This is the only band from Kansas to ever march in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade
In 1974, 400 marching bands applied to participate in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
Only 14 were chosen.
One of them hailed from a small town in northeast Kansas.
To this day, in the 100-year history of the famous holiday parade, it is the only band from Kansas that has ever participated, Macy’s officials confirmed for The Star this week.
Which makes what Wamego High School pulled off 50 years ago something of a miracle on 34th Street — performing in front of the famous department store in New York City on national TV.
Off to New York they flew on a chartered plane, 125 teenagers and 50 parent chaperones, many of whom had never been on a plane or traveled out of state.
They stayed on after the parade and watched ballet at Lincoln Center, visited the Statue of Liberty, rode the subway and watched Ben Vereen’s Tony-winning performance in “Pippin” on Broadway.
The adventure cost band members nothing because their proud hometown scrambled to raise $24,000 in five months to pay for the trip. That’s more than $150,000 in today’s dollars.
Then-band director John Childs, who is now 88 and lives in Wamego, sounds incredulous that the band managed to pull it off. He jokes that with no cell phones, no technology to rely on, it’s a wonder they’re not all still wandering the streets of New York.
The parade commentators were awed, too, as they watched the band from Kansas play for three minutes in front of Macy’s.
“To raise money for the trip to New York the entire band and many members of the community worked … (did) everything from washing windows to milking cows and picking corn to get the band here,” the commentator said.
“This is a big moment for them. The Wamego High School Red Raiders marching band from Kansas.”
Some of those band members, most now in their 60s, saw their performance for the first time just this year after an old reel-to-reel recording stored for years in Childs’ basement was digitized.
The video is on YouTube now. It was also shown at the band’s reunion during Wamego’s huge Fourth of July celebration over the summer, a gathering that also celebrated Childs as he became the first inductee into the high school’s new Fine Arts Hall of Fame.
The ‘Pied Piper’
Childs was in his eighth year of teaching band in Wamego in 1974, having defied the advice of his own high school counselor in Marion, Kansas that he should dig ditches for a living.
Instead, he got a degree in music education from Wichita State University and worked hard to get kids in Wamego excited about instrumental music.
Starting with the fifth-graders he visited classrooms, encouraging kids to go home and talk to their parents about band. At that first meeting with Wamego moms and dads, “I was astounded how many parents showed up with their kids,” he said.
He taught classes by himself, 250 kids a day, a virtual one-man band who doubled the size of the high school’s band in one year. “We were busy all the time,” he said.
“You know there are 120 members of this band and there are only 400 kids in the high school,” the parade commentator told the TV audience. “That’s what, about 30, 35% of the high school is in the band.”
Cindy Nihart, who is 67, was 17 and a senior when she marched in the parade.
“By and large, Mr. Childs was a Pied Piper,” said Nihart, who lives west of Wamego. “There wasn’t anyone that didn’t like Mr. Childs.”
Nihart was first trombone, “one of the first girl trombones that most of the world had ever seen,” she said. “The girls were all flutes and clarinets, that kind of thing.”
But she wanted to play trombone like Childs.
“He was always so enthusiastic about the music,” she said. “We knew he cared about us. And just a gentle soul. We were all real protective of him, too.”
Childs was familiar with New York City through his wife, Dianne, a University of Kansas graduate who grew up in WaKeeney, Kansas. She fell in love with New York while visiting her sister who had a job teaching there.
After Dianne graduated from KU she moved to New York; she and Childs got engaged there. Today they live in the house they built in Wamego 56 years ago.
Childs sent recordings of the band’s performances to parade organizers a couple of times before they got noticed.
“We loved New York City, I loved New York City ... and I wanted his kids to have the experience,” said Dianne. “We had no idea we would ever get chosen. It was just a lark.”
“I knew we were good, but you don’t think it will happen,” Childs said.
A couple of weeks after he wrote yet another letter to Macy’s in 1974, the parade sent the man responsible for choosing the bands to Wamego. “He wanted to see the band in uniform,” said Childs.
“The uniforms are a big deal with Macy’s. They wanted quality stuff. Some uniforms are poorly made and look that way.”
The band kids wore their uniforms to school and performed for the Macy’s rep on the school’s football field. “He was impressed, we knew that,” said Childs. “But we didn’t know ... whether we were going to get an invite or not.”
Then on the last day of the 1973-74 school year, during band period, “we finally got a phone call from them and they said we had been accepted,” said Childs. “And of course, we were all just in a state of shock.
“It made the cold mornings and the hours of work that we spent on this stuff, it made it all worthwhile to the kids. It showed them the benefit, that there’s no substitute for hard work.”
Most of the bands in that year’s parade had experience; some had performed in the Tournament of Roses parade in Pasadena, California.
“I don’t know if we were the smallest band there,” said Dianne. “I think they wanted to have a rural showcase.”
Before the Macy’s rep flew back to New York he told Childs, “you guys aren’t even in the 20th century.”
The city slicker didn’t stick around long enough to see how small-town camaraderie paid off for the band.
“We did everything, we hauled trash, we picked up trash, a bunch of the guys did this. We had a lot of bake sales, every single solitary weekend. I’m sure all those band mothers were sick of it,” Dianne said.
“We sold fireworks. Had a couple of dinners ... the support was unbelievable.”
And, they got help from the “Little Apple” — nearby Manhattan — for their trip to the Big Apple.
Phil Hewett, the director of K-State’s marching band from 1968 to 1982, brought the 400 members of his band to Wamego for a show that raised $2,000 in one night.
As a thank-you, the band played the K-State fight song at the parade.
The scope of the trip hit Nihart in degrees. Anxiety hit before the excitement.
She would be traveling without a family member. She had never been on a plane. She realized she was “going far, far away,” she said. “The parents were reasonably worried about what a trip to New York would entail. Half of them had never been to a place like that.”
She compares herself to her young grandchildren, way more “cosmopolitan” than she was at their age, who have visited several foreign countries and take beach vacations. “Our idea of what was out there was, well, we didn’t have one,” she said.
The band kids also were thrown for a loop when they heard they wouldn’t be able to carry their music with them. They would have to — eek! — memorize the music.
“Could we dance while we’re doing this? We had a routine, but some of these kids could barely march,” Nihart said. “Could we do this? Could we do this without embarrassing ourselves, without embarrassing Mr. Childs?”
No potty breaks
The band assembled on the parade route at 5 in the morning on Thanksgiving Day to rehearse. The Rockettes were there, too. “We hadn’t even had breakfast yet,” said Childs. “When that was finished we went back to the hotel and had our breakfast, then they bused us to Central Park West.”
Their assigned handler told Childs that he “must warn your kids that from the time they leave the hotel to the time the parade is over, there’s no place to go to the bathroom,” Childs said. “So I was honest with them ... and I said you can train yourself to do that and you must do it. Boy they did. They were serious about it.”
It felt to Nihart like the band marched for six long miles, though Childs has told her it wasn’t that long. “And it was cold,” she said. “We had to wear gloves ... it was very cold. We stood for a long, long, long, long time. We were staged, I remember in front of a museum that had animal statues, tigers and lions and something like that.
“And I was cold. Everywhere you looked was stone and cold surfaces. It was just a cold day.”
Like others, she hadn’t seen the performance until this year when she watched the newly digitized video.
“For the first time, as a 67-year-old, I sat back and listened and for the first time thought, ‘We were pretty good,’” she said.
Only a handful of the band members still live in Wamego. But that one Thanksgiving in New York City is “the one thing we all had in common,” said Nihart. “It’s something that will connect us all our lives.”
