"The university has provided me with the stimulation of being around young people and has kept me young. I like to teach, and the better the student, the more I like it."

James Dixon, a 17-year-old trumpet player in the Guthrie Center High School Band, conducted his first performance on May 8, 1945, the day news of Germany's surrender at the end of World War II reached the world. For reasons Dixon does not recall, he boldly stepped to the podium in the high school gymnasium and directed his classmates in a spontaneous concert. Guthrie Center's real band director was out of town; Jim Dixon saved the day.

That unscripted moment launched the young musician on a course that would take him far beyond the bakery where he worked even after he graduated from high school. As he tells the story, it was fate that tugged him from a small Iowa town and escorted him to the University of Iowa to study music.

The late J.R. Compton, Dixon's high school band director, had earlier introduced his young student to the world of professional orchestras. For a number of years, Compton would load the high school band into a bus to Ames or Des Moines to hear the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (now the Minnesota Orchestra). It was at his first Minneapolis Symphony concert that Dixon observed the charismatic Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos. The internationally known maestro made a lasting impression on the small-town teenager. With admiration for the Minneapolis Symphony firmly entrenched and his pep assembly performance fresh in his mind, Dixon became obsessed with conducting.

"That was the first real turning point in my life, the day I decided to study music. I quit my job at the bakery and enrolled at the University of Iowa. That was quite out of character for me, and to this day, I don't know what really possessed me. I'd been very successful as a baker, so it really was quite a remarkable decision for me to make."

As a freshman, it didn't take long for Dixon's boundless energy and passion for conducting to come to the attention of his teachers and peers. Himie Voxman, UI professor emeritus and director of the School of Music from 1954 to 1980, remembers the young, enthusiastic Dixon. "Shortly after he came, a delegation of students came to me and said there was a boy, James Dixon, who wanted to start up an orchestra on which he could practice conducting. I said it would be all right, and a little later, they came and said he had started them out with Beethoven's Eroica Symphony," Voxman remembers with a grin. "Nothing like starting right at the top."

In 1976, after the University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra performed splendidly at the International Society of Contemporary Music in Boston, the orchestra was featured in a four-minute segment on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." When an interviewer tried to compliment Dixon by crediting him with putting Iowa on the map, the maestro retored, "No, I took you there and showed you where it was."

Although Dixon was virtually untrained at the time, others began noticing that this student conductor had more than diligence going for him. "Dr. Philip Clapp, who was then director of the School of Music, was not given to letting just anyone conduct, other than what they were required to do for their conducting courses," Voxman recalls. "But as time went along, I noticed that he was quite willing, at rehearsals of the chamber orchestra, to turn it over to Jim while he went back to play the timpani. I knew then that he saw in Jim the same qualities I saw."

Dixon's reputation as a phenomenal student reached beyoned the campus, all the way to Minneapolis and to the ears of the famed Mitropoulos. It was a dream come true for Dixon when the conductor of his beloved Minneapolis Symphony offered him a job. Mitropoulos was moving east to conduct the New York Philharmonic and soon Dixon became his protege, traveling with him all over Europe.

"Meeting Mitropoulos was probably the luckiest thing that could have happened to me," Dixon says of his late mentor and friend. "He was by far the most influential person in my life."

The experience gained with Mitropoulos and during his college years was enough to win Dixon the post of resident conductor with the Seventh Army Symphony shortly after he was drafted in 1953. He played concerts for German audiences and credits his army stint with providing him needed conducting experience.

Shortly before his tour of duty in Germany ended in 1954, Dixon got a call from his friend and former teacher Himie Voxman. Voxman was calling with news of Clapp's death and with a job offer, asking Dixon to take the reins of the UI Symphony Orchestra.

"I regretted that the circumstances surrounding my job offer were as grim as they were, but I was nonetheless pleased and proud to have the chance to return to my alma mater," Dixon says.

For the next five years at the UI, Dixon learned and grew, finally making enough of a name for himself that he was asked to serve as conductor at Boston's New England Conservatory in 1959. He spent two years in Boston and then went to Minneapolis as assitant conductor with Minneapolis Symphony conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski.

With another year's professional experience secured, Dixon found himself back in front of the UI Symphony Orchestra. He admits that his return, following trips around the world and a string of conducting successes, looked to many as if he was wasting his potential or "selling out."

But Dixon felt, and still feels, that it was the right choice. "Most important to me was that the UI offered job stability," Dixon says. "I could not have launched off into the world without a job, to possibly stand on a street corner in New York City with a tin cup. It just isn't in my nature. I just can't do it. I have to have a job."

Now -- after 29 years as conductor of the Quad Cities Symphony Orchestra (a post he retired from in 1994), 35 consecutive years at the UI, numerous professional awards, appearances as guest conductor for more than a dozen of the world's major orchestras, and a couple of honorary doctorates -- James Dixon, Iowa's Philip Greeley Clapp/Carver Distinguished Professor of Music, is without a job. He conducted his farewell concert with the University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra on March 12, selecting Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in A Minor for the program. He raised his baton for the last time in Hancher Auditorium at the final performance of the UI Opera Theater's production of Gianni Schicchi and Suor Angelica on May 4.