Christmas in Kewanee won’t be quite the same this year without Brock Tumbleson. Many people knew Brock as the local funeral director who helped them deal with the passing of a loved one. Some knew him as the organist at their church, others as a member Kiwanis, fundraiser for the Salvation Army, or avid collector of antiques and western memorabilia.
But his family will tell you his real love, next to them, was Christmas.
“Christmas was in his DNA,” daughter Maggie Winter told a packed sanctuary Sunday, Dec. 15 at what would have been the annual concert to raise funds for the Salvation Army. Instead, it was billed as “the first Christmas Extravaganza.”
The family wondered, as did Eddie Toliver, director of the Kewanee Salvation Army 360 Life Center, if there would be a concert this year after Brock’s death in May.
The concert was always “Brock’s baby,” organizing it for the first time in 2000 with Jim Blucker and Dave Sherrard, a local musical combo called the Kewanee Klassics.
According to Blucker, Brock started using his musical talents to raise funds for the Salvation Army with another local musician, Hubert Helmkamp. The piano duo played for the bellringers inside Wal-Mart but when the store moved the red kettles outside, and Helmkamp developed health issues, Brock came up with the idea of forming the Klassics.
He brought Blucker on board with the electric keyboard and Sherrard on drums, with himself on the grand piano. They performed in various venues throughout the year, but presented their first concert for the Salvation Army in December of 2000 at the First United Methodist Church.
Toliver said the group raised $500 the first year, but as the concert started drawing bigger crowds, they eventually raised that amount the last year to a record $5,000. The last in-person concert was held in 2019.
In 2020 they produced a virtual concert which was posted on YouTube and produced a Christmas CD with all proceeds going to the Salvation Army. After that, health issues began to limit both Brock and Jim’s activities and the Klassics disbanded.
Brock kept working on putting together an annual concert for the Salvation Army which last year raised $3,000, according to Toliver. Brock’s tireless persistence also helped the local Salvation Army raise a record $43,000 in its kettle campaign last year, which no one knew at the time would be Brock’s last.
By summer, there was doubt about whether or not there would be a Christmas concert at all. Then Maggie got a phone call from a Wethersfield High School Class of 2003 classmate, Bryan Blanks who had an idea. “Let’s do a show!”
Bryan and Maggie had performed in school plays directed by Cathy Dana and had stayed in touch. Blanks, who now directs and performs in plays in community theater in Peoria, offered to help produce a “Christmas Extravaganza,” in loving memory of Brock Tumbleson and put out a call for local talent to be supplemented by some of his talented friends from Peoria’s theater scene.
The result was 90-minutes of traditional and contemporary Christmas music by the Kewanee Community Choir, the choir of the First Congregational church, and Jim Blucker, with performances and memories by several vocalists including members of the Tumbleson family and the retelling by his son Jake of jokes Brock told each year at the concerts.
There was also a stirring, stage-worthy rendition of “Twas the Night Before Christmas” by Dave Miller, who said Brock had asked him to read the poem at one of the first concerts. Blanks listed Brock as one of his role models at graduation and said it was because when overcome by stage fright or other worries in performing one of their school plays, all he had to look down at Brock, playing the piano at the foot of the stage, and he would give him a reassuring smile which help him go on.
In closing, Maggie repeated the parting remark her father made each year, “You didn’t have to pay to get in, but you’ll have to pay to get out,” a not-so-subtle appeal for concert-goers to put something in the red kettles placed just outside the doors.
The Salvation Army concert wasn’t the only thing Brock was involved with during the Christmas season. For many years he and his family and friends created displays in the windows of Furniture Country including one which featured pieces of his extensive collection of vintage and antique toys.
Brock was also one of the founders of the Northeast Park Drive-through Christmas Display. He and Mark Mikenas, executive director of the Kewanee Chamber of Commerce, discovered the displays on a farm in rural Elmwood and, with volunteers, set them up in the park for the first time in 2017.
This year the lighting crew put up a display just inside the entrance in his memory. Mikenas said Brock’s Kewanee Klassics cohort and retired KHS band director Jim Blucker, was consulted for the correct arrangement of the musical notes on the sign beneath the smiling face of Brock as Santa which are the notes to “We wish you a Merry Christmas!”
