Monday Memory: When it took three days to get a contest finished
In modern days, drum corps pull into a power regional and perform once. But it used to be to play the regional Final, you had to place high enough in prelims. Twenty years ago that was a same day gig, doing prelims in the morning and those who made finals got to play again that night. At best a corps might spend two days in town for this one show. But there was a time when it took three days to figure out who was in Finals. And it wasn’t for a regional.
1975 U.S.Open program page for Class A
In 1975 the Bluecoats headed out to Marion, Ohio for the nationally revered U.S. Open. Think of the prestige of the regionals in 2019 in Atlanta and Allentown and you get the importance. Try finding Marion on a map and it might take you a while, but this 35,000 (in 1975) person town was a hot bed of drum corps activity. In the early 1970s the town had not one, but two active drum corps: the Marion Cadets and their feeder corps the Jets. And the U.S. Open would draw over 70 drum corps for its contest.
Wait, what? How many?
In 1975 Bluecoats were one of seventy-one drum corps to perform at the U.S. Open. The second-year corps competed in Class A (think Open Class in the 2010s) and the program listed their step off at 1:34 pm on a Friday afternoon as the 41st corps of the Class Competition. Three more corps would follow. Before you try ponder the logistics of 44 corps in a day, the first 25 competed on Thursday while the remaining corps competed on Friday.
How did a nearly brand new corps get such a great step-off time? Planning and logistics: your starting time was based upon the post-mark on your entry packet mailer. Bluecoats were planning long for this contest.
1975 U.S. Open program of Open Class corps
But at the same time, the Open Class (today’s World Class) corps were also having prelims across town. That’s two drum corps shows happening less than 6 miles apart at two high school stadiums. 14 of the big boy corps performed on that same Friday as Bluecoats while the 13 others went on Saturday morning. U.S. Open Finals was on Saturday evening. Incidentally, the Dubuque, Iowa Colt .45s (now just the Colts) performed in the same time slot as Bluecoats on the same day over at the Open Class site.
Imagine the drum corps paradise of catching a dozen corps a day for three straight days and each day none of the corps were the same from the day before!
Bluecoats would finish 6th in Prelims, 0.5 behind the emerging cross-state rivals Glassmen. From that 1975 U.S. Open slate of 71 units, only five are still competitive in DCI (Colts, Scouts, Troopers and Blue Stars) and the Bluecoats are the only Class A corps that moved on to World Class in modern times.
In just two years, the upstart corps from Canton would take Class A High Drums in Marion and in 1981 win the overall Class A title at the U.S. Open. Was the U.S. Open a unique show of its day? Nope. Over in Butler, Pennsylvania, the American International Open was another just like the Marion show. The early days of DCI were still a time when VFW, American Legion and these world Opens heavily influenced the drum corps landscape.
1975 Bluecoats rifle line
