1975

Board

Pres. – Larry Keppel
V.P. – Craig Howard
Sec’y – Sue Piotrowski, Jim Ellison
Treas. – Tom Zimmerman
Corps Comm. – Bob Peterson
Bus. Mgr. – Larry Soos

Staff

Drums – Steve Bell, Charlie Houseman
Horns – Bob LaDuca
M&M – Mike Linton

Show

OTL – “English Folk Song Suite”
Prod – “South Ramparts Street Parade”
Prod – “What Can a Friend Say?”
Concert – “Trumpet Blues”
Exit – “Ghost Riders In the Sky”, “King of Kings”

Schedule

[Editor’s note]

The journal ends there.

I evidently didn’t have the heart to update it at the end of the ’75 season. While the corps had actually grown slightly from ’74 to ’75, we were still tiny; the 20 man (person?) horn-line that might have wowed ‘em in the fifties didn’t cut it anymore.

And although we’d been “reduced” to competing in RCA, we were sure (and we “were” a rather musically-sophisticated bunch) that we could make up in quality what we lacked in numbers. We couldn’t.

My ever-dimmer memories of that summer include an inspired performance at the RCA finals in Hamilton that resulted in our losing, not only to the Royalaires, but to the Dunkirk Patriots as well. It probably didn’t help us that we didn’t make a secret of the fact that competing in RCA was, to us, “slumming.”

Payback’s a bitch.

As might be expected, what grumbling there had been in the ranks, only grew. By the following spring, after rehearsals for the Patriots’ indoor show proved us completely unprepared for public performance, it got ugly. And that night, after the show (at the Aquavia Post), I quit.

I don’t mean to make it sound as if my quitting were some fatal blow to the corps; it certainly wasn’t. It’s just that I’d finished college, had a decent job in Jamestown and I was tired of trying to rescue a legend – year after year after year.

With steel mills closing down all around us, who could afford to run around the country marching in a “band.” And with anti-war sentiment so high, why would anyone, new rules allowing beards notwithstanding, want to belong to a para-military group?

The rest of the corps, of course, carried on -- as it always had -- and worked hard to turn things around. But it wasn’t to be. In 1976, the Hamburg Kingsmen Drum and Bugle Corps disbanded.

Craig Howard, 2006