Chapter 20

Pushing Lemons

FOR A LONG time, Don Warren worried that in Drum Corps International he’d unleashed the beast that would devour his Cavaliers. Not only did his duties with DCI pull him away, the demands of life on the circuit took a toll.

Frequent and extended touring was now a fact of life. The Cavaliers struggled with the transition from weekend turnouts and intermittent trips to nearly full-time life on the road. They barely could afford instructors, let alone chartering buses and feeding members during weeks of travel. Warren Alm, back on the board of directors, and business manager for the home show at Maine East, remembered scrambling to keep up.

“We were all struggling to adhere to the budget. The west coast corps, Santa Clara in particular and then the Blue Devils after them, were what they were calling ‘traveling corps.’ They were devoting the entire summer to drum corps and traveling. And because they had the entire corps together en masse, all the time, they were obviously many leagues ahead of us. There was no way we were going to get back into the competitive strata of Santa Clara and Blue Devils when we did not meet and practice and stick together all summer.”

The Cavaliers lagged behind in business practices, too. The way the corps fed its members hadn’t changed much from when Alm rode the buses: pick a hot dog stand or fast food joint and waste an hour shuttling through. “The Blue Devils had their own traveling chuck wagon,” Alm said. “This guy who was a retired Marine mess sergeant, he was out there cooking hamburgers for ‘em. Why can’t we do something like that? I worked for Kraft Foods at the time, and I was familiar with the fact that Kraft had its own industrial foods division where they would supply restaurants and institutions in large quantities. Like a dummy, I stood up and announced, ‘Here’s how it’s done.’ Guess who wound up being the first manager of the cook truck?”

Alm’s task was finding a vehicle—and cheap—the Cavaliers could outfit to carry and cook meals. He returned with a decommissioned horse trailer, a step up from Alm’s first discovery—a pop-up camping trailer Don Warren labeled “the laughingstock of the activity.” The corps nixed that option, then an old school bus before equipping the trailer with propane stoves and household refrigerator, pulled by a truck dubbed The Blue Goose.

“Cause it was blue,” Adolph DeGrauwe said.

“And you had to goose it to keep it going,” said Warren.

“It kept overheating on us,” DeGrauwe explained. “And then Conrad (Maryanski), of our illustrious transportation department, said he would find a way to make this thing work. He cut a hole in the hood. He took a cookie sheet and made a new hood for this thing so water could go into it to get heat out of the inside. It worked another 100 miles.”

The Cavaliers tried saving money by owning vehicles instead of leasing every summer. In 1979, they paid $60,000 for three Scenicruisers from Coach Travel Unlimited. For that price they got two 1955s and one 1956 model. “What a nightmare,” DeGrauwe remembered. “We had a bargain. We thought this is great, you know? We’d save so much money with these buses. And they ran! Well, they ran about the first year or two, saved us a little bit of money, and after that we were dumping money into them. The fact that we did all the work on them probably saved the corps. I can’t tell you how many times I was underneath them, changing tires.”

DeGrauwe got a crash course in auto mechanics from Maryanski. Together, they overhauled engines and fixed everything on buses—changed air bags, rewired electric, fit new windows. Coach Travel let the two use their facility for serious repairs. But on the road, it was patch whatever you could, wherever it broke down.

The corps’ buses bucked and staggered like mules every turn of their tours to Canada in the early 1980s. “I remember seeing this all-girl drum corps going down the road,” treasurer Don Heitzman said. “They were driving brand-new Mercedes Benz buses and we were all sitting along the road, sucking our thumbs.”

DeGrauwe recalled trying to solve a broken window in a part of Quebec where few spoke English. “We went to one mechanic with an old shop. ‘We’ve got an almost antique bus. Can you fix it?’ ‘Yeah, I can fix it.’ He looked at it, then, and said, ‘This isn’t an antique, this is a relic.’”

Lights darkened, fuse box wires burned. “We broke down so many times,” DeGrauwe said, “(our) cadets had a bus and we told them to bring that bus to Canada. And that goddamn bus broke down.”

Jeff Fiedler thought DeGrauwe would suffer the final breakdown. The corps was delayed again on its way to Montreal and DeGrauwe described the troubles to Don Warren via truck stop pay phone. “Adolph, come home,” Warren said. “If you don’t think you can do it, come home.” DeGrauwe laughed. He turned to Fiedler. “He says we should come home!”

“We can’t,” Fiedler said.

“I know that.”

DeGrauwe slumped in the booth. The bus sent to save them had died, and kids lined the side of the road. The corps ended up renting a school bus to complete the two-day trip.

“We were supposed to have a beach party in Maine, but we missed it and Phantom Regiment got our lobster dinner,” soprano Bill Wiggins groused.

“There are many good stories about pushing,” Fiedler said. “In Colorado, we were pushing in the Pueblo area on a back road and it was completely dark. And we went up over a mountain and suddenly you were all by yourself and you could see everything, but you couldn’t see the bus anymore because it was gone (rolling down the slope)!”

When buses rolled of their own volition, the air conditioning quit. Fiedler awoke at 4 or 5 a.m. on a swing through northern Louisiana and found his arms melded to seat partner Dallas Niermeyer, and both of their appendages stuck to the seat with the heat. “We literally had to peel our arms apart.” A little later, the corps pulled into a truck stop and the driver must have banged on the right panel or punched the dashboard, because the air conditioning whirred to life. And the rest of that ride was cool, and comfortable—a sensation never to be experienced again, Fiedler growled.

Not that the guys didn’t have fun in the tanks turned clubhouses. Open windows proved entertaining. “We had a free day in Milwaukee,” remembered Marco Buscaglia, a baritone who started with the cadets in 1978. “And a bunch of guys got drunk. Big Wally was sitting in back of me, next to Kenny Farr, and he threw up out the window in the middle of the night, about 2 a.m. And Sean Mead, way in the back, was sitting with Sly (Sybilski), and he wakes up in the morning and has got puke in his glasses because it came right in through the back window.”

“We used to be able to throw something out the front windows and it would come right back in the back windows,” Fiedler explained. “We’d have throwing experiments. Paper. Food. Clothing. We’d be going at it, and it would just jump and get sucked in the back window.”

“Chewing tobacco was another story,” Buscaglia grinned.

The corps’ shared transportation misery was something that fostered togetherness. But woe be to the Cavalier insensitive enough to use on-board facilities during endless trips. You waited for a pit stop, or else suffered the wrath of fellow members subjected to your funk. “That would be one time we’d chase people, if they took a crap in the back of the bus,” Mark Des Biens said.

“Coming home from Atlanta, from DCI, our bus was full and it stunk like shit,” Buscaglia said. “This kid—Sly—was walking around with one sock on, and we said, ‘It’s you! You’re the guy!’ We threw him back in the bathroom and locked him in there a while.”

Scenicruisers weren’t the only vehicles to go kaput. The equipment trailer was the most unreliable wheeled contraption in the world, Craig Rasin said. “We would take bets,” said Bob Jackson. “How long before the next oil filter, fuel filter, breakdown.” Once, when Jim Zebrowski was driving, the corps desperately needed a part for the truck. Zebrowski took the Genglers’ station wagon and pulled into a truck stop, noticing the exact model parked there. Zebrowski checked. There weren’t many people around. “He parked the car, slid underneath the truck and took the part off,” Rasin said.

“Oh, my God!” Don Warren reacted to this story.

“We had to go,” Dan Heeres explained. “We were headed somewhere. Every once in a while you have to be innovative.”

The Cavaliers’ early chuck wagon was a headache waiting to happen. The generator powering the refrigerator broke down, or the stove caught fire. “Those two things were the roughest for me to inherit,” DeGrauwe said of buses and kitchen. But there was no choice. A staggering pace chasing the Blue Devils and Vanguard was better than withdrawing altogether.

While Conrad Maryanski ducked under buses, his wife, Dorothy, kept her hands busy with another, equally unstable corps asset.

The Cavaliers’ 1976 adoption of plumed hats and naugahyde vests—and hairstyles to go with them—visually signaled a new era. But by the late 1970s those uniforms were held together by the skill and ingenuity of Cavaliers seamstresses more than any revolutionary idea. “They were awful,” Dorothy testified. “They could only be cleaned maybe twice a summer. And those wool pants, satin blouses—imagine naugahyde, how moldy it would get underneath! Because it’s 100 degrees, marching in a parade and boiling in a naugahyde vest and satin blouse.”

Other corps had money to frequently clean uniforms. The Cavaliers didn’t—and couldn’t afford to wear out costumes they needed to last another four or five years. So the boys pulled on the same grubby shirts and pants they wore hoofing across the 50-yard line the week before, and tried to imbue the ratty garb with flair and class. Too bad, Dorothy said, “you could smell ‘em before you saw them. I used to have to open the equipment truck, where the uniforms had been hanging over a 700-mile trip, in 100 degrees, and it would just gag you! The hardest job I ever had was to find people to go to the laundromat with them, because of the smell. And we cleaned out a lot of laundromats, boy. When we walked in, people left.”

Dorothy was as indispensable with a needle and thread as Conrad was fashioning a spare part. She grew up with the Cavaliers in her Logan Square backyard. Brothers Bob, Ken and Rick Jackson, and cousins Rob, Chuck and John Robertson marched; her mother slung eggs and bacon as cook. When Bob rejoined the organization, Dorothy, and now Conrad, were eager to help. “My husband wasn’t much of a cook,” Dorothy said. “But when he saw those buses sitting in the parking lot, I knew he would be with the Cavaliers probably the rest of his life. He took over transportation and he just ran with it.”

Conrad rearranged his schedule as stationary engineer for Harris Bank to free time for the corps. But Dorothy still needed to find her niche. Don Warren soon barricaded the camp stoves to keep her out. “I don’t cook,” she admitted, “and I made more of a mess. All he wanted to do was get rid of me.” When the corps discovered holes in its rapidly-aging uniforms—and corresponding holes in the budget—Dorothy stepped up. “They thought I was nuts.”

Dorothy ignored quizzical looks and took charge of the equipment truck—Monk’s old post. She minded horns and flag sticks and rifles, and made sure seams were tight, hems held. Whenever the corps needed new flag designs, Dorothy was consulted. And whenever she noticed pants or coats beyond repair, she didn’t talk to anyone, she made a new uniform, on her own. “I would never go to the drum corps for those things. I would just go for the fabric and buy it myself.”

Dorothy gathered others with sewing talent, including Sue Fiers, Sylvia Luettke and Jan Zebrowski, and they boarded a little white school bus that became an integral part of the caravan. They’d set up sewing machines on the road and perform minor miracles—taking one good leg from tattered pants and joining it with the better half of another, etc. and etc. “It was a struggle, but it was some of the best times of my life. We used to laugh and talk at the back of the bus. Today, it’s a business. Back then, it was a weekend, good times for us. We wouldn’t have traded one minute of it.”

The Cavaliers’ status may have slipped, but Dorothy and Conrad and the rest didn’t let it get to them. Conrad opened his wallet to fuel the volunteer bus in which seamstresses and nurses rode. They sung and laughed through 12-hour treks with no air conditioning, admired sights whipping past the windows instead of complaining. They endured pranks pulled upon them by the boys—moving their luggage so it sometimes took an hour to locate when they pulled into town, long after midnight—and came to regard each other as family. “My boys,” Dorothy says of corps members she clothed.

“We would pull into a school, and all the adults would sit down and get out the cookies and milk. And you would sit there and laugh. Everybody became friends, we became a family. You could depend on everybody. They were some of the biggest characters in the world, and some of the best people there ever could be.”

What the Cavaliers lacked in competition, they made up in camaraderie. Good thing, too, since much about being second-tier was difficult to endure. There were late nights, constant breakdowns, and accommodations most top corps left in their road dust. “I can remember times the ladies just chose to stay on the bus because the school was so rotten,” Dorothy said. “There was one school, it was in Tennessee, and we pulled in, and the kids put all of their sleeping bags in the gym and went out to practice. When they came back in, everybody was packing up—their sleeping bags were so covered with roaches, they just couldn’t do it. The building was crawling. We just got on the buses and moved on to the next thing.”

But as long as Dorothy had her sewing machine, and her boys, she was happy. “I used to burst with pride (watching the Cavaliers on the field), because I always used to figure ‘that’s my share.’ I can’t cook, but I can put a clean uniform on the field.”

While Dorothy helped the Cavaliers look good, instructors labored to keep pace with stylistic trends sweeping the activity.

Military pomp gave way to ever more daring music and show design. What used to be a predictable performance—symmetrical, loud, with crisp, conservative uniforms and drummers confined to shuffling back and forth on the 50-yard-line—exploded into artistic displays of musical virtuosity and visual showmanship. Two-valved horns brought a wider range of sound, and demanded better arrangements, written by leading college and professional educators, who recruited their own talented students to perform. Percussion sections expanded to match the decibel output of brass, adding a “pit” section up front with timpani, gongs, triangle, xylophones and Latin percussion agogo bells and gourds. Rototom and multitenor players thanked their lucky sticks for light, ergonomic carriers to lug drum heads through demanding sequences.

Larry McCormick’s vision of a “total show” concept finally came to pass, with corps building themes around the glory of the South, Star Wars, opera, ballet, TV shows, Spanish jazz and Russian Christmas music. Corps changed costumes on the field, dressed as monks, smeared on face paint, writhed around maypoles, incorporated pompons, danced the Can-Can, staged impromptu football scrimmages. Somewhere, the Cavaliers’ precocious circus clown wept.

But while the Cavaliers struggled, DCI thrived. PBS began broadcasting finals nationwide in 1975, and never had corps from all corners of the country been as competitive. While California’s Vanguard and Blue Devils traded titles, each region boasted a unit or two hot on their heels, separated by mere percentage points in scoring.

In the Midwest, the Madison Scouts, with their wall of brass, and Phantom Regiment, with its theatrical, symphonic shows—Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Wagner’s opera “Lohengrin” were key in their repertoire—set the standard. From the East, 27th Lancers were training ground for the revolutionary drill design George Zingali would take to new heights in the 1980s with the Garfield Cadets: patterns materialized from nowhere, and dissolved just as quickly; flags and rifles spun in double- and triple-time. The Bayonne, N.J., Bridgemen were recognized for Dennis DeLucia’s percussion and programs veering from dramatic to goofy. Honky-tonk dances, falling on cue, delivering their drum major in a white limousine, and spoofing The Gong Show were among their exploits. From the South, Spirit of Atlanta—with former Cavalier Bob Hoehn at the helm—came charging into the top ten within a year of their creation, knocking down the stands with standards including “Dixie,” “Georgia on my Mind,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “Devil Went Down to Georgia,” and their gut-punch, full-company closer, “Let it Be Me.”

Judges rewarded the avant-garde and daring, but audiences were sometimes left in the dark, wondering at the hidden symbolism of a color guard gyration, mumbling as the drum major back-flipped into a half-split. The Cavaliers’ traditional fare played to the crowd. “Rainbow” and “Softly As I Leave You,” “Santa Esmeralda” and “Do You Wanna Get Funky,” while failing to impress judges, kept the casual listener grounded. Soon, even to play a recognizable song would be considered quaint among DCI diehards.

Gail Royer of Santa Clara, and others of his musical breeding, influenced the leap in skill level from neighborhood kids happy to get a horn or drum, to high school musicians and budding music majors, Dan Heeres said. Royer, a college teacher, would offer his orchestral students extra credit if they marched in drum corps during the summer. “So he had professional musicians on the field you were trying to win against. That’s when he started to win all the time.”

And in management, where the Cavaliers always enjoyed a kind of, well, cavalier attitude, other corps got better at the political game.

“Behind the scenes, they had guys like Gail Royer flying in to sit down with (DCI head) Don Pesceone,” Heeres said. “I never knew the guy was in town. Don Pesceone was in our town (Chicago), but we never took him out to dinner, found out what judges were working what show. He worked those judges all the way up (to the show) to find out what they wanted and then they changed to whatever they wanted all the way until they got to DCI.”

If Royer wanted to see all the judges working DCI’s southern swing, he got it. Whereas the Cavaliers went on the same tour and never met with any judges or had any idea what their tendencies were. It was a marked departure from the Cavalier Way of the 1960s, when judges Earl Joyce and Bob Currie attended rehearsals. Now no one worked the system, and it showed in the standings.

One way the Cavaliers kept up with rivals was keeping their cadet group going. At the suggestion of Don Warren, Adolph DeGrauwe changed the B corps’ focus from learning music and marching fundamentals to fielding a parade unit in its own right. Get the kids marching and you get them interested in A corps, Warren figured, you get them hooked on Cavaliers tradition so they stay involved.

With the organization of Cadet Corps International, DeGrauwe’s regiment of kids aged 6-15 swelled from around twenty boys in 1973 to more than a hundred as the decade wore on. Their uniform got a boost from the black pants, white T-shirts and green and black berets of the early editions, to white satin garb with green accents, a sort-of miniature, mirror-image of older Cavaliers’ duds. The cadets swooned at dressing like their older brothers, and played their music, too—1960s charts were dusted off. Playing exhibitions before DCI shows, and marching in the same parades as the A corps, reinforced the notion that before long, the little kids would be onto something big.

“They were like gods to us,” said John Van Dorpe, a cadet from 1975-78. “We were looking up to them. Someday, I hoped that I could make it into the A corps. How do I get good enough?”

As the old adage goes: practice. Boys with horn or drum experience honed those skills. Elementary kids were usually funneled into the color guard to start. They trained with six-foot flags, performed drops, and learned how to march under the tutelage of Gil Baker, Ralph Poznanski and former cadet-turned-A-corps-drum-major Jeff Fiedler. “At the end of the year you had a choice,” said Marco Buscaglia, who joined the cadets in 1978. “Most guys in cadet corps went on to the horn line and drum line. A couple guys stayed in guard.”

If they stuck with their apprenticeship, by the time they were 13 or 14, the A corps usually came calling, benefiting from an infusion of polished personnel. Although DeGrauwe was aware of the cadets’ role as feeder corps, he wasn’t above getting into the spirit of competition. At a Madison show, DeGrauwe bet his charges if they beat the Scouts’ B group—which would be a first—he’d let them shave his goatee. The competition was moved indoors due to rain. And corps were told to perform at a standstill. Concert, only. No marching, no flags. But Cadets instructor Steve Brubaker figured the corps could still use its smaller, “swing” flags.

“We went to compete, and we beat Madison that day,” DeGrauwe said. “But we had a two-point penalty because we used color guard equipment. So we lost the show. I went and protested, but they said, ‘Flags are flags.’”

“We had heard we won,” younger son Scott DeGrauwe remembered. “Then we lost. Then we heard we won again. Then we lost again.”

As concession, DeGrauwe sat for the razor anyway.

“We shaved half,” older son Steve DeGrauwe giggled.

Pranks were part of the indoctrination for cadets. Angel Guardian camp, at Devon and California in Chicago, was a home for troubled boys—and here came the Cavaliers. “There’s a little graveyard on the property,” Buscaglia explained. “So you would go out there, and the older guys would say, ‘There’s a devil here. Don’t stay out too late, or you’ll see the devil.’”

“Some of the older members would try to scare the young guys,” remembered Norm Dziedzic, a cadet from 1977-81. “They’d grab a blanket and run down the hallway (pretending to be ghosts).”

Spooky stories couldn’t dissuade the DeGrauwe brothers from devoting their childhoods to the corps. They were part of a generation who marched from grade school through college. They started “having to be potty-trained,” in the words of father Adolph, unable even to carry heavier drums. They left running the corps as junior leaders and jump-started a rebuilding process that put the Cavaliers back on the path to glory. When today’s old-timers line up with green “gears” hanging around their necks—rewarded for years of membership—no one but fellow 1970s mainstay Scott Seal can boast as many as the DeGrauwe brothers’ fourteen.

The DeGrauwes were continuing a family tradition stretching back to Adolph’s father, who as a member of the Belgian American Legion post participated in archery and sponsored a drum corps, the Ardennes. Adolph and older brother Gil marched with the Ardennes before joining the Cavaliers. The experience got Adolph out of the streets, taught him an instrument, and made him friends for life. He wanted the same for his boys.

“We were so young,” Scott DeGrauwe said. “I was five years old when I joined. Everybody said the rifle was bigger than me. He just brought us into it, and we moved along.”

“He must have thought he could shoot the rifle,” older brother Steve quipped. “I remember about discipline: what kept us out of trouble was you were so busy all summer and winter you couldn’t get into trouble—except the trouble you did with the group.”

As Scott says, the craziest thing he did in drum corps was sign up. “It was the absolute, 100-percent giving up of our childhood,” said John Van Dorpe, who committed 11 summers to the Cavaliers, four of them with the cadets. Van Dorpe joined because his brother Pete came to the corps in 1972, following the Wasz brothers—Ed and Larry, late of the Berwyn Centurions. They were in awe of the Cavaliers’ might and mystique in the 1960s.

It was an era when a show cost a couple bucks admission. Tickets to DCI finals in 1981 ran $10. Corps kids were your next-door neighbors, Little League teammates, sat at the desk next to you in school. It was a shock, Van Dorpe said, when the corps got a member from Florida in the late 1970s. “In the 1950s,” Adolph DeGrauwe said, “if we had an out-of-towner it was someone who came from Evanston.”

“I can’t imagine having a nine-year-old daughter or 11-year-old son, watching them get on the bus to Canada—‘see you in two weeks,’” said John Chapin, new to the cadets in 1981. “I can’t even begin to imagine it. Ernie Coffin—he was like eight!”

Whoever came into the fold and stuck around was considered family, which kept the kids safe, in-line, and happy. They encamped at each other’s houses all summer, shared meals. The DeGrauwes’ mother was along for the ride on the cook truck. Their father, of course, was in charge—not always the best thing, Steve DeGrauwe noted. “We couldn’t get away from our parents! We had a good time when he quit the one year. And then—oh, yeah—he came back again!”

Cadets toured separately from the main group, with their own clique of drivers, known to all by first names and nicknames. There was Mr. J—Carl Johnson in the “real world”—who donned sunglasses at night, driving through construction zones. Pat, and Nancy. Charley Pratt, Gil Baker, Bob Bachman, the Wroblewskis, the Poznanskis, the Fiedlers—all found their start in the Cavaliers through cadet corps. “It was funny,” Jeff Fiedler said. “Kind of like a Little League social network in certain ways. Parents knew each other and got to hang out a little bit.”

Fiedler started with the cadets in 1973. It was an inauspicious year to begin an association that would last through the next three and a half decades. “We couldn’t get any worse,” Fiedler admitted. “We tried.”

Fiedler—no relation to 1950s drum majors Dave and Jarvis—had been raised to root against the Green Machine. He grew up on Chicago’s northwest side. Two cousins marched for the Millstadt Crusaders in southern Illinois. His aunt and uncle were quartermasters for the group. Whenever the Crusaders came to Chicago in the late 1960s, Fiedler and his family took in the spectacle. The first time Fiedler remembers seeing a corps performance was at LaFollette Park.

“It was a winter thing, it was loud. Because it was a Chicago Park District auditorium, it was all concert and little, you know, moving. What I really remember is sitting with my aunt and uncle. And they hated the Cavaliers. They hated you,” Fiedler said, nodding at Don Warren. “I remember going to Lane Tech for prelims and Elk Grove for finals (in 1968). I was sitting there with my aunt and you guys (the Cavaliers) were wearing the green sport coat. I remember my aunt going, ‘Oh, there’s that Don Warren,’ with such contempt in her voice. At that point you’d been winning forever.

“And I was watching the show and everybody had their opinion on who won and all that. And the Royal Airs were good, but I thought the Cavaliers won, and I said it. I’m sure they all rolled their eyes. The corps was kind of despised in some ways. People took great pleasure in the fact that the Cavaliers didn’t win.”

It didn’t matter who won to eight-year-old Fiedler. He was fascinated with the pageantry. He watched judges count off each mistake, making their ticks, and was impressed kids a little older than him could handle the pressure and still move well and play their instruments. “The Cavaliers were all guys. They carried themselves a certain way. I thought their uniforms were a little more distinctive than everybody else’s. The Cavaliers wore satin; everybody else wore wool, I guess. There was a little more of a flash or whatever to them. It’s kind of strange for me now (to think about back then), because when you’re 8 or 9 years old you just go along with the flow. If somebody hates this politician, you do, too, because your mom does and Dad does and cousin does. Whatever it was, though, I liked the Cavaliers.”

Fiedler believes his father, Maurice, secretly admired the Cavaliers. From the Fiedler home in Cragin, they heard the corps practice in Hanson Park. The family often biked to watch rehearsal.

Fiedler was more interested in baseball than music. Little League dominated spring and summer. But in winter 1973 the Belmont-Cragin Leader ran a notice about the Cavaliers looking for members. Fiedler was 13. His dad phoned the corps and it was suggested Fiedler join the cadets. He was in eighth grade, and didn’t yet play an instrument. “We went to Cavalier Hall one night in February or March, met Adolph, met Diane, met Mr. Poznanski and signed on the dotted line,” Fiedler said. “They gave me a valve rotor trumpet.”

Fiedler doesn’t remember why he chose horn over drums. Perhaps his parents didn’t want a lot of noise around the house. In any case, trumpet lessons weren’t enough to get his chops in shape for that summer, so he joined color guard to start. Most of the kids were younger than Fiedler. “It was something I probably knew more about than the average person, because of my cousins’ experience. I knew a lot about drum corps, a lot of behind-the-scenes things. I’m sure most of the people in the Cavaliers didn’t know this. They were surprised—I caught on real quickly. What they didn’t realize until they put a flagpole in my hand is that I could actually spin a flag. My cousins were in the color guard and they taught my sister and I some things. I was a little bit self-trained, too. I played baseball, and I spun the bat a lot.”

Two or three weeks in, Fiedler was named color guard sergeant of the cadets. He was quickly promoted to A corps in 1975. “I didn’t know we were that hard up back then,” Don Warren later teased. “My God.”

Kids like Chris Smith were steered into corps by parents looking for structured activity and the opportunity to develop early musical promise. He came into the corps in 1977 with minimal experience—organ lessons from age five, a little trombone at school. As a 10-year-old recruit, the cadets put him on soprano, then put a pair of cymbals in his hands. After that, it was drum line the rest of his Cavaliers summers.