I am Byron Myhre, a retired physician and an Emeritus Professor at UCLA School of Medicine.  I took from Claude for 5 years from 1991 to about 1996.  I live in Palos Verdes, on the South side of Los Angeles. I was one of the last students he had.

I started out by my going to his camp at Isomata in 1990 and I enjoyed it very much.  The next year I got up courage to start lessons with him at Leadwell street.  I was in my mid-60's, and had not taken lessons for 40 years, although I had continued playing, thus I was a little intimidated about taking from him, but I called him and he encouraged me to come.

I had never had much endurance, and after about two months he said that I should change my embouchure because I was playing too low on the red.  He gave me a routine.  Among other things, I was to put the mouthpiece at the correct spacing on my lips about 20-30 times a day and buzz He was quite opposed to mouthpiece buzzing, feeling that the goal of a trumpet player should be to blow a horn and not a mouthpiece; but in this case he felt it was indicated.  So he said "I'll put in your lesson book that you should position the mouthpiece, and you will know what that means."  He refused to write "buzz" on my lesson sheet.  Later when I tried to look this up on my lesson sheets I could not find the buzz statement, and then I remembered what he had done.

After I had taken lessons from him about a year, he told me one day that they had found an enlarged lymph node in his neck- which he did have.  He had radiation therapy for this.  The treatment knocked him down for quite a time, but after a while he started giving lessons again.  At this time, he closed the Leadwell studio and moved back to Big Bear where he had his permanent home.  Once a month, a buddy of mine and I would make the 3 hour trip up the mountain and then back down.

The next year he was feeling better (not great but better ) and I went to camp again the second time and enjoyed it as much as before.  By this time he had married his second wife, Pat.  As the time went on, he began to lose strength.  He was having trouble eating and would eat only light and easy to chew food.  My lesson was at 1:00 on Saturday so I often caught him at lunch.  It would take him some time to eat, because he was getting weaker, but when lesson time came, his adrenaline would flow and he again was the teacher taking charge. He would sit at his desk and put you through the ropes.

In January of (I think) 1996, Pat called and said he was canceling my lesson.  I thought it was temporary, but she said no.  He recommended one of his teaching graduates, Rich Hofmann, from who I have been taking ever since.  He died that summer.  I had a Benge 3+ at that time and for a long time he didn't say too much about it.  However, in the fall of the last year he suddenly looked at me one day and said, "If you're ever going to do anything with the horn, you've got to get a better one.  That model is not good, and yours is one of the worst.  I subsequently bought a CG Selmer, but it took some time coming, and I never got to take a lesson from him on it.  I told Pat that I had bought the horn and she passed it on to him.

The interesting thing about Claude was that he was always upbeat.  He would tolerate no nonsense during the lesson, but he would make some statement so that you always left the lesson on a positive note.  I'm sure this was difficult sometimes for him to do this to me, because I wasn't a very good trumpet player, but I ended up a lot better than if I hadn't taken from him.

He was quite a guy and an excellent teacher.

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