A Pageant of Marching Bands

Abstract

Charity Game is sponsored by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, morning newspaper, for the high schools' Medical-Injury Funds to cover costs of injuries to athletes, and for the Plain Dealer Give-A-Christmas Fund. It has drawn from nineteen thousand to forty-seven thousand people annually in its seven-year span, the latter figure being the 1937 record total. Charity Game is really two spectacles, one of football and one of massed bands. game is the Greater Cleveland scholastic championship contest, the last game of the scholastic season, the high spot of the gridiron struggles among nearly twoscore high schools of Cuyahoga County. band spectacle is the prelude, the dedicatory exercises, the opening ceremony for the game. It is the one event in the year when all eligible school bands appear together before the public for outdoor massed operations. The massed band ceremonial is nearly as strong an attraction and draws nearly as many people as the game does, according to John A. Crawford, of the Plain Dealer, game manager. Look behind the scenes of this Charity Game band spectacle to see how and why it has built up public appreciation for instrumental instruction in high schools. Charity Game spectacle is staged in Cleveland's Stadium, a huge bowl of concrete, steel, and brick, on the breezy edge of Lake Erie. Stadium is egg-shaped with the home plate for baseball and the westerly goal posts for football in the narrower end. gridiron lies east and west. Around the gridiron runs a quarter-mile cinder track. Around three sides of the field rise deep gray bays of seats, two decks of them; on the fourth side, back of the easterly gridiron goal posts, back of center field in baseball terms, spreads a single deck of green-faced bleachers, crowned with the black expanse of the scoreboard. Stadium seats seventy-nine thousand, but has held ninety-two thousand. Into this gigantic structure came twenty-five bands last November 27 to stage a forty-six-minute spectacle-fourteen hundred players without a massed rehearsal. They swarmed into the easterly gates, scattered through the center field bleachers, doffing overcoats, uncasing instruments, and leaving them in the bleachers, two bands to each section, under police guard. And then they jammed into the concourse under the bleachers, filling it with the din of instrument tuning, and making it a bedlam of scurrying players dashing for line-up positions.