When The Missing Links made an appearance last weekend at the reunion of the Bowling Green High School
class of 1967, there were a couple missing links.
Two of the members of the band couldn’t make it. Still their spirit was represented by fellow band
members John Zeigler and Kenny Reeves.
When the pair played a set of Beatles tunes at the reunion last Saturday night, it was a spirit from
another time, when every high school had several rock bands that played dances.
The Missing Links, which also included Brad Mansfield and Dan Householder, epitomized the era, and
succeeded beyond the dreams of most of those groups.
In 1967 the band earned a trip to a national battle of the bands sponsored by the Jaycees by winning a
regional competition in Toledo and then the state competition in Mansfield.
The Missing Links placed in the top 10 at the nationals. It was a heady time for the young musicians.
It was Mansfield, who played organ, who pulled the band together. They all had minimal musical training.
Zeigler said he had a few piano lessons and sang in the school choir, but had never played bass before.
He learned from Reeves who had been playing guitar by ear for several years.
Reeves had just moved into town from the south, a self-described "hillbilly." His father was in
the Army and was stationed at Bowling Green State University to teach in the ROTC program.
Zeigler said he could sing like Frankie Valli. Reeves remembers relatives and family friends would give
him a quarter him to sing a song for them.
The band built up around his voice. Reeves was grateful that the Bowling Green kids accepted him. Before
joining The Missing Links, he said, "playing sports was my biggest passion, and then I found my
biggest passion playing music and entertaining."
They soon had a local following. Scott Gillespie was ia seventh grader and he was so anxious to hear them
that he braved his early adolescent anxieties to go to the Christmas dance at the junior high where the
band was playing.
"They were like Bowling Green’s version of the Beatles," he said.
And the band did cover Beatles tunes as well as the other hits of the day. "If it was on the radio
we’d do it first," Reeves said.
One of their top numbers which they deployed to good effect at the state competition was their own
version of the Gershwin tune "I Got Rhythm."
The national competition was a high point. Reeves recalls all "the great guys and great bands from
all over the country" they met in Braintree, Mass. where the contest was held. The bands, one from
each state, were the survivors of a contest that started with 11,000 combos. A band from Utah, The
Gents, was the eventual winner.
They also got to meet the legendary Les Paul, a guitarist known equally as a musician and as an inventor.
He pioneered the use of multitrack recording and developed electric guitars that shaped the sound of pop
and jazz for the last half of the 20th century.
Being teenagers, though, Reeves said, "we didn’t realize what a pioneer of recorded music he
was."
The band was savvy in how it used the money it earned, Reeves said. "John was always the brains of
the operation,"
Zeigler remembered negotiating the band’s fee for a show at St. Michael’s in Toledo. The band wanted
$1,000. The nun was willing to pay $500. Zeigler suggested they split the take at the door. She agreed.
That night about 1,800 teens paid $3 a head to hear the band.
That was quite an infusion of cash. Some of it flowed into the instrument fund that allowed them to
purchase top of the line Sun Coliseum P.A. system and powerful amplifiers.
Zeigler said the band paid his way through college. That’s where he, Householder and Mansfield headed
after graduation. Reeves, a year younger, was still in high school.
The band lasted one more year after their graduation. But then school work took precedence for the three
older members.
"I realized my limitations," Zeigler said. "I was never a professional entertainer."
Instead he went into audiology, and continues to work in the field. He now lives outside Orlando, Fla.
Mansfield became a geologist and lives in Corpus Christi, Texas and Mansfield became a designer and
commercial artist and lives in southern California.
Only Reeves continued on in music. "I wanted Missing Links to go on forever."
Instead he worked as a single and with several other bands, playing just about every night spot in the
region. He eventually decided to hang up his guitar, at least professionally, and now works for Gannett
in Cincinnati in marketing and advertising.
Still the members have stayed close. Mansfield designed the covers for every recording Reeves ever
released.
They and other friends still get together annually to jam for a week or so.
Reeves said it was the fans who helped the band achieve its blaze of glory in the 1960s. "I’m very,
very flattered that people still remember The Missing Links."
