“I never really learned how to play in college,” he said. “I got an orchestra job and learned how to play there.”

Stokes was 22 when he got the job in Florida in 1976 with the Sarasota Orchestra back when it was known as the Florida West Coast Symphony, a fairly new organization at the time founded in 1948.

“I went to college for four years but didn’t graduate. So when this orchestra gig opened up, I was in the right place at the right time,” he said, “because it turned into a really good orchestra. We had great guest artists like (comedian/songwriter) Steve Allen, (bandleader) Cab Calloway, (folk singer) Judy Collins and Sammy Davis Jr. From October through May, I was very busy doing lots of gigs.”

Stokes attributes a certain degree of the orchestra’s improvement to the arrival of “a lot of Russian defectors” around that time, such as Alfred Gershfeld, who eventually became the director of the Lake Placid Sinfonietta for six years beginning in 1998. Gershfeld is currently the orchestra director at the New World School of the Arts, a public magnet high school and college in downtown Miami, Florida.

Stokes described how a “Sarasota/Lake Placid pipeline” developed in the 1980s when he and Anne Harrow, the current flutist for the Sinfonietta, both played together in Sarasota.

Harrow wrote in an email that she came to the Sinfonietta in the late 1980s after then director David Gilbert invited her up. She has since moved to Rochester, where she is on the faculty at the Eastman School of Music.

Karl Braaten, a violinist in his 13th year with the Sinfonietta, also played in Sarasota prior to Lake Placid.

Steady employment in the music world regardless of the type of music can be seasonal in nature depending on the location, which often forces musicians to move about the country throughout the course of the year. In places like Florida, the “on” season starts in the fall and ends in the spring.

In places farther north like Lake Placid, the “on” season happens in the summer.

“I was sort of a journeyman player,” Stokes said.

He spent nearly 20 years traveling between the North and South to play in orchestras during their respective “on” seasons. He moved to Keene in the year 2000, not to play with the Sinfonietta but to work at Mirror Lake Inn as a massage therapist. By coincidence, he received his massage therapy training in Florida with longtime Bloomingdale resident, Kelly Hass, who used to be a flutist with the U.S. Army bands.

“I was so surprised when I saw him here,” Hass said. “He is such a fine musician.”

Stokes worked at Mirror Lake Inn for nearly eight years, he said, but burned out on the job despite his receiving “good money and benefits” for the work.

By this time, he’d been married for more than 10 years to Karen Rappaport, the current director of the Wells Memorial Library in Upper Jay. With some time on his hands, he completed enough courses to earn a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He also developed a passion for learning jazz guitar online by studying videos from Jimmy Bruno’s Guitar Workshop.

At one point, he said, his wife asked him – very politely without trying to generate conflict – if “sitting around playing guitar in your pajamas was the best way to find another job.”

Around that time, he got a call informing him of an opening for a band teacher’s position at Keene Central School. He followed up, got the job and taught there for eight years until 2015.

Stokes found that early violin lessons gave him a touch of prestige as a fifth grader when his family moved to Minnesota from Denver, where students could begin string instruction as early as the fourth grade.

“There I was. The new kid, and the smallest one.”

But once the string classes began, Stokes soon found himself a year ahead of his Minnesota peers because they were not offered string instruction until the fifth grade.

“I had a one-year jump on them,” he said.

These days, the 64-year-old Stokes says he considers himself “semi-retired” as he collects Social Security, works on musical arrangements and original compositions, and remains active playing violin with the Community String Orchestra of the Adirondacks, a multi-generational ensemble created by cellist Esther Rogers Baker. He also plays in various pit orchestras for high school and community theater productions and sometimes with a trio at St. Eustace Episcopal Church in Lake Placid.