says he’s not a professional musician.

Les primarily plays the fiddle and guitar and has also sung for various western swing bands on occasion. He started playing, he said, because his family did.

“We lived out in the country in Arkansas. And they often played in the evening around the fireplace,” he said. “ I was seven years younger than the next youngest one. So they kind of ignored me and they never really helped me to learn how to play. I always kind of wished I would have then, but they were all pretty good — and the girls played guitar and my dad played fiddle and my brother played a fiddle really good.”

Les remembers his siblings and father playing music around the fireplace when he was a young boy, around 5 or 6 years old, and falling asleep with his back to the piano.

Eventually, Les’s brother joined the Army, and his sister got married. But there was still an old fiddle and guitar in the house, so Les decided to learn how to play. Then he teamed up with some of the other kids, he said, and they formed a band, playing for country dances.

“In Arkansas, you know they’d invite people out to the country house once a month and have a dance. And we would play even though we weren't all that great, but I guess what we were the best they had. So they tolerated us.”

Les’s first band, “The Happy Roving Cowboys,” played through high school. After graduating in 1945, he joined the Air Force and was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. There, he joined a band there before later starting his own.

Les, who was then a sergeant, built up the band, changing out some of the members until they had the sound they wanted.

The band grew to include a saxophone player, fiddler, electric lead guitar, and bass. Les played rhythm, guitar and sang vocals. Les also bought the front of an old Buick and used it as a frame for a trailer he built to store equipment.

Their last gig, performing at the Lake Cliff nightclub in Shreveport, Louisiana, was the same place where Elvis Presley got his start.

It was during that time in Louisiana, Les said, that he met his future wife, Peggy. He remembered he’d called her up on a Saturday and asked if she’d like to go on a date.

“She said, ‘Well I go to church on Sunday.’ I said, ‘Well, I'd be glad — I can go to church. I can go to church with you?’ So that's how we started dating. Ended up about six months later, we got married,” he said.

Roughly three weeks after getting married, Les was sent overseas to assist in the Berlin Airlift.

“About three weeks after we got married I went overseas and left her,” he said. “I kept saying the only reason I wanted to marry her now was to be sure she'd be there when I got back.”

After six months overseas, Les came back to the U.S. and was stationed at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. He worked in flight tests as an engineer for three years, playing in a band they called “Almost Bluegrass,” out of respect for Les.

“I didn't want to play bluegrass, but that's what they played,” he said. “So I played and they changed the name to Almost Bluegrass.”

From there, Les said, he was selected for Officer Candidate School at the Keith Randolph Air Force Base. He became a second lieutenant, then spent a year in navigation school before going to Barksdale Air Force Base.

After Barksdale, Les went to Arizona State University to earn his masters’ degree in mechanical engineering. After graduation, he was stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

“I was helping design some boosters for missile launches. And I did that there for three years. And all that time I really [wasn’t] involved in a lot and bands. I played music all the time, but not the group.”

He stayed at Vandenberg AFB for three years before retiring in 1970. His wife Peggy was a teacher, and Les decided to get teaching credentials as well.

Les started teaching elementary school, then moved to teaching a middle school shop class.

“I got awful interested in building stuff when I was in the shop and I said, ‘I'd like to learn to make fiddles.’ So I started making instruments. And I did that for the next several years,” he said. “I built all kinds of guitars, mandolins, fiddles.”

Les’s specialty, he said, are five-string violins as opposed to the standard four-string. Over the years he’s also made several guitars and mandolins.

Tucker taught for 15 years and continued playing music with Almost Bluegrass and making instruments. Eventually, Les and Peggy retired and moved back to Louisiana, and a small town called Simsboro.

“We had a place back in Louisiana, we bought just because we could years before,” he said. “[We] decided to go back there and build a house while her mom was still alive back there.”

In Simsboro, Les started yet another band called the “Last Chance Western Swing Band.” They lived there for another 15 years, and Les played in many places similar to where he now lives — retirement homes and nursing homes.

At one point, Les and his band even got invited to the Louisiana State Jazz Festival, despite not playing jazz.

It was on a particularly hot afternoon, after a day of hard work, Les said, that he found himself thinking it might be time to move again.

“If you've ever been to Louisiana, you'll know you don't perspire down there, you sweat,” he said. “I was sitting on the tracker after I'd been working most of the day and I just turned the key off and sat there thinking I was soaking wet with sweat from head to toe and thought to myself, I'm 70 years old and you know, this is not really fun anymore.”

Les went inside and talked to Peggy. She agreed, and the two packed up their motorhome.

“She said, ‘Yeah, let's get out of here.’ So we had the biggest garage sale the town had ever seen. Sold everything we had, practically,” he said. “We took off, headed down the road on our motorhome.”

Along the way, Peggy suggested that if they were going to live in their motorhome they ought to get a bigger one.

They drove to Visalia, California, where their daughter was living at the time, before continuing on their travels. Over the period of several years, they traveled to all 48 lower states, as well as Canada and Alaska.

Les continued to play with an old high school friend living in Oregon when he visited, and an assortment of RV parks they stopped at, including spots in Arizona and Texas where they wintered.

Later on, the two decided to settle in Oregon, in the town of Woodburn. When he was able to, Les would often spend his free time with his friend from Oregon in his shop, where the two would work on repairing instruments.

One particular instrument, a bass fiddle, Les had picked up for $35 on a whim.

“Everything in the world that could be wrong with it was wrong with it,” he said. “When I left Oregon, two years ago when we came here, I sold my bass fiddle for $1,500 against $35 for it originally.”

Les and Peggy spent another 20 years in Oregon. Then two years ago, they retired to Sandpoint.

When he first arrived, Les said, he met a woman who played piano and started accompanying her with his guitar. The group grew, and then Les joined another band called Slow Jam. Then he started another band at Luther Park.

“It was sort of a sing-along, a lot of people knew those old type songs,” he said. “We’d been playing almost two years here, and we named this band, also, ‘Last Chance,” because we thought it was our last chance.”

The band played every Wednesday and Thursday afternoon, he said, playing some older songs and favorites like “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain.” They continued playing for close to two years until COVID-19 forced the state into lockdown.

Peggy passed away in November, after having a stroke. They were married 71 years, Les said. During that time she always encouraged him in his music.

“We laughingly said the only arguments we ever had were whose mother was the best,” he said. “We had a lot of fun together … She was very tolerant of my music playing. That’s one thing, she didn’t really play music, and she wasn’t great at keeping time, but she didn’t mind if I played and she encouraged me all the time, so it worked out really well.

Although Peggy’s gone, Les has been keeping the company of his cat, “Nuisance,” named after a cat he and Peggy had years ago.

The first “Nuisance,” a calico with a fluffy tail, had shown up one day at Les and Peggy's home in Louisiana.

“My wife, she didn't want a cat. So she kept trying to run it away with a broom and it stayed there for a couple of days. And finally, one day he was walking with us from the shop down a little sidewalk I had there to the house. That cat was going to run in-between her legs,” Les said. “I said, ‘I'm gonna feed the cat’ and she said, ‘Well, and you've got a cat.’ So I asked, ‘What do you want to name it?’ And then she says ‘Nuisance.’”

The cat became a constant companion when the couple traveled in their motorhome and the second “Nuisance,” “‘Nuisance Too,” has the same fluffy tail and friendly demeanor, he said.

“She hears a knock and she heads for the door and she wants to get petted. And when they leave, she kind of gets her feelings hurt if they don't say anything, to her or take their foot and rub her a little bit or something. She sits there and looks and kind of looks kind of forlorn if they don't say anything to her,” he said. ““It's not quite as lonely as it is being without my wife — the cat can't quite take her place, but it's better than nothing.”

Recently Les also had a few of his safety restrictions lifted, so instead of staying in his room, he’s able to socialize a little more and go outside.

He’s still waiting to make music with the band again, he said. With vaccinations becoming available, he’s hoping that might not be too long.

“We're all anxious to get back to playing again,” Les said.

To listen to the Bee 7Bee podcast about Les, click here.