For more than 85 years, Clyde Leon Bysom enchanted Lawrence residents with smooth melodies rippling through his clarinet and saxophone, his daughter Terri Bysom Stringer said Friday.

Clyde Bysom, 96, is an active musician in Lawrence and can be seen performing with the Junkyard Jazz Band, the New Horizons Senior Band and Clarinet Quartet, though he has memories of many bands all the way back to World War II.

Raised in Lawrence, the late 97-year-old played in his first concert in 1929 at the age of 12 in South Park’s gazebo, Stringer said. In that gazebo, Bysom would play hundreds more times for the community over the next eight decades with some of the 50 different bands he played in.

Bysom died June 1 surrounded by family and friends at Lawrence Memorial Hospital after leading a life filled with music, heroism and a community spirit, Stringer said.

She plans to celebrate her father’s life with a memorial concert in South Park later this month, at the same gazebo Bysom filled with music so many times throughout his lifetime.

Kansas University music education professor and conductor/music director of the Lawrence City Band Bob Foster said he grew to know Bysom when Foster came to Lawrence in 1971. Foster said he thought the memorial tribute would be the best way to remember the musician Foster described as “very good at what he did.”

“The way his life was, it is probably the most appropriate way (to memorialize Bysom),” Foster said. “Do it with music.”

A lifelong Lawrence resident, Bysom was a Lawrence High School graduate and studied music at KU, where he joined the university band in 1936.

“He was a product of Lawrence schools and a very good representative of instrumental music in Lawrence,” Foster said.

Bysom lived nearly his entire life in Lawrence, aside from his service in the Army Air Forces. He was a corporal and B-29 Superfortress tail gunner in the 393rd Bombardment Squadron, Chalmers said. Bysom was among the crew that dropped one of the last bombs in World War II, according to a 2014 Journal-World article, and played in two military bands.

When he returned to Lawrence, he helped make pipe organs at Reuter Organ Company, 1220 Timberedge Road, and after his retirement worked as an instrument repair technician for Hume Music, which since closed.

In his near century-long life, Bysom was never far from a woodwind. Stringer said her father’s doctor told Bysom he “wasn’t worried about him as long as he was still playing.”

Stringer said he played until he could no longer toot his horn, with lung disease eventually stealing his breath. May 15 was the day of his final concert, and in the last entry in his journal, found after his death, Stringer said, Bysom wrote the following:

“Ending my 85 years of blowing horns. I have had a great, long tenure though and am thankful for that.”