For Six Years, We Marched with the Finest Small Town Marching Band Ever, the Byron Marching Eagles

March 31, 2020 at 9:02 AM

Reading Township, Illinois

The Byron Marching Eagles traveled all over the county and the state, marching wherever invited. We made the scene numerous times for the National Cherry Festival, band on the run, sleeping nights on the floor of a Traverse City elementary school. We could enjoy the festival when we weren’t performing, and we performed in all the parades and stood in place downtown, offering concerts to anyone who was willing to listen.

Despite sleeping on the wooden floor under the basketball nets, Mr. Mosciski insisted upon the neat hanging of our natty purple uniforms with gold trim. We kept them on hangers in a closet, and he stood outside the door, checking the uniforms first. He saw mine and gave me a lesson in matching up the seams of the trouser bottoms. I always remember the lesson when I match up the seams after laundry, hanging my pantaloons.

The Eagles owned the streets of Byron. Almost a hundred marchers in spats and purple uniforms with a military cut, we could bring a concert to every inch of downtown Byron. We even bussed to the senior citizens home in downtown Argentine once. A man wandered up to a cornet player and stared at the shiny brass as if he were studying a Christmas Tree ornament. We didn’t understand at that time that our elders were experiencing changes in memory and behavior. And it didn’t matter because the residents applauded us gratefully. 

We filled Saginaw Street with music when our village called upon us. We were the ornament of the Homecoming Parades. We made the parade a parade. The floats rolled along to our music as the elementary children cheered. We served our veterans, marching out of the goodness of our grateful hearts, honoring the Daughters of the American Revolution to the Veterans of Foreign Wars to the Ladies Auxiliary.

How can we forget how the leader of the auxiliary stood on the platform built before Tower Hardware, reading her speech from a sheaf of wide ruled paper, the better to see her writing? She paused as she lost her place twice, but we stood patiently at attention, hanging on the next word. None of these moments were sent to TikTok or shared to Facebook and we must rely on our memories. I bet Mr. Tower built that stand and dismantled it every year while he ran the store.

We followed our service men and women into the Byron Cemetery, marching half rank, and played taps when the DAR ladies floated carnations and Flanders Field poppies upon the waters of our mill pond. The VFW then raised their rifles for a twenty-one-gun salute. Dismissed, we walked back to the high school in silence.

We were a farm community, but the sons and daughters of corn farmers, cattle farmers and hog farmers could prove our high culture with a John Philip Sousa march, played with flutes trilling and a brass section that wouldn't quit. The parents of Byron believed in private musical instruction.

Miss Julie Vince on the French Horn played hauntingly well because she trained classically on a piano kept in her living room. If you dated Miss Julie, you had to keep up on the keys while playing four handed piano. I met a man named Jack Kelly, who could. I still remember the two playing an informal concert at Julie’s house, sharing the keyboard. The music went on for a hour that I will always treasure.

The trombone team of Kurt Rivard and Dale Shaeffer collected plenty of brass medals at Solo and Ensemble. I still remember a performance of their selection for competition. I listened with amazement, astounded at what those two could make the trombone perform.

The band had to raise funds. Before citrus season in Florida, we sold citrus from Indian River and the orders came in quickly. The fruit sold itself ahead of the harvest, almost as quickly as Girl Scout Cookies. My mom always took a box. After harvest, the boxes or orange and yellow fruit was delivered to the band room and taken to neighbors by hand.

The marching band also sold a birthday calendar. My mom bought one the first chance she could, filling out a form that asked for the names and birthdates of all her children. When delivered, we couldn’t believe it. Every date on the calendar showed names of our neighbors, and we knew the birthdate of every person in town.

A birthday card came in the mail for my mother, Joan Elizabeth. She looked at the envelope, and the address belonged to a man who lived in a prefabricated home on the Byron mill race at the end of Silver Lake Road. Mom knew him from Lott’s Supermarket. He would walk into town to pick up his milk and bread, a man with a boyish face and a large purple birthmark on his cheek. He chatted with mom, said hello to us, and then went about his shopping. We learned later that he sent birthday cards to all the adults listed on the Birthday Calendar. He knew all the addresses in town. I think I heard that he had worked for the Byron post office, delivering mail.

To confess, I loved the birthday calendar. I had a crush on one of my classmates. I have no idea why my attention fell upon that person. But it did, from elementary school until senior high. I looked up her name on the birthday calendar. It took searching through four of the months. Once I knew her birthday, I could look up her sign in the Zodiac. She was a Virgo and I was a Libra.

I learned that those two weren’t entirely incompatible. From friends, I learned that she was very religious and spent most of her free evenings in classes at her church. I even looked up her address, on the hill in town by the man known for fixing every type of television or radio. He had a workshop in his garage. We took all our electronics to him, and dad and he would talk tech for far too long. I would get bored.

One night, I walked up to her door one night after being dropped off by mom at the middle school dance. I knocked, wondering if she could come down to the dance. I practiced my spiel as I waited on the porch. I’m rather glad that no one answered the door.

She came to the Tenth Reunion of the Byron Class of 1981, held at the Veterans of Foreign Wars on the road between Corunna and Owosso. Carrie, who has kept our class together for almost four decades now, found a great deal on the rental. I talked with my crush for an hour that night. She had married a man she had met at church after a silly string of dating mistakes. And she laughed as I confessed that I had pretty much used the band calendar to build a dossier on her. It’s never cringeworthy when one makes a full confession and the confession meets with absolution.