Boyd Hood, Trumpeter

You wouldn't call what happened to trumpeter Boyd Hood in the fourth grade a lucky accident. Yet the fire that burned 60 percent of his body and caused his right fingers to be amputated at the first joint above the knuckles was partly responsible for his commitment to an instrument he had started playing only recently. "At first, we propped it up on my knee or the couch," he says now, nearly six decades later. "And it turned out that my fingers just fit the trumpet."

Hood, who is also a composer, hails from a small farming town near Dallas and credits his parents with instilling in him perseverance and a love of music. "My father made it to the training camp for the Detroit Tigers but was then drafted, and my mother danced professionally on the stage of the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood before she married," he says.

After Hood's studies at the Eastman School in Rochester, N.Y., he had a fairly routine series of orchestral appointments. But in the mid-1960s, the trumpeter made a big change, spurning the Houston Symphony to teach at Indiana's Ball State University, which in turn led to an appointment at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia.

Though he and his family had "a rich life" in Canada, moving to Southern California in the mid-1970s after an extended visit wasn't hard. "I had forgotten what it was like to play on the level of the Philharmonic or the studio orchestras," recalls Hood, who joined the Philharmonic in 1982, leaving the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, where he had been first trumpet since 1979.

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