It was a tense hot summer. One of Ohio’s parched, driest in recorded history. Punctuated with severe storms that brought destructive forces, high winds, lightning, tornadoes and little rain. By late August, the corn crop was a lost cause. The drought had set in.
The Alliance Review headlined on August 23rd, ‘No relief seen from the record heat wave.’
These were not simpler times. International Cold War tensions were building to a crescendo. Then Korean Airlines 007 was sent into the dark ocean one night from a Soviet missile, taking all innocent civilian lives onboard with it. The Marines had lost a few good men in early September in Lebanon and would soon lose a lot more. There were fears about acid rain and dioxin being found everywhere, seemingly in everything tested. The US economy was emerging slowly from recession years, and unemployment and interest rates were a staggering 10 and 11 percent each. But there was some temporary movement, albeit small, in the right direction that summer.
Industry in Alliance was teetering but still there. Transue & Williams, Alliance Machine, Babcock & Wilcox, American Steel Foundries, and Morgan Engineering were still there holding on and keeping a lot of jobs and families going. Monster Cranes, steel, and a multitude of machines were being manufactured and constructed for export. Advanced and precision machining was taking place; technical research was being conducted. All of this work -- still being done by thousands of men and women on the north side of town. This vast industrial base of Alliance would not survive another decade, but we didn’t know it then. The writing was on the wall; NAFTA was still on an approaching horizon. Inexorable effects from normalizing relations (1979) and granting China Most Favored Trade status in 1980 combined with technological advancements in microchips and automation in manufacturing processes were still gaining momentum.
It was when Sally Ride became the first American woman in space aboard the newest addition to the space shuttle fleet, mission STS 7: Space Shuttle Challenger. It was the year that everyone tuned in to watch the last episode of M*A*S*H. The Garfield Cadets played Bernstein’s Mass to win The Drum Corps International Finals competition in Miami. It was the summer of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and sequels at the movies. There was Return of the Jedi, Rocky 3, Superman 3, Psycho 2 that you could see at the Mount Union Theater or out at the College Plaza. Date movies that year were The Big Chill, Terms of Endearment and The Right Stuff.
Buckeye Village Market was still small, and family owned on State Street and Fernwood. Kroger’s Grocery was only recently gone, the empty store still down on North Union but the best donuts and cream sticks in town were still made fresh at the Sugar & Spice on Scranton. Rapid construction was underway three and half miles southwest of downtown Alliance. The roof and water tower were up at the new Carnation Mall. By October, the city’s first shopping mall would be open for business. JC Penney, Kmart, Radio Shack, Walden Books, and Camelot Records were coming to town with sparkling new Mall stores.
And a corn-stalk marching band from rural Alliance known as the ‘Marching Dukes’ with new British uniforms <1> kept going out and winning and winning.
Friday, November 4, 1983, Marlington High School
The phone wasn’t going to stop ringing. Ring. Ring. Ringing echoed down the long glazed brick hallways of the high school.
In the day when the phones were built like little armored tanks and connected to walls by thick wires and rang with a hard cast internal brass bell and hammer, this one had a lot of mileage on it. This was the band’s office phone on Mr. Frenz’s desk. If it rang, and in Mr. Frenz’s absence, whoever was in the vicinity was obliged to answer it. This is before answering machines or voicemail. If no one picked up the phone, the call was over. You never knew what call you missed.
She heard the phone from the hallway outside, and as a die-hard band kid, she knew how to answer it. She was one of those band kids that was into everything ‘band.’ Marching band, Orchestra, Jazz Band, Ensembles, Chorus and Theater too. Same with her brother and sisters. Jenny Jeffers was a sophomore Baritone player with fresh sun burn and a face full of freckles. She was a self-described strawberry-blond. Excellent student, like most band kids; passionate about animal rights and the arts. She later was a double major at Otterbein College, a dedicated vegan, and animal rights activist. Jenny was fiercely independent and one of those band kids that looked out for others. She was protective of the new and the smaller and more vulnerable. She would not tolerate bullying in the band and went out of her way to preserve an inclusive and accepting space for everyone around her. This was just Jenny being ‘Jenny.’
“Marlington Band Office, Jenny speaking,” she said while reaching for a pencil and notepad to take a message.
“Can you tell me if your Marching Band is going to the Johhson City Nationals tomorrow morning? Can I speak with one of your directors,” the man on the long distant call asked.
“Yes, absolutely we are going. The busses are loading now.”
“Can I speak with your director please?”
“Yep. Give me a minute,” she replied and placed the receiver on the phone down on the desktop and walked out to find one of her directors. She ran into Mr. Koontz first, coming down the hallway. She relayed the message and within a few minutes Mr. Koontz was picking up the phone to answer the same question in the affirmative. Ray watched Jenny walk out of the office and melt away into the distant cacophony of band kids boarding busses.
“Ok, we are calling because we didn’t want to burn the miles and go down there if your band wasn’t going to be there. You have a real chance to win the whole damn thing.”
The caller couldn’t see Ray Koontz’s cheeks redden with what was said but could sense his humility and kindness. Ray heard the caller tell him about what they had seen weeks before when the Marching Dukes had won the Class A Regional Championship in Penn Hills outside of Pittsburgh.
“We are definitely going to be there.” Ray hung up the phone, and he never knew who it was who placed that call but always remembered it. It was one of those moments that helped him understand that the Marching Dukes were something special, something more than a high school marching band. To Ray, this was more than just another teaching job. They were touching lives, even in those early years.
Saturday, November 5, 1983, Johnson City, Tennessee Grand National Championship
It took them over ten grueling hours on yellow school buses to get there from Alliance, Ohio.
152 kids from Marlington High School wearing faux tall bearskin shakos and Stewart of Athol ancient tartan, arrived in Johhson City Tennessee on that Saturday morning expecting to win by giving it all away.
The sky was overcast and the chilly air around the stadium was charged with the sounds of marching bands from all over the country warming up, tuning, and preparing to play and march with everything they could marshal together. Controlled chaos. That’s what it’s like when more than a thousand bandmembers, more than a thirty marching bands, hundreds of cars, busses, trucks and vehicles -- their exhaust fumes heavy in the air, descend on a stadium with a strict warmup and performance schedule; fans, parents, supporters, support staff, ushers, judges, all streaming into a stadium like an explosion of humanity and marching musicianship in reverse. Marlington was scheduled to perform their show on the second day of preliminary competition, band 37 of 39, Saturday at 3:30 PM.
They were to play after Greenwood High School 3:15 PM and before Salem 3:45.
Band competition victories had been piling up for the Marching Dukes all through the late summer of 1983.
On September 12th, the Alliance Review reported:
“Marlington band takes top honor:
The Marling High School Marching Band took the grand championship trophy during a competition Saturday at Newcomerstown.
Known as the Marching Dukes, the group, fielding the largest band in its competitive history (150 persons), was victorious over 11 other bands in all classes. Marlington took first place in Class A, and also won first overall in flag corps, rifles, percussion, music and general effect, and a second in marching and maneuvering. The group qualified for the Ohio Music Educators Association marching band contest set for November in Columbus. To qualify a band needs to score 85; the Marching Dukes racked up 91 Saturday. It was the third grand championship in Newcomerstown for the Dukes.”
A week later, the headline in the September 19th Alliance Review was ‘Dukes win band contest.’
“It was a clean sweep for the Marching Dukes of Marlington Saturday during the night annual Constitution Day band contest in Louisville. In Fact, Marlington High Schools’ marching and won first in every category expect majorette, and that’s because the Dukes don’t use majorettes in their band program. The overall firsts were for marching, music, general effect, percussion, rifles, flags, and field commander. In Class A competition, the Dukes’ firsts were for music, marching, general effect, percussion, rifles, and flags. The Dukes Band also qualified for state finals with a superior rating of 1 and score of 91.4. There were 11 schools entered in the competition.”
The following week, they won again at Cadiz.
Alliance Review September 27, 1983:
“Dukes band takes top honors at Cadiz.
The Marlington Marching Dukes capture grand championship honors at the International Mining Festival and Band Competition Saturday at Cadiz, topping a field of 11 competitors. This is the fourth time that Marlington has won grand championship honors at Cadiz, and the third time the marching Dukes have earned top honors this year. Among the titles recently won by MHS were best rifles, best percussion, best music, best marching, best general effort, and first place, class A, overall championship.”
Two weeks later they qualified for finals competition at the Bands of America Regional Championship at Penn Hills, outside of Pittsburgh. Later that night they won the Class A Championship.
Alliance Review October 10, 1983:
“Marlington marching band to enter national competition
The championship trophy and a chance to compete in the nations was earned by the Marching Dukes of Marlington Saturday at Penn Hills, Pa. According to director Terren Frenz, the marching unit has earned an elite position among high school bands in this country by entering the Marching Bands of American Competition and copping top honors for Class A. Marlington will compete with the three other regional winners as a member of the ‘Winners Circle’ composed of the finest bands in the country. The nationals will be at Johnson City, Tenn., late this fall. In addition to the championship trophy, each band member received an Olympic style medallion bearing the inscription of “MBA Champion.” The other two divisions were won by Rocky Mountain High Scholl of Rocky Mount, N.C., and by Norwin High School of Irwin, Pa. More than 200 Marlington band fans attended the Pittsburgh competition on Saturday. Marlington High School marching musicians have been competing in the MBA National Program since 1978 when it began. Although ranked very high prior to Saturday’s performance, this is the first time that Marlington has won the championship title.”
They had won everything leading up to Nationals. Penn Hills, New Comerstown, Cadiz, Westland. They weren’t expecting to merely win their class at Nationals, there was serious talk about winning the National Championship.
Cameras from the McCormick company followed Marlington band throughout the day to document what was expected to be this incredible feat. There had been phone calls to Marlington High School in the days leading up to their departure to verify their travel itinerary. The pressure, the attention, the accolades, the medals and trophies that year, were a gathering and cresting wave poised to break on the shores of a national championship and they were ready.
If you were to look at the Marching Dukes as an engine gaining speed and momentum in 1983, you would want to take a closer look at the mechanics involved in their success. Getting under the hood in 1983, you would find an engine part that was helping but wasn’t necessarily built for high school. This advanced engineering came from a component called the Ohio Brass Factory Senior Drum & Bugle Corps.
At the time that the Marching Dukes began to amass championships, build a winning reputation, and make finals competitions with the newly formed Marching Bands of America, about a tenth of the students were actively participating in a Senior Drum Corps that was being run by Mr. Frenz, his wife Linda, and his brother John Frenz, a neurosurgeon from Massillon.
The Ohio Brass Factory was in its final year in 1983 and had been at it competitively since 1979. Fielding a hundred-plus members, they said they had members aged from 16 to 61. This drum corps was practicing twice a week at Marlington High School and traveling to weekend competitions in two different drum corps circuits throughout Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland.
It would be difficult to quantify the effect of exposure to this higher level of marching performance. But by seeding the Marching Dukes with many drum corps participants, they were raising internal expectations of what could be accomplished with a high school marching band. These higher expectations, higher levels of performance and drum corps experience were all contagious within the Marching Dukes culture. The kids playing in drum corps were coming back to high school and providing the leadership that was raising the bar, by example, for everyone. They were not scared off by ambitious and complicated marching drill because they were already doing it in Brass Factory. They could memorize and play complicated musical arrangements because this was what they were doing with adult musicians in Brass Factory.
In marching band, a lot of what is happening is following the person next to you. Imitation. Reflection. Assimilating so that your performance does not lag behind the person to your left and right. If the person next to you exudes confidence, competence, maturity, you work and practice to reflect that in your own performance. If the musician next to you has memorized their music, plays it in tune, knows when to play powerfully, when to play with sensitivity, you know it; you adapt to it and do it too. And that was what it was like to be in the Marching Dukes.
That late afternoon in Johson City, they assembled in a circle around their band director, like so many other times before, to hear him, learn from him, and try with everything they had to do what he told them to do.
Mr. Frenz cleared his voice and spoke into the silence of the moment around him. He said:
“Life is always a series of new beginnings. God gave you talent. Your obligation now is to go out there and share it with everybody in the audience. The staff and myself have done everything we knew how to get it out of you. Your obligation now is to go out there and give it away and share it with the audience. We are not worrying about beating anybody, we are not worrying about any trophies right now. You are going to do the best possible job that is humanly within your capabilities, and you are going to give it to those fans in the stands. And that's what we came here for: to give away everything that we have.”
They were not focused on results. They had been carefully trained to focus on their methods, their music, their marching, their process, and to concentrate on performing at their own peak ability. Much like the mountain climber focusing on only that three-foot section of rock before them, their output was directed entirely at ‘giving.’ Holding nothing back, being completely and literally in tune with each other to become the music they were playing for the entire purpose of giving it all away. That is what defined the Marching Dukes of Marlington. Leaving nothing in the performance reserve tank at the end of any show and walking away with the knowledge that their real victory was in that alone. Giving away everything they had.
Moments later, Mr Ageloni, the assistant Band Director, said this to them:
“Ok, a couple things. I know you’re asking yourself, and we are too; how did we get here, how did we do this? This isn’t like a carwash and selling chocolate bars. Because fundamentally, you worked really hard to get the fundamentals down. And you worked hard. Fundamentally, Mr. Frenz wrote an incredible drill, and he deserves a tremendous amount of credit for that. You have worked the fundamentals. You have inserted yourself, your own little spirit, whatever that is, to bring that alive, and you have come up with an incredible product. And now you are giving the product to these people here and to others that don’t even know you. I remember a little quote <2>, and I don’t remember where it was from, but it went something like this: that loving and sharing is open arms. If you close your arms to the loving and sharing, then you will only be left holding yourself. And nobody here is going to be left holding yourself.” **
There was silence after they spoke and everyone knew what they had to do. All of their achievements, work, preparation, practice, self-sacrifice, and thousands of hours of collective learning would soon come down to just ten brief minutes on a hundred-yard field.
These were the last words of direction they would receive before they would march out and into Preliminary competition. Their preparation could not have been better. They had every tool they would need to finish their season that afternoon in Johnson City, qualify for Finals, perform one more time and walk away with the National Championship. It was all within their grasp, all of it merely a breath away from seizing.
Their show was in five movements. It all started with a field formation of 5 perfect circles. In the opening sequence, the Marlington band snapped rapidly into a four-sided rotating diamond that spanned the field from both ends of the 35-yard line. It was an ambitious marching drill. This brass dominated opening moved into the second movement of percussion performance and continued marching drill complimented by a large, synchronized color guard and aggressive twirling rifle lines. They moved from ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ to ‘Spanish Fantasy,’ featuring trumpet solos from Jim Obney and Lisa Breiding that were confident, playful, dazzling. Into the long and flowing phrases of the Henry Mancini’s ‘Thornbird Suite,’ they profiled a fantastical bird on the field extending from each 20 yard marker, filling the stadium with a solemn and lovely melody, showing the soft side of their musicality. All of it led inevitably, to a major stand-and-blow straight line statement, one razor straight brass line from the 10-yard home to the 10-yard visitor side of the field. This line broke into other straight-line segments covering the expanse of the field culminating in a massive brass finale.
But some things didn’t go according to plan. Some changes were made to the formations a week before the show that threw a section into some marching blunders. In the final marching sequences, there were some interconnecting sections that were designed to go into and within each other precisely, but there wasn’t enough time to practice this before performance to get it just right. Judges caught it. The Marching Dukes were eliminated from finals. Their season was over.
The big-school powerhouse from Rocky Mount North Carolina won the National Championship with a score of 92.75, also walking away with achievement awards in Brass/Winds, General Effect, and Flags/Color Guard. Pretty much everything. The rules for Bands of America competitions even then favored big-school domination. The Marching Dukes would have to wait another three years before getting close to a National Championship.
I imagine it was a long and quiet bus ride home all those years ago. I’m sure there were some who were thinking about something else that Mr. Angeloni had said that day:
“It is a little bit like going into a Chines Restaurant. You know, and you look at that Menu, and you get sweet and sour pork. And it’s sweet in the respect that we are here, and we love to be here, and we are willing to share, and we have all worked hard. And it is sour in the respect, that this may be the last one.”
It was the last one for all the seniors.
I’m confident that years later, they recalled these other words that Mr. Frenz had said:
“Our real goal isn’t to gain a prize or defeat a rival, but to pace each other on the road to excellence. And that’s really what we try for, as long as every student feels they are giving the best of their potential, not getting, but giving everything they have away to the viewer, to the listener, and even to the judge, then the competition doesn’t matter. We really feel that it’s the giving of that art, your heart and soul, that’s important.”
I am removed from these events as I write this now, by over forty years. These same feelings of awe, of wonder, of the beauty, and of the music that we ‘became’ have never diminished within me from my own time with the Marching Dukes between 1985 and 1988. I hope that you, the reader, have felt something of the same.
I also wonder how differently our lives and world could look if we applied these lessons to other relationships and other dimensions in our lives. To give away everything that we have. What would the world look like if more people were willing to do this? Doing things to the best of our abilities. Giving as much excellence as we can. Giving for the sake of giving. Striving for our fullest potential. Things would look a lot different.
Just thinking about this reminds me of the sweet and sour pork Mr. Angeloni used to talk about. There is definitely both sweet and sour in all of this to me.
In memory of Jenny Jeffers 1968 – 2025. An activist, friend, fierce defender of the most vulnerable. She courageously gave it away.
<1> Uniform Footnote:
Alliance Review 6-22-83
“Ten years of saving by the Marlington Band Boosters culminated Tuesday with the formal notification that 150 high school band uniforms worth more than $25,000 will be given to the Marlington Local School District. Band Director Terren Frenz made the announcement at last night’s regular monthly Board of Education meeting by showing an example of what the marchers will wear in the fall and praising the boosters for their work. The new orange uniforms, topped with black at the shoulders highlighted with white trim, will be used to clothe what may be Marlinton High School’s largest band ever. Frenz, who will enter his 11th year as band director, said the high school band will number close to 160, topping the previous high of 144.”
<2> A likely adaptation of Leo Buscaglia’s Living, Loving and Learning (1972) ‘love is always open arms. If you close your arms about love, you will find that you are left only holding yourself.’ ”
1983 Marching Dukes of Marlington Roster
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