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Thought that would get you to read this! LOL

This morning while in the shower, for some reason, I was thinking about the dreaded 1985 Bridgemen and the Christmas in July themed show. Could this had been the signal to us about "The Day That Drum Corps Died?" Of course I jest there...it isn't dead, just taking a well-deserved rest until we start to see corps sprouting up all over the country and Canada once again.

Back to my shower....I started to become depressed thinking about the '85 Bridgemen and comparing it to the 1976 Bridgemen. Where did it all go wrong? I remember seing them at World Open and said, "What the heck is that?" Can someone tell me WHAT HAPPENED?

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.....Back to my shower....I started to become depressed thinking about the '85 Bridgemen and comparing it to the 1976 Bridgemen. Where did it all go wrong? I remember seing them at World Open and said, "What the heck is that?" Can someone tell me WHAT HAPPENED?

Blame the management and staff. But it didn't just happen in 1985, it might have started in 1982.....kids want to march at the highest level and Cadets were right up the road. 1982 was Cadets breakout year, and everything fell into place after that.

With less kids coming through the door, and perhaps less talent, I am guessing the staff struggled with not only show theme, but also show development.

Somewhat related is the demise of the 27th Lancers. The ship starting sinking after 1981. Placement each year fell (82 - 6th, 83 - 10th, 84 - 11th). It became harder and harder to recruit kids - and local corps were all but gone. Reaching out to college kids, they arrived in late May, and had to learn a show - musically and visually - in quick fashion. No time for basics, or for working on movement and style. In 1985, when 27th missed finals, it became even harder to recruit for 1986. When the corps failed to make finals in 1986, I think it became obvious how difficult it was to continue.

My hat is off to the Boston Crusaders. Throughout all of the focus on Rockland Defenders, North Star, Alliance of Greater Boston and 27th, BAC continued to focus on their mission - to survive. They have a very loyal alumni and fan base, and have taken the steps necessary to insure they would survive. I want to see them back in the top tier, proudly performing and marching to Conquest !!!!

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Blame the management and staff. But it didn't just happen in 1985, it might have started in 1982.....kids want to march at the highest level and Cadets were right up the road. 1982 was Cadets breakout year, and everything fell into place after that.

With less kids coming through the door, and perhaps less talent, I am guessing the staff struggled with not only show theme, but also show development.

Somewhat related is the demise of the 27th Lancers. The ship starting sinking after 1981. Placement each year fell (82 - 6th, 83 - 10th, 84 - 11th). It became harder and harder to recruit kids - and local corps were all but gone. Reaching out to college kids, they arrived in late May, and had to learn a show - musically and visually - in quick fashion. No time for basics, or for working on movement and style. In 1985, when 27th missed finals, it became even harder to recruit for 1986. When the corps failed to make finals in 1986, I think it became obvious how difficult it was to continue.

My hat is off to the Boston Crusaders. Throughout all of the focus on Rockland Defenders, North Star, Alliance of Greater Boston and 27th, BAC continued to focus on their mission - to survive. They have a very loyal alumni and fan base, and have taken the steps necessary to insure they would survive. I want to see them back in the top tier, proudly performing and marching to Conquest !!!!

It started way before '85 ... While the corps reached it's zenith in 1980, in terms of both performance excellence and placement, the organization had started crumbling from an administrative perspective after Eddie Holmes (the founding Director of the corps) retired following the 1978 season.

Long story, lots of drama (none of which is relevant today, water under the Bayonne Bridge, if you will...), but the bottom line was that the infrastructure wasn't there to support the spending levels needed to sustain the corps, a lot of long-time folks who were the backbone of the corps support started leaving the organization, and by '85 there was pretty much nothing left but a name, and a lot of debt.

Same story as a lot of the other corps of that era, different players ...

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I'm glad you had a shower Keith. I have a dry sense of humour with a dash of sarcasm.

As at November 12 2011, 9 out of 20 threads on the first page of Historical Junior Corps Discussions were started by you!

May I have your permission to start a topic?

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Are you saying I am doing to much on DCP Linda?

BTW I wanted to mention 27th too.

1982 I was on staff with the Renegades (NY) the corps had huge potential but during the summer (1982) a person who knew many Rochester kids and was affiliated with Garfield came around and sold some kids to marching in NJ in '83. On the other side....a new corps was starting in Rochester by the co-director of the Renegades and many kids left to march with them. The Renegades got corporate sponsorship, purchased new drums, had everything going for them, along with a name change (Royal Legacy) and the members went to other corps. I guess that was the start of the slow death of junior corps in NY State.

I'm glad you had a shower Keith. I have a dry sense of humour with a dash of sarcasm.

As at November 12 2011, 9 out of 20 threads on the first page of Historical Junior Corps Discussions were started by you!

May I have your permission to start a topic?

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There was another event in 1985 that accounts, in part, for the decline of the Bridgemen.

Star of Indiana was born, and they had the resources to hire staff and actually pay them.

Larry Kerchner, Dennis Delucia, Bob Dubinski and a few others, as well as a number of corps members went from the Bridgemen in '84 to Star in '85. You can't replace a world-class staff when you can't afford to pay them.

I was with 27th Lancers in 85/86, George Bonfiglio was struggling to find ways to increase the revenue for the corps. He would often talk about how difficult it was to compete with income just slightly above $100k when half the top twelve were bringing in over $500k and the rest were above $300k.

27th lost George Zingali and Marc Sylvester to the Cadets because they could pay them and 27th couldn't. The Cadets had championship winning shows written for them. 27th in '85 had a drill that was so awful we scrapped the whole thing mid-season and learned an entirely new visual show in the middle of tour. Our visual staff consisted of 1 person - a recent age-out. Neither the drill writer for the show that got scrapped, nor the one that replaced it, went on tour. Our brass staff consisted of 3 people, 2 of whom had aged out in either '83 or '84. Fortunately, we had Charlie Poole and our percussion scores were carrying the corps (as they had in '84 - in '84 prelims the hornline was in 18th the drumline in 2nd (they deserved to be in 1st)).

What finally did us in was the state of our tour busses - the newest of which was built in '63. We started with 4, 1 died the day we left for tour and we never saw it again. The others took turns having breakdowns (costing us rehearsal time) and we had a few trips with the whole corps crammed on two busses. By the time we got to Allentown, we were down to 1 bus and stranded. You can't move a corps on 1 bus. If it weren't for Bill Cook, who sent a Star of Indiana bus, we wouldn't have been able to finish tour.

George Bonfiglio was deeply affected by the fact that he no longer felt he could get the corps safely down the road.

So, what really 'killed drum corps'? IMO it was the national tour. Corps that had the financial resources to go on tour continuously for 8-10 weeks survived, those that didn't folded. The model changed from corps competing mostly locally on the weekends, with kids living at home most of the time, to corps going on 2-3 tours of 1-2 weeks each with breaks in between where, again, kids lived at home, to the early 80's where corps started going on tour fulltime for about two months. The number of corps in existence dropped from ~400 to ~200 to about ~100 by the early 80's and finally to about 50 by the 90's. It was a vicious circle: the financial requirements of the national tour was killing corps, and the reduction of the number of corps in existence resulted in fewer local contests to compete in thereby making it more imperative to be able to tour nationally.

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So, what really 'killed drum corps'? IMO it was the national tour.

Right on,..............also, prior to the advent of the national touring model, corps were community based, the early 70's brought forward the notion of travelling 100's if not 1000's of miles to be in the "be all, end all" corps,..........no more hometown allegience,.............

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I'll admit that I fell for it. I was merely wondering if Hooters was going to become a drum corps sponsor. lol. And then I saw it was in Historical discussions.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Thought that would get you to read this! LOL

This morning while in the shower, for some reason, I was thinking about the dreaded 1985 Bridgemen and the Christmas in July themed show. Could this had been the signal to us about "The Day That Drum Corps Died?" Of course I jest there...it isn't dead, just taking a well-deserved rest until we start to see corps sprouting up all over the country and Canada once again.

Back to my shower....I started to become depressed thinking about the '85 Bridgemen and comparing it to the 1976 Bridgemen. Where did it all go wrong? I remember seing them at World Open and said, "What the heck is that?" Can someone tell me WHAT HAPPENED?

Keith, Keith ... Keith. You could have used American Express and I still would have opened this thread because it was you.

What happened as I see it began well before '85 or even '76. It was because it was the end of 1971, it was because of a group of selfish, greedy Mid-West Corps directors wanted to make money from a great activity, because of a very stupid conflict in Vietnam, because of the breakup of many communities, the lack of families having dinner together because of f-ing McDonald's, 50,000 young people not coming home, Nixon, gas prices ... 1971 was (as has been discussed before) "The Year Drum Corps Died" Drum Corps went into a cocoon for just about a decade then emerged to scamper around with little or no focus until the another group of people got together from Indiana with a real plan on how to run a Drum Corps as a business and not use anything other than talent and focus and not politics to build an organization that if others had followed their model they'd be successful, too and within six years they were the corps everybody had to get out of the way of ... and then ... like any great champion quit after realizing no matter what, they could be better than any other corps but they would never beat the system. (Was that a great run-on sentence or what!?) So after the mid 90s Drum Corps went back into the cocoon again and coasted along uninspiring me at any rate until a couple of years ago when Phantom, and Carolina Crown, and SCV and even BD and the Troopers got some life back ... but even though Juliet had a spark that made my heart skip a couple of beats ... well you know. :lookaround:

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it was because of a group of selfish, greedy Mid-West Corps directors wanted to make money from a great activity

I'm assuming that's parody, otherwise it's breathtakingly ridiculous. Do really think people like Don Warren and Jim Jones were in it for the money? Doesn't it make more sense that they were trying to save their corps (and the activity, by extension) from the mismanagement of organizations like the VFW and American Legion?

An unrelated comment regarding the thread's name... it's good to see that the inconsistent censors of DCP have finally grown up a little and left it in place. A few years ago they would respond like overactive adolescents with a new toy, hitting the "closed" or "delete" button at the slightest perceived -- not actual -- inappropriateness. Whereas this thread's title is intended as a joke, I posted about an actual occurrence a few years ago: one of the local NYC sponsors of the ESPN DCI broadcast was the Penthouse Club in Hell's Kitchen. The censor shut the thread down immediately. Glad to see that "Hooters" makes the grade!

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