Carl Triplett and his wife Carol look back on a life of music and love that started at Hartnell.

Carl and Carol Triplett, 86 and 81, are sitting in their Salinas dining room surrounded by cardboard moving boxes. The house they are leaving after 20 years was Carl’s parents house, located a few blocks from Hartnell College. In 1951, his family moved from the Central Valley to Salinas just after Triplett graduated from high school. Hartnell – more specifically, the music department where he played trumpet – became Carl’s new home. Nearly 70 years later, he said goodbye to that home on stage, playing his last concert beside current students, many of them teenagers and 20-somethings.

Triplett left and returned to Hartnell twice – the first time, after a stint in the Marine Corps, and soon after he met Carol, a Salinas native who was 18 at the time. The second time he returned to Hartnell was after the couple lived for about 40 years elsewhere in California, raising five children along the way. Despite the long gap, Triplett says he played with every Hartnell music educator since the early 1950s except one.

The first time he came to Hartnell, Triplett found it intimidating. He’d graduated from a class of 32, in a high school with 180 students total; Hartnell had around 500 students.

“I was scared,” he remembers. “I braved through it, except I was very immature. I spent my time in the student lounge playing Hearts instead of going to class.” Except for one thing: “I didn’t miss any music classes.”

Just as he had in high school, Triplett played trumpet in the jazz and marching bands, but when the rest of his classes weren’t working out, he and a friend enlisted in the Marine Corps. After his discharge he came back to Salinas. It was before the start of the fall semester in 1956, and Carol was at the college to register for classes after graduating from Alisal High School in June.

“We had the same counselor, and he asked, ‘Do you want to meet a really nice guy?’” she recalls. That nice guy promised to give her a ride home in his VW Bug if she let him borrow her pen. She hesitated because the pen was a graduation gift. She did let him borrow it, however, and she let him drive her home, even though she lived four blocks away. “I thought, ‘I’m in college now, I’ve got to be brave,’” she says.

After six weeks, they decided to quit school and get married. “And we’re still married 63 years later,” Carol says. They moved to Los Angeles where Carl worked for Los Angeles County in the engineering department and Carol went to school and became a nurse. Triplett lost all of his top teeth – “brush your teeth, children,” he says – and stopped playing trumpet. He thought he’d never play again with false teeth. A chance conversation with a toothless trombone player inspired him to pick it up again.

It was around that time they left the city for Lake Isabella, east of Bakersfield, where a community orchestra was in need of a trumpet player. Carl stepped in, his first time back in an orchestra since leaving Hartnell 27 years earlier.

The Tripletts moved back to Salinas in 2000, and Carl came full circle musically as well. He returned to the Hartnell jazz band and orchestra after 45 years away. Although it was getting harder for him to navigate campus – he uses a walker and no longer drives – he never missed a rehearsal.

“His work ethic is so good, I think a lot of the younger students feel guilty when they’re absent,” Steve Ettinger, who leads instrumental music at Hartnell, said in a press release before Carl played his last concert there in December. “When they see this guy, what he has to do to get to class, it shows them how serious this is, and he’s just a great model for them to realize that music is something you can do your entire life.”

In 2006, Triplett joined the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Spreckels. He’s played taps for VFW and other events and last year he joined the national volunteer group Bugles Across America, playing taps at local military funerals. (He auditioned over the phone. “The guy said, ‘You’re OK,’” Triplett recalls.) He’s especially proud of his performance at a ceremony at Seaside Memorial Park in November, when he played taps for the dedication of a stone remembering 22 fallen sailors during the Vietnam War. “That was the best thing I ever did for anybody,” he says.

After 20 years in Salinas, the couple is now packing up to move again, this time back to the Central Valley to live with their daughter. Triplett has no intention of retiring from music. “Working with the VFW and Hartnell kept me alive – and I want to stay alive,” he says.

He’s already checked if there’s a community band nearby. There is one at Porterville College and he plans on auditioning.

“At Hartnell they were stuck with me,” he says, joking. “In Porterville, I don’t know if they like 87-year-old men.”