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Not remembering the gender of George's children after only 28 years. Shame on me. Must've been the Chunky chocolates.

Oh don't be an ### Wayne! I merely stated that I don't know if he had daughters or not. It's entirely possible he did.

But if he had them in your time, they would have been nearly 30 years old by the time he died.

Of course, if he had them after 1987, then they'd have only been in their teens.

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I was surprised to find out that George ghost-wrote Blessed Sacrament's "Eleanor Rigby" for Bobby Thompson. Even his most intense competitors respected his talent.

Really? I never knew that one. That was a great drum part...BS first played it in 69 and reprised it in 70. In 70, Les Parks wrote the rest of the BS drum book.

The Tuthill/Thompson connection in 69 helps explain how he 'officially' ended up on their staff in 72.

Mike

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George Tuthill was no doubt a strange cat. I marched with the Hawthorne Caballeros from 1971 -1975, all years with George Tuhill writing parts and Jack Pratt assisting with cleanup.

Jack Pratt did cleanup for me with the 1977 King's Regiment, a decent GSC corps. Now THERE was a character of a guy, but a great one at that! He lived in Hawthorne, so working with the Cabs was a "natural". I visited his house quite often that year.

Outside of drumming, he had two major hobbies...collecting classical music albums and old comic books (before it became an "in" thing!).

If you wanted to hear the New World, he'd ask you "which orchestra and under which conductor"...he must have had thousands of records.

Comics-wise, he had originals of the first Batman comic, first Superman, etc....he was en English teacher in the Hackensack school system. I understand his masters thesis was on the effect of comic books on the war effort in WW II.

Great guy! He came up with the idea for our second percussion feature for the corps...a short 6/8 piece by Vaughan Williams (for our first I used Debussy's "Goliwogs Cakewalk"). I can't remember the name, sad to say...it had some sort of nautical theme. I went to the Julliard music library in Lincoln Center to find the score....ended up writing a short piece for percussion and brass quintet.

Mike

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Oh don't be an ### Wayne!  I merely stated that I don't know if he had daughters or not.  It's entirely possible he did.

But if he had them in your time, they would have been nearly 30 years old by the time he died.

Of course, if he had them after 1987,  then they'd have only been in their teens.

With George, you never know bit the children I'm talking about were school-age when he wrote for Belleville in 78-79. I know sitting was always an issue when he'd come in on the weekends, and he couldn't leave until school was out on Friday afternoons.

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  • 16 years later...

I knew George Tuthill very well.  I feel like OP misrepresents him, and that saddens me.

I met him in 1980.  I marched with the Sky Ryders.  It was my age-out year, and I'd discovered drum corps almost too late.  I joined the line as a soprano soloist.  The corps had improved a great deal from an already-good horn line in 1979.  I would sign on the following year as an assistant brass instructor.  I didn't realize that (fellow DCI Hall of Famer) John Simpson would have to leave at the end of the season owing to a family death.  It was quite a lot dropped on my lap.

George was the catalyst for Sky Ryders' quick rise to top-ten status.  Literally everyone in the business properly credited him for it.  But the Board of Directors had been feuding with him for years (unjustifiably), and ultimately fired him.  They fired John Simpson as well.  Simpson went on to help start Star of Indiana.

So, let's not get the idea that George's firing was reasonable.  It was not.  The Sky Ryders literally never came back from his firing.  They languished.  And they never regained the popularity that they had in the early '80s.

All of that was attributable primarily to George.  The team of George, John, and Lee Carlson was as good as it ever got for Sky Ryders.  And I don't think anyone who was in a position to know would push back on that.

I would go on to primarily play jazz, write, and work in showbiz as a composer.  I mention that only to say that I was (and am) a serious musician, and my experience is not limited to drum corps.  What George provided in the larger scheme of Sky Ryders was a proof-of-concept, involving many of the things you have been discussing.  He was ahead of the curve musically.  He was a great player (I played in a rehearsal band with him off season, and his musicianship was outstanding).  And he was a smart strategist.  I'd dragged my schoolmate Daniel Moore with me in 1981.  Daniel would return in 1982, with the specific job of improving execution scores, and getting the drumline clean-enough to support the scores we were getting in horns (which as many of you will recall, were high...the corps placed 10th, but the horns placed 6th, a tenth behind Vanguard).

The Sky Ryders board made a tragic mistake, one that led to the downfall of the corps.  Just look at the recaps.  Pretty easy to see.  Up up up under George.  Not so much ever again.

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On ‎6‎/‎19‎/‎2005 at 9:43 PM, lp1955 said:

I had forgotten about this till a friend of mine reminded me about this.One more thing about George in 1972 we were on tour and our Drum instructor had to leave us. This was the week of the first DCI championships we rolled into White Water with no one to work with the drum line George came up to them while they were working on the show and asked where is your instructor the kids told him that he had to go home. So George stepped right in and worked with them. We made finals by .1 tenth and were the first corps to ever compete in DCI Finals. Was it the help that George gave us? Or could the kids in the line have cleaned up the tenths needed to make finals? I don’t know but George sure didn’t hurt us.

Strange afternoon, Leo. None of us knew who he was. Just thought he was looking for a job. But we let him run us through our paces. Later we found out who he was. So we had George Tuthill for an afternoon at UWW in '72, you had Sandra Opie for one in '73.

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