HOW I ENDED UP "BEHIND THE BLEACHERS"

HOW I ENDED UP "BEHIND THE BLEACHERS"

by GWFrog

         When my boss asked me if I would be interested in transferring to take over managing our DeKalb store, one of my biggest reasons for saying, "Yes, of course I'll move to DeKalb!" was the proximity to Huskie Stadium, home of the Drum Corps Midwest Championships. I had become quite a fan-in-the-stands, attending as many nearby shows as possible, and in those days, I had come to refer to "DeKalb" as "my annual sunburn." On that third Saturday in July, I would my spend the entire day up in the stands, seeing each and every corps, and generally getting toasted and roasted.

         But it was a lovely wintry day when I took a walk to downtown DeKalb to pay some bills--- walking because my car was in the shop with a blown transmission. Along the way I met a section of sidewalk that had fluffy, freshly fallen snow sitting atop icy smooth ice, making for a surface about as slippery as greased glass. My feet flew out from under me, I came down wrong, and I could hear as much as feel the ankle shattering. I ended up in the hospital, where six screws went into my right ankle to put the pieces back together. (My right ankle is still my good one, but that's a whole nother tale.)

         The upshot of my accident is that, when the more-or-less-local corps started coming out to DeKalb to do their early work at Huskie Stadium, I was still crutching my way around. So it was that, on a lovely spring morning in 1988, I got in my car (now possessed of a new transmission) and drove over to Huskie Stadium to hang around and see what corps was in town that weekend and who else might be hanging around. If you go to enough shows and hang around drum corps enough, you get to know a lot of the people in drum corps, even if you have no ties to any particular corps, so I figured there would probably be someone to hang around and visit with.

         I got to the stadium, parked, and started crutching my way over to where the Guardsmen folks were working on their "new" buses (15 & 16 years old, unless I misremember.) Corps manager Sue O'Brien was one of the first to see me coming, and Boy! did she see me coming. The first thing out of her mouth was not, "Hi, Michael!" Nor was it, "What did you do to end up on crutches?" No, Sue was a corps manager, so the first thing out of her mouth was, "Are you going to go on tour with us this year?"

         And so it was that I spent the next three summers behind the bleachers as a "Miscellaneous Staff" member of the Guardsmen entourage. Which then led to chronicling activities back there for Drum Corps World.