About the Glenn Miller Birthplace Society
Born in Clarinda in 1904, Alton Glenn Miller grew up to become America’s favorite musical patriot — the bandleader behind “Moonlight Serenade,” “In the Mood,” and a swing-era sound that still fills rooms today. When he traded stardom to lead the Army Air Forces Band during World War II, he turned his music into service, and his legacy has belonged to his hometown ever since.
The Glenn Miller Birthplace Society was formed in 1977 to keep that legacy alive. Today the Society celebrates the music and memory of Glenn Miller through the Birthplace Museum and restored childhood home, the annual Glenn Miller Festival each June, and a music scholarship program that invests in the next generation of young musicians. It’s a small operation with an outsized mission: preserving an American original for the people of Clarinda and fans around the world.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Society receives no state or federal funding. Every exhibit kept open, every scholarship awarded, and every festival staged is made possible by supporters who believe this story is worth passing on. Your gift helps ensure the music never stops.
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Glenn Miller Endowment Fund
Some gifts are felt right away. An endowment gift is felt forever.
The Glenn Miller Endowment Fund, held through the Clarinda Foundation, is a permanent fund built to sustain the Glenn Miller birthplace property for generations to come. Rather than being spent all at once, your contribution is invested and protected — and the earnings it generates provide steady, dependable support for the property’s upkeep, year after year, in perpetuity.
That lasting support covers the essential, behind-the-scenes costs of caring for a historic property: utilities, groundskeeping, building maintenance, property insurance, and contractor wages. It’s the quiet work that keeps the birthplace home standing and well cared for, so it can continue welcoming visitors for decades to come.
The museum’s exhibits, the annual festival, and scholarships for talented young musicians are supported directly through gifts to the Glenn Miller Birthplace Society. The Endowment Fund plays a different, equally vital role: protecting the physical home at the heart of it all. Because the Society relies entirely on the generosity of its supporters, an endowment gift offers something few others can — the certainty that this historic property will be preserved long after all of us.
When you give to the Glenn Miller Endowment Fund, you’re not funding a single season or event — you’re securing the ground Glenn Miller’s story stands on, for everyone who comes next. Every contribution, at any level, helps build a foundation that will carry that legacy forward for generations.