Current and past members of the Springfield Public Schools. All girl drum and bugle corps honored their history at an All-Corps event last Friday, marking the end of summer and the impending school year, with marches from both current drum corps, the Central High Kilties and the Parkview Lassies, and performances from alumni groups representing Central and Parkview, as well as the now defunct corps, the Kickapoo Bonnies, Glendale Scotties and Hillcrest Highlanders. Ksmu spoke with event organizer Joanie Stant, a former Lassie and sponsor for the Current lassies, about the history and importance of Springfield's drum and bugle corps:
Stant: R. Richie Robertson, the Scotsman that was the Boy Scout band leader here in town. He created the Kilties because music was super important to him, and he wanted opportunities for girls to do something like that. So, he started the Kilties and it was Springfield High School, and his wish was, as new schools opened, that they would each have a drum corps. We were the second ones at Parkview in 1956. Our doors opened and the lassies became part of the drum corps. In 1958, Hillcrest opened their doors and the Highlanders became a drum corps, and then Glendale followed in 1964 and then Kickapoo opened in 1971. The end of your sophomore year you would try out. And each corps had somewhere between 38 and 41 people. Depending on the school, you would have 150 girls trying out for 20 spots every year. Every year. And it was a big, big deal. For the most part, I think through the end of the 80s, the drum corps were still full. They had full force. But things began to be more difficult and we had smaller corps and not as many people trying out.
Kickapoo. Of course, they didn't have as long a history. They had only opened their doors in ‘71, so they disbanded in 1988, in the spring of ‘88. So they were the first unfortunately to lose their corps. Parkview, our numbers dwindled in the early ‘90s, and by ‘95 they had disbanded. Glendale followed in 2003, and then Hillcrest, they had a corps until 2012. Our first year back was 2012 at Parkview. That's how I've become so involved in this, as far as getting all these alumni together is because not only did those of us who had been lassies at Parkview, not only did we understand what it was like to lose your drum corps and to disband. But we also had the privilege of having it come back. And we saw firsthand those of us that kind of helped put it back together. We saw firsthand in doing so how very important it was, the heritage of it all in the sisterhood of it all. And the history needs to be remembered. It needs to be kept alive somehow.