By Thomas Palmer
This has been one doozy of a week. On Saturday, after two months of both physical and mental preparation, I will be stepping onto the field at Ohio Stadium with the OSUMB Alumni Band and, for the first time since I was 18, I’ll be performing a ramp entrance and Script Ohio.
During Script Ohio, you’ll find me at the top of the first “O,” alongside other Alumni sousaphone players.
I thought I’d take a few moments amidst all this to share the story of how I made the Ohio State Marching Band the summer after I graduated Galion High school. It’s a story I tell infrequently but still makes me chuckle.
The summer after I graduated from GHS, I knew I had to work hard to have a chance at making the band. OSUMB tryouts were legendary for their difficulty; horror stories about the grueling process and the high number of unsuccessful first-year attempts were common. The number of marchers was set in stone with no exceptions.
That summer, I made it a routine to walk or jog every morning along the streets of Galion —often with my sousaphone on, believe it or not. Early each morning, my girlfriend (shoutout to Debbie, who’s still a dear friend) would knock on my window, signaling it was time to hit the streets.
The tryouts were just as tough as described. That year, at the same time that I was giving it my best, another hopeful was making history by becoming the first female sousaphone player in the band.
Fast forward to late in the tryout week. I had survived the initial cuts, and at one point the band director dramatically stopped everything in the stadium to address the group.
He pointed to someone and asked everyone to take a good look. To my horror, I realized he was pointing at me. “This,” he said (I’m paraphrasing), “is what dedication looks like. Tom is a model for all of us.”
I was utterly confused—until I looked down at myself. Blood was literally running down my arm, my side, and my leg.
Naturally, I checked for the source of the bleeding. Sure enough, there was a large semicircular gash on the underside of my right arm. In the heat of the moment, with adrenaline pumping, I hadn’t even noticed that my sousaphone’s spit valve had caught my arm during a bow just a few moments earlier. There was no pain, but I didn’t let on to that fact. Just blood. Lots of it.
In the end, four freshman sousaphone players were chosen as alternates, myself included. I’ve always jokingly credited that injury with my making the band. In truth, I was really giving it my all.
To this day, I still have the scar on my arm as a reminder.
In a strange twist of fate, despite being an alternate, I ended up performing the ramp entrance and Script Ohio during my first week and with just a couple of days’ notice. But that’s a story for another day.
Photo: View of the Ohio State Band marching along Regent Street #13 by Robert Lamb, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
