Curtis Ervin is 33-years-old and he is doing what he loves in the premier location.

Ervin is the new band director for Russell County High School, and that is a long way from the pharmacy he'd been training to work in.

"I was a pre-pharmacy major at Campbellsville," he said. "After two years at college I was sitting in a classroom and I realized money wasn't what life was all about.

He explained that his parents, a logger and factory worker, have a very strong work ethic and that they had made sure he understood the importance of hard work, but he was realizing a job could be something you enjoyed.

Ervin said he wanted to wake up every day knowing he was going to work at a job he loved; so he returned to his love of music.

Since then he has helped with the program in Cumberland County, been an assistant in Green County middle school director in Owensboro and most recently the director for Marion County's program.

Now he is in Russell County, where he'd been taken as a student.

"My professor said this was one of the top programs in the state and the best integrated program," Ervin said.

Ervin said the reason for that was reinforced when he met many of the parents of his new students. He called out the names of the previous directors, just as he said the parents had, referring to themselves as "one of McGaha's kids," or "one of Ackerman's"

"This is a band town," Ervin said, and that isn't common.

He added that he really hoped one day when he was retired others would say, "I was one of Curtis Ervin's."

He stressed though that it wasn't just his job to make musicians. "Most of the students won't go on to be professional musicians," he explained.

But they will all go on to be citizens of this nation, members of the society, and it is those rolls he wants to make sure he has prepared students to fill.

"I'm a big believer in hard work," Ervin said. "I want my students to be people who make things happen. There are people who things happen to, people who watch things happen to others and people who make things happen."

He said it is the people who make things happen that give the most to the society and get the most from the world around them.