In honor of football season and the fall weather that arrived this week, I thought I’d post the latest of Chuck Humeston’s columns from the Iowa Falls Times-Citizen.

Remembering Two-a-Days

With the start of football season and with the brutal heat and humidity the past couple of weeks, I remarked to someone, “Man, this reminds me of having to do two-a-days.”

“Me, too,” he answered.  “What position did you play?”

“Rank G, File 5,” I answered.

He looked at me quizzically.  “Football?”

“No,” I answered.  “Hawkeye Marching Bank.  Rank G, File 5 was my position in the Sousaphone Rank.”  I think he thought I had lost my mind.

I played football.  I played basketball.  I played baseball.  I ran some track.  But, most importantly, I was a “band geek.”  And considering the stereotypes conferred on tuba players, I was probably the geekiest of the geeks, proud to say.

I went to a small consolidated school typical of rural Iowa and graduated in a class of 42 fellow students.  This gives you some idea of the talent pool available for sports.  Telling you I played defensive and offensive tackle at 156 pounds gives you a further idea.  Wow, would I like to see 156 pounds again.  That was many haircuts ago.  In other words, frankly, I wasn’t very good.  Plus, I had this ridiculous idea that sports should be fun.

Band is what got me through school.  I started out in fourth grade playing trumpet.  Well, I attempted to play trumpet.  I was terrible.  The sounds I made were something like a worn brake shoe.  Thankfully, a sympathetic band instructor saw I was in trouble, and one day said, “Why don’t you try the tuba?”  I did, and I took off.  A week before large group contest one of the two tuba players quit school.  I was in sixth grade, and the band teacher moved me to the high school band.  “I don’t care if you can’t hit one note, just sit there and hold the horn.”  To my surprise I could hit the notes.  I bypassed junior high school band and just stayed in the high school band.

I can’t say enough about those experiences.  Sure, I really enjoyed getting the beejeebs knocked out of me every Friday night by guys twice my size, but band took me places I could never go with sports.  If you think band doesn’t teach you attention to detail, poise, concentration and dealing with competition, try auditioning for the All State Band and having a college instructor tell you to “play an F-sharp scale in Myxolydian Mode, two octaves, ascending and descending” (by the way, I couldn’t do it).  Whew!

Anyway, at Iowa I went into the marching band.  Two weeks before the first game, like the football team, we had “two-a-days.”  And they were tough.  To give you an idea, pick up a 50-pound sack of fertilizer, go out in the heat and march at 120 beats per minute up and down a football field, eight steps to every five yards.  Oh, and blow through several feet of brass tubing at the same time while wearing 100 percent wool.  I hated the piccolo players who could carry it in their shirt pockets.

There wasn’t anything quite like the rush of being on the field in front of 70,000 people.  Well, make that around 30,000.  I know much has been said about how Hawkeye fans follow the team.  I’m here to tell you whoever believes that wasn’t at Kinnick Stadium after Evy and before Hayden.  Anyway, those Saturdays I’ll never forget.  Memories I wouldn’t have without music programs and dedicated teachers.

I’m ready to be in Kinnick Saturday.  Oh yeah, the football game should be good, too.

This totally brought out my inner band geek.  Not that that’s saying a whole lot, because my inner band geek isn’t exactly buried.  But it definitely put me in the mood to go to the football game tonight and relive the glory days.  Well, that and the radio station playing “Twist and Shout” this afternoon.  When I was actually in marching band, I loathed it.  Nothing excited me more about college band than the knowledge that Wartburg didn’t have a marching band, so there was no way I could be conscripted into it.  Then I went back home one weekend and went to a high school game and realized just how much I missed it.  Wartburg had a pep band for football games, but they had a heck of a time getting people to show up for it, which really surprised me because there was generally no shortage of people who turned up for pep band at our high school basketball games.  And it was just weird going to a football game with no marching band.  Weird, I’m tellin’ ya.

So now I want to go to the home game tonight, even though it’s supposed to be middle-of-October cold.  We won’t go because it’s too late to find a babysitter on such short notice, but it sure would be fun.  Maybe I can talk someone into watching Justin for the homecoming game.  I think we’re playing Grundy again this year, but maybe it’s BCL-UW.  Either way, it should be a fun game.  We stomped on South Hardin last week.

I read an interesting editorial in that same newspaper.  Well, I read it this morning (the paper actually came out on Wednesday) after someone else mentioned it.  It was an interesting editorial and I plan to post more about it, but I’m running out of time to write at the moment.  Hopefully I’ll have time this weekend, but my plans are a bit up in the air right now, so who knows when I’ll get around to it.  Anyway, happy Labor Day Weekend!

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