Harvard Band Still Crazy After 75 Long Years

In the fall of 1973, a Harvard first-year named Sam G. Coppersmith was left in charge of the Harvard Band's six-foot-tall Big Drum.

But before the Brown football game, three students from the Providence, R.I. university convinced Coppersmith that they were ABC reporters and needed to borrow the drum for pictures.

Eager to please, Coppersmith and Band Director Thomas G. Everett, who holds that title to this day, helped the Brown students load the drum into their pick-up truck.

By the time the student and the director realized the instrument had been stolen, the thieves were well on their way back to Rhode Island.

"At the time, we assumed it was Yale," Everett says now. "Who ever would've thought Brown people were smart enough to pull it off?"

Then Harvard Police Chief Robert Tonis ultimately saved the day. He put out an All Points Bulletin for the Brown students in four states, according to Everett.

The undergraduates were quickly caught on Interstate 95. The judge in the case, reportedly a Harvard graduate, was not lenient, Everett says.

Coppersmith, by the way, is today a U.S. representative and the Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona.

That 21-year-old story is only one of the adventures and misadventures band members have survived in the institution's 75-year history. Everett has directed it for the past 23 years.

Next Friday night, the band will mark its Diamond Anniversary with a concert at Sanders Theatre featuring alumni, students and special guest performers.

Early Years

In the early 1900s, the only Harvard band was a group of banjo players who entertained the fans at home football games, according to records on file in the University archives.

In 1919, Frederic L. Reynolds '20 abandoned the banjos and founded the Harvard University Band. He became the band's first director.

Harvard band members and directors are generally credited with establishing the marching band style used by many colleges around the country.

"Harvard formed its own style in the 1950's," says Anne Q. Eakin '95, band manager. "Today, all of the Ivy League schools except Cornell copy it."

That style includes forming words and objects on the field and spelling out the punch lines to the announcer's jokes with their field formations.

The band has performed a number of now-leg-endary routines, including showing Sputnik in orbit (on the very same day the real satellite was launched), champagne pouring into a glass (complete with bubbles and a "hic") and a pen writing the word "Crimson" across the field. In 1953, for one performance only, the band did a drill on ice skates at Boston Garden.

Even the then-director, G. Wright Briggs, agreed to lace 'em up.

Throughout its history, the band has been a place where conventionally polished musicians could play alongside students with more unusual abilities.

In 1925, for example, George Thow '29, a classical trumpeter who would later play with the likes of Jimmy Dorsey and Lawrence Welk, marched alongside Scott Burbank '29. Burbank had the rare ability to play two trumpets at once.

That sort of diversity has won the band critical plaudits over the years. In the 1950s, Bill Cunningham of the Boston Herald wrote: "The immortal Sousa himself would be proud of this cultured collection of blowers and beaters."

The people at Playboy Magazine, in fact, were so smitten with the band that on two separate occasions, in 1961 and 1968, they were featured in the magazine making a formation in the shape of the Playboy bunny.

But Harvard's blowers and beaters have also handled serious gigs.

In the summer of 1968, at the request of the Kennedy family, members of the band flew to Washington D.C. to perform at the final graveside services in Arlington National Cemetery for Robert F. Kennedy '48.

Big Drum

The six-foot drum, nearly stolen in 1973, has long been the band's signature. It is the largest playable bass drum in the world, band officials say.

The drum first came to Harvard in 1927, when finding heads--the parts the drummer hits--was difficult. The hides of two exceptionally large cows are needed for the heads, according to the University archives.

Caring for and pulling the drum is one of the most important tasks a band member can perform. It is an almost sacred job.

"Both my grandfather and great-uncle, Robert Barrett Lawson '31 and Wilbur L. Lawson '31, were on the prop crew and pulled the original Big Drum," says K.T. Lawson '97. "Today, I'm the Assistant Manager of the prop crew, and in that capacity, I pull the Big Drum."

Yale

Some of the best stories about the band involve the University's storied rivalry with Yale. In the mid-1980s, the band from fair New Haven was even forced to follow in the Crimson's footsteps.

"The game was at New Haven, on one of the coldest days on record. It was so cold that by halftime all of the metal instruments had frozen up," Everett says. "Except for the drummers, whose hands were frozen, no one could play."

So Everett's resourceful musicians went out at halftime and sang the traditional Harvard fight songs with only the drums to accompany them.

"Then, just before he turned the microphone over to the Yale announcer, Harvard's announcer said, 'And now, please watch as Yale attempts to imitate Harvard's band,'" Everett says. "And since they couldn't play any instruments either, that's exactly what they did."

Today

Everett says the biggest recent change in the band is that it does more than play at football games.

"I see the band spreading itself more evenly across various services around the University," he says. "Back in the '30's, this was a football band. Today, we hold concerts and play at Freshman Week, Commencement, and for visiting dignitaries."

But its original mission--"to foster Harvard spirit through Harvard song," Everett says--will not soon be forgotten.

Says Eakin: "Today, the band stands as one of the last bastions of school spirit at Harvard."