I guess I’m starting early this year. Maybe it’s because of what happened last summer, which was very believable and incredibly fantastic. Of course, the economy weighs heavily on our souls; it has shifted our focus and made us question things.

Perhaps I want to live simpler now. I want to return to things that have always made me happy -- that I know are rewarding to the people involved. For many reasons, I am setting aside time again this summer to volunteer with my drum corps. I am looking forward to it more than I can describe.

If you have a few moments to share with your favorite corps this summer, maybe you might enjoy spending some time with them behind the scenes.

I marched for three years in drum and bugle corps -- one year, 1991, in the Phantom Regiment, the previous year in the cadet corps, and my first year, 1989, in the Quad City Knights.

The human mind is remarkably kind in its faculties, in that the difficulties of growing up and the pain one might experience in those struggles are largely shed over the years in favor of the lovely, longing glow of nights spent on the field under the lights with one’s friends.

I remember vividly the cheering crowds. Fondly, I recall the volunteers who aided the corps and supported us on and off the field. They did anything and everything to make sure that the corps made its way down the road and back safely. Their smiles and selflessness were instructive for me.

In Phantom Regiment, they told us how important it was to say “thank you” and really mean it. I was grateful for the opportunity to march with the corps in the first place. I recognized how fragile our little group was, out on the road during the  

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First, we’d like to thank Steve Vickers of Drum Corps World for his interest in our project. His help is extremely appreciated.

You are certainly aware of the decline of drum corps in Quebec for some years now. At the end of the 1970s, we had over 50 organizations throughout the province, several of them competing in Ontario and the United States.

Most of these groups have since folded, leaving today only one active junior competitive unit, Les Stentors from Sherbrooke. As the sole survivors of this musical sport in Quebec, they have had to compete exclusively in the U.S., leaving them unable to tap into an important marketing tool, their own provincial and regional visibility.

The revival project

The instigator of this project, Bruno Lavoie, is a drum corps fan, having marched with Les Metropolitains from Chicoutimi in the ’70s and ’80s, as well as an expert in marketing and economic development. He has used his expertise to develop   short-, mid- and long-term goals for this project and has surrounded himself with others from different backgrounds.

One of his goals is to develop an organizational culture for our activity, something that has been seriously lacking in the past.

The mission of this revival project is to break youth’s isolation and develop its sense of membership.

Consistent with the mission, many partnerships have been and will continue to be formed with other social and community-oriented groups. The membership cost for  

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My memory of the Seattle Cascadesgoes back to the early 1970s when I was invited by Fred Lopez to attend several Drum Corps West Championship events in Washington. I was there partly out of curiosity about the significant number of western corps and especially the Pacific Northwest representatives.

The other reason was because my friend Ed Downs from Audio House in Lawrence, KS, was hired to record the championship and he produced sets of record albums. I worked for Ed as student at the University of Kansas, designing album covers for his largely school-oriented studio. His recordings were some of the finest drum and bugle corps material I had ever heard because of his re-recording the audio at his building, the empty sanctuary of a 100-year-old church which produced incredible “presence.”

The corps in the Northwest were all wonderful including the Seattle Marksmen, Seattle Shamrocks, Percussion-naut Patriots, Tri-City Columbians, Flamingos and Spartans, along with corps up and down the West Coast.

Jumping ahead almost two and a half decades, the Cascades re-emerged from their primarily Western show schedule to begin touring on the DCI circuit in the early 1990s. They worked their way up the DCI Class A/Division II ladder, then made the leap into Division I in 1999, placing in the 2002 finals. Financial concerns took the corps off the field in 2008, but they are returning to World Class this summer.

Mike and I have talked about what the corps has faced the last few years and I thought it would be timely to let our readers in on what has changed to  

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