Joey met Janice through a mutual friend while he was a student at Vandercook College of Music and she was at Northern Illinois University. He was smitten enough to hitchhike back and forth from Chicago to DeKalb throughout the early 1970s just to see her. It worked. They married August 7, 1976 at Lake Bloomington, and Janice was his love and support for the fifty years that followed.
Joe had the talent to pursue an orchestral career as an oboist, having studied with members of the Chicago Symphony, but he chose the classroom instead. He spent 30 years as a music educator, eight of them in Herscher, Illinois, and 22 as a band director at Canton High School. He retired in 2008 after shaping the lives of more young musicians than could ever be counted. Retirement didn’t take. He kept teaching at Bradley University, training the next generation of music teachers, because it turned out Joe never really knew how to stop.
He played oboe, jazz saxophone, and classical guitar, all of them well, and spent years as interim conductor and oboist with the Prairie Wind Ensemble.
Though downstate Illinois became home, Joe never stopped being a Chicago kid at heart. He made the trip back often for Cubs games, jazz clubs, and the restaurants he never let himself forget. He loved his life at Wee Ma Tuk Hills, which he always said reminded him of his childhood summers in Wisconsin.
Joe’s band room was more than a classroom. It was a place where kids could linger, listen to albums, talk music, and slowly begin to understand that what they were part of mattered. Joe had a way of making sure it never felt like a chore, even when he was pushing hard. And he did push. He expected something of his students, often more than they expected of themselves. He taught music, yes, but what stuck was something deeper.
And then there is the legacy that he leaves behind. It lives in the students who became musicians, yes, but also in those who didn’t, who still carry a lifelong love and appreciation for music because of him. It lives in the friendships formed in marching band, in jazz ensembles, in late afternoons spent in the band room. It lives in the countless ways people learned to show up, to work, to listen, and to care about doing something well. It lives in the fact that, all these years later, his students are still trying to live up to what he saw in them when they were sixteen.
Joe is survived by his wife, Janice Sparhakel; sister-in-law Susan Creasey; niece Kelli (Greg) Lynch; grandnieces Sydney (Blaine) Bruce and Rory Lynch; and great-grandniece Sutton. He was preceded in death by his parents, Joseph F. Roman and Patricia Pisyk, and his sister, Mary.
A celebration of life will be announced at a later date.
Memorials may be made to the P & O Band Club at Canton High School, the Humane Society of Fulton County, or the Women’s Crisis Center of Canton.
And, in the words of JoRo “Back to set one. And love it.”
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