With sponsorship, the corps began turning out for drum and bugle shows in communities up and down the highways and back roads leading to and from home, as well as the American Legion’s state convention. Usually, the season opened on Memorial Day and stretched through summer weekends until its culmination on Labor Day. The corps met Wednesday nights all winter, and when the weather broke began Thursday night drills, usually at Hanson Park Stadium, at Fullerton and Central.
Nearly every Saturday the corps trooped onto two buses chartered for travel around Illinois and into Wisconsin, Indiana and other neighboring commonwealths. Most were out and back trips—leaving Logan Square as close to dawn as the boys’ work schedules allowed, returning late that night with the sweat long dried on their backs. Dining consisted of pulling the buses into whatever roadside stop could shuttle several dozen boys through the chow line. At local shows, they mobbed concession stands before or after performances. Contests lasting several days, like South Milwaukee, were the rarity.
No one thought of the weekend sojourns to Momence and Dubuque and Cary as touring, in the way of the rock n’ roll acts that soon traversed the country in variety troupes. They called them turnouts. Warren chartered the buses, the boys boarded, they hit the highway, arrived at the show, unloaded their gear, strutted their stuff, packed it all up, rolled on home and did it all again the next weekend. “That left you maybe two or three days a week to yourself all summer long,” Jarvis Fiedler said.
“Memorial Day through Labor Day it took all of your time, no question about it,” said Bob Egeland.
Most shows featured a parade or festival before competition. Friday nights were devoted to barnstorming in South Milwaukee. The corps didn’t wear uniforms, but the T-shirts and jeans they donned kicking around their own neighborhood, and they knocked horns and shuffled ranks as they wound through the streets. Saturday was the contest, with the parade early in the morning as prelude. Field shows ran as long as 15 minutes, and parades were as much an exercise in endurance, especially when marching behind the horses, Egeland joked.
“You were sucking bugs and things in through your mouthpiece,” Fiedler said. “I don’t exactly know how the uniforms survived, or the kids did, parading in close to 100-degree heat, four or five miles. That’s hard. You get all sweaty to say the least. At the end of a parade you’d pour a bottle of Pepsi down your throat just to break it up enough so you could taste the second bottle. But I don’t remember marching as miserable. We’d drink Pepsis till we were blue in the face and have a good time.”
Competition was as much mental game as physical performance. VFW rules required corps to hold to a cadence of 130 beats per minute or face penalties. Inspections brought further infractions for the slightest smudge on shoes, the barest button out of place. The main task for Fiedler as drum major was getting everybody where they belonged, “moving the corps.” How well they moved counted as much as the quality of their performance. The style was very military in its pomp and bearing, and execution had to be precise. These were former soldiers judging the corps, and pride, if not fear at laboring under the veterans’ jaundiced eyes, drove the boys.
“We all took a kind of great joy in the marching end of it, screw the music,” Fiedler said. “The military movement was always fun to me, getting the corps in and out, and making sure we didn’t run over anybody.”
That’s when Fiedler wasn’t playing “The Game.” In the Cavaliers’ early years, drumming was an Achilles heel, and the judges were merciless. They’d get as close on the field as they could to the drum line, wherever the line roamed, and pick out flaws, recording tick after tick—deductions to the perfect score of 100 every corps started with. “So I’d aim for them,” Fiedler said. “Wherever I could, I’d go anywhere to hunt them down. I’d be in certain places certain times and try to get in between them (and the corps). Everybody who became a drum major knew about that. It was part of the fun.”
When the corps was its best, hitting the line like a charging battalion and nailing the high notes with gusto, the crowd was a far more reliable—and more immediate—measuring stick than judges. The audience let the boys know how they felt, though corps members couldn’t always hear applause until they were done, Egeland said. The music was too loud on the field. “The only shows you really felt a grind were ones where there wasn’t a big audience, and there was no response,” Dick Snyder said. “The more people, the more adrenaline. The more crowd noise and you can just keep going and going.”
From their inception, the Cavaliers were sure they’d be winning—state titles, show medals, Legion and VFW national championships. “There’s something awfully good about beating some other kid out of what he thought he was going to do,” Fiedler said. There has to be a goal, Don Warren said. Competition keeps interest up, holds it all together. And once you taste victory, “That’s it. You know. The goal is to be in the playoffs, to be the world champion. And all the fans have the feeling, too. It’s just life. If you don’t have the competition, what’s the purpose?”
But the newly-christened Cavaliers weren’t getting it done. Not yet. The corps was prone to silly mistakes that marked its youth. Egeland cringes, remembering his “accidental solo,” toward the end of one show, when he sounded the harmony part on his own. The crowd applauded, but it didn’t know the music. The judges did. Such gaffes cost the Cavaliers.
Learning the drill was a struggle, and when the corps rolled into Dwight, Ill. for its first competition, the membership practically begged not to go on. “A lot of us thought we weren’t ready,” Warren Alm said. “We’re gonna get embarrassed. We’re gonna get slaughtered.”
Enter Don Warren, with just the right touch of deceit to motivate his young charges.
“Don put the word out, ‘Hey, I just heard from the instructors. If you don’t go on they’re quitting, you bunch of namby-pambies.’” Alm remembered. “We didn’t want to lose that. We didn’t want to be the namby-pambies. We went on and did our show, holding our breath and everything. We found out when we talked to our instructors, oh, it was fine. They were going to stay with us. ‘What are you talking about?’ they said. So Don had pulled the ruse on us. To make sure we toed the line and got out there and showed them what we got. Once we broke the ice on that one, we wanted another one under our belt.”
Warren supplied rah-rah words when needed. His speeches were rarely of fire and brimstone quality—the boys knew he was on friendly terms with other corps managers. But Warren would share what knowledge he’d gleaned, the better to stoke his troops. “He’d pass on little pieces of things, like how the Belleville guys, they’re going to kick our ass and stuff like that,” Alm said. “And we’d be like, ‘Oh yeah? Yeah, well we’ll see about that!’”
As the Cavaliers improved, competition heated up among the neighborhoods. “We were pushing ourselves all the time,” Alm said. “We had the drive to beat Norwood, or beat the Grenadiers, or whoever. We did a lot of that ourselves. This was almost like my high school football team against your football team because the neighborhoods were so close. This was bragging rights, you know?”
One of the hardest places the Cavaliers played was down Springfield way at the state fair in the heat of August. The drill had to be readjusted to fit on a narrow horse track. Housing was scarce because crowds were huge. “We were one of so many attractions that came to the fair,” Alm remembered. “If it wasn’t drum corps night, it was stock car racing night.”
One of the corps’ principal competitors was the Belleville Black Knights. Loyalties seemed divided along baseball lines—and just as rabid. “If you lived in Chicago, you’re a Cub fan. But you didn’t have to go too far south within the state of Illinois to find a lot of St. Louis Cardinals fans,” Alm said. “So the Belleville Black Knights had a lot of fans that would show up to Springfield and be supportive of the country boys versus the big city boys. It wasn’t like they’d boo us—but you could tell by how they cheered.”
Good times were usually had in the hops-scented streets of South Milwaukee, where drum corps from every age group gathered—seniors, juniors, bands, drill teams. The party lasted all weekend. “We’d get sucked into a big mob of people,” said Bill Dragland, a Cavalier from 1956-63. “They surrounded ya, poured beer on ya.”
“On Friday nights, they had a big street festival,” Alm said. “In the barnstorming parade you would go up and down the blocks and round and around and around. It was something, kind of an opportunity for us up-and-coming corps to make a little extra money, because if you were parading and actually playing the number at the time when the big cannon went off, that would be another 50 dollars. So Don had us out there running around. We played our lips off until they were hanging down to our knees.”
The guys took advantage of downtime. These were days before every moment was scheduled: wake, eat, rehearse, perform, sleep, repeat. So when they weren’t visiting the—ahem—historic sites, the boys in green trained their eyes on the fairer squads of competing corps. “We wanted to check out the skirts,” Alm said. “There were an awful lot of pretty girls around, and a lot of the marriages came out of the meetings between guys from our corps and girls from other corps.”
Though the boys weren’t the only beings buzzing. “I always thought they were manufacturing the mosquitoes there, they were so big,” Jarvis Fiedler said of South Milwaukee.
“I had one sit on my nose during inspection,” Bob Egeland remembered. “I was just looking at him”—unable to take a swat, lest the judges get tick happy.
If the corps tired of fun and games, it was because it wasn’t winning. The Cavaliers constantly finished behind two chief rivals: the Norwood Park Imperials and Austin Grenadiers. Here were two established corps, Warren said, probably getting the benefit of the doubt from judges, and who could argue? Corps in the Midwest were dead even. As the ticks accumulated, the Cavaliers won top brass occasionally, marching more and more as hard drilling paid off, but drumming and general effect were a different story. It was entirely subjective, Warren knew, but that didn’t take away the kinks in their necks as they stared up at rivals, show after show. “Everybody thought we should be winning. I don’t know whether I was naïve, but I just figured that sooner or later, if we hung in there, we would do it. We were working so hard.”
Letdowns began to wear on the membership. The Cavaliers entered 1952 eager for success, expecting it. But the corps found itself part of the melee during the season’s first month, jockeying for position. South Milwaukee’s Spectacle of Music drew the usual lineup of regional corps and squads the Chicago boys had never heard of. Senior corps including the Boys of ‘76, Sharvin Redjackets and Gladstone duked it out in their own division. But the junior corps ring was so crowded Spectacle officials divided the kids into two classes. Corps with a long history–the Grenadiers, Imperials, Racine Scouts, Mel Tierney and Bell Corps, performed in the A class, while the Cavaliers were relegated to Class B with the Kilties, Madison Scouts and defending-champion Cedar Rapids Cadets.
Unfazed by the grouping, and undaunted by the competition, the Cavaliers finished the weekend at the top of Class B.
Some viewed Milwaukee as portent of good things to come. Instead, through July the corps turned in a string of third-place finishes so maddening and monotonous the only development interrupting their collective funk was fourth place at the Gladiola Festival in Momence. Rehearsals leading up to the show had gone smoothly, and the ranks were revved up and ready to break the jinx. But Mel Tierney took the trophy, as they had in Milwaukee’s A class. “We shuffled back to the school, changed clothes without a lot of goofing around, and boarded the bus for what was one of the quietest rides back to Chicago,” Warren Alm remembered. “Things were supposed to be looking up for us. I think we had one, maybe two more local shows, and then we were to be off to New York for our first American Legion nationals. Things were so bad there was even talk of not bothering to go.”
A week later, as the Cavaliers rolled into Cedar Rapids, Ia., Don Warren looked into their eyes and saw resignation staring back. The state fair contest didn’t seem the time or place for the corps to shake its doldrums. There were guys who were sick. A group of them floated the notion of not competing. “I called the corps together and gave the pep talk of my life,” Warren said.
Warren unleashed a litany of we-owe-it-to’s: The corps had to compete that night, he told them, the show sponsors deserved it. The corps had to play its show, the audience deserved to hear it. The corps had to go on, its post deserved it. Most of all, the boys owed it to themselves to perform the best they could. “Don’t be quitters,” Warren implored. “If we want to break up, let’s do it in our back room somewhere. Let’s not do it out here.”
The Cavaliers took the field and did their thing. Alm doesn’t remember any particular detail from their performance, except that the tension had melted away. The corps was loose, not hung up on expectations. “It was one of those, ‘Oh, what have we got to lose?’ things. We weren’t going on with grim game faces. This was one of those devil-may-care, let’s do this, give it our best shot.”
As scores were announced, Don Warren held his breath in the stands. On the field, the boys braced for another dismal showing, perhaps even—gulp—fifth place.
“As the announcer worked his way through the placings and got to fourth without mentioning our name, there was a slight bit of interest being displayed on our part,” Alm said. “We exchanged furtive glances with our squad members as if to confirm what we were hearing.”
Third place was announced: Norwood Park Imperials.
“I felt, well, we beat one of them,” Warren said. “I really kind of figured we’d be second. That might have been enough to get them excited again.”
The public address announcer now had the Cavaliers’ “total undivided attention,” Alm remembered. “Things seemed to move very quickly now, aided by large doses of adrenaline coursing through our systems.”
“In second place,” the amplified voice bounced its tidings around the stadium, “the Grenadiers.”
“And with that all hell broke loose within the ranks,” Alm said. “We went from a feeling of rejection to pride in a matter of seconds. Our joy was pure elation, especially when accompanied by the congratulations of our fellow competitors. This win was for real.”
The Cavaliers had beaten the same outfits that had trounced them all summer. In the following issue of Midwest Corps News, their fulfilled hopes and the molding of an identity were melded in the banner headline “Cavaliers wish on rainbow comes true.” “That solidified the whole bit of what was our theme song,” Alm said, referring to the show-closer that became a Cavaliers’ standard, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
The Cavaliers lost far more shows than they won in the summer of 1952, but they were now convinced they could march into any stadium, anywhere, and have the crowd on its feet and judges in their corner. The corps’ confidence level rose about 1,000 percent, Alm calculated. Conquering Iowa? Hell, Don Warren said, the corps was convinced it could go to New York in August for the national championship and win. “I do know the subject (of quitting) was never discussed again. The new guys on the block really left their mark, and from now on we were a corps to contend with. Now we were really getting rolling.”