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Burton
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Photo courtesy of Chris Cooper.
Associate Band Director Chris Cooper with Annie Burton at the band Christmas show, which Cooper said was one of her favorite events.
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Photo courtesy of Stephanie Wood.
Burton would bring her sewing kit to games on Friday nights so she could make last-minute repairs to the Patriot Band uniforms.
From parades around the world to Friday night games, if the Homewood Patriot Band was marching, Annie Burton was right there with them. For nearly 40 years, her instrument of choice was the sewing needle.
Burton, who died in September at age 88, was known to generations of band students and parents as the Uniform Lady. Since her own children were in the band, Burton made — or taught others to make — most of Homewood High School’s band uniforms, drum major uniforms, flags and banners.
“She just loved children, loved sewing, wanted that band to look sharp. She wanted them to be the best looking thing in the parade, and she spent her life fighting for it,” said her daughter, Loretta Strouss.
That care showed.
“It’s just a sign of love. We still march band uniforms that were purchased in 1978 because she showed us and taught us how to take care of them,” said HHS Band Director Ron Pence. “Mrs. Burton was one of the first people I met when I came to Homewood 22 years ago. Mrs. Burton is the spirit and the soul of the Homewood Patriot band.”
Burton was raised in Homewood and learned to sew as a young child. She met Gene Burton at Dawson Baptist Church and married him at 18. Burton was a member of Dawson for 75 years and taught Sunday school there for 50 years.
They had four children — Mike, Gail, Loretta and Keith — and Strouss said her mother taught her to sew at age 8. When she entered her freshman year at the brand new Homewood High School in 1972, Strouss “wanted to join everything” and was accepted into the Star Spangled Girls dance line.
But the dance line didn’t have pep rally uniforms, and Burton wanted to make sure they were durable.
“She ended up teaching the Star Spangled Girls how to sew in the brand new home [economics] room of the new high school,” Strouss said. “We would dance all morning and we would sew all afternoon, learning how to make our pep rally suits.”
Strouss’ little brother, Keith, joined the band, and Burton started making their uniforms, too. She made their first banner to carry in a parade, as well as flags and parts of the uniforms.
By the time all her children had graduated, Burton had no intention of leaving.
“She basically never left. We used to tease her that couldn’t she graduate from high school by now? Surely you’re smart enough to graduate,” Strouss said.
In her years with the Patriot Band, Burton would accompany them to the Rose Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, Walt Disney World, Disneyland and trips to England and Ireland. Strouss said her mother’s favorite experiences were kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland and visiting New York for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
But she was also there on Friday nights to watch them perform — and sometimes perform emergency uniform surgery. Strouss said Burton once had to repair a band member’s ripped pants before he took the field to perform his tuba solo. She didn’t have a sewing machine, but she made it happen from the stands.
“So then Mama frantically sews his pants together, runs out of the stands to the bathroom door. There’s a policeman standing there and she starts sassing him: ‘Young man, you go in there and you hand these pants to a young man standing there in his underwear, and you hurry up because he’s got to go march,’” Strouss said.
Strouss said Burton was a perfect example of a volunteer spirit and serving others, but she was also the unquestioned “ruler of the band,” despite standing only 4-foot-10. She wasn’t afraid to boss around the kids or the parents when something needed to be done and teach the kids when they were misbehaving.
“[She] was never shy about givingher opinion about what should be done andhow it should be done. And usually she was right,” Pence said.
In the summers when Burton would teach parents to help her make and repair the uniforms, Associate Band Director Chris Cooper would hang up a sign that read, “Mrs. Burton’s Sweat Shop.” It was accompanied by a list of rules, including “You will not look Mrs. Burton in the eye.”
When Cooper would salute her, Pence said Burton “just laughed and laughed.”
“He made it sound like she was the meanest, snarliest woman in the world,” Strouss said.
Over the years, Burton’s dedication never wavered. She taught Sunday school at Dawson until she was 82, and she sewed uniforms into her 80s as well. She never made a penny off the uniforms she created.
“She’d sew at midnight, she’d sew at 4 o’clock in the morning. She sewed one night until her sewing machine burned up. It started smoking,” Strouss said.
And the uniforms were made to stick around.
“She had some uniforms that were marched for over 30 years because of the care that she took,” Strouss said.
Other band directors noticed her talent, but Strouss said Burton’s answer was always the same: “I don’t love you. I’m not sewing for you.”
Burton had to take some time off from being the Uniform Lady when her husband got sick, and she left Homewood to move in with Strouss in 2014. But Pence said she was still taking care of the band.
“She made enough of those [drum major uniforms and hats] before she retired from us several years ago that we would have them for a lifetime,” Pence said, adding that she has enlisted a friend to continue helping with the sewing.
“Mrs. Burton is still with us and made sure she took care of us,” he said. “She loved the Patriot Band more and as much as anybody has ever loved this community.”