100 YEARSAGO IN THERECORD
Sunday, Oct. 13, 1918. “Troy, naturally a musical city, has for years been fortunate in having bands, and excellent bands, too,” The Record reports, “but never in its history did any kind of a musical organization leave such an inspiring impression with music loving Trojans as did the Great Lakes Naval Training Station band.” The name may sound mundane, but the band is more than 300 strong and its conductor is Lieutenant John Philip Sousa, America’s “March King.” Sousa brings his band to Troy today to promote Liberty Bond sales for the U.S. war effort. While Troy’s entertainment venues are closed due to the Spanish flu epidemic, there’s relatively little risk in going out to watch a marching band. Multitudes take advantage of the opportunity. The band forms at River and First streets for its first performance at Monument Square. “The sight of the twelve helicon tubas almost stopped one’s breath,” our reporter writes, “One could hardly count the cornets, trombones, French horns and reed instruments. Suffice it to say there were scores of these.” Apart from Sousa himself, the star of the show is drum major Micheaux F. Tennant, nicknamed “The Peacock of the Navy.” “The drum major certainly takes his title seriously,” our writer observes, “He was an entertainment by himself, radiating by his every move his consciousness of the wonderful organization behind him.”
From Monument Square the band proceeds to Franklin Square, while “the escort of police had to step up a little. Accustomed as they were to local parades the captains and sergeants did not get off as lively as the business-like, hurry-up, 30-inch stride of the sailor boys.”
The band continues north to Jacob Street and Fifth Avenue before turning back downtown for a climactic performance in Sage Park. “Every available seat and space in the windows of the facing buildings had been taken. Boys climbed into trees and some of them on the court house roof. The façade of the First Presbyterian Church became an improvised band stand.”
Seymour Van Santvoord pitches Liberty Bonds between the numbers. The onetime Troy mayoral candidate delivers “one of the most forceful utterances of a speaker of consistent effectiveness on any question.”
In an interview, Sousa notes that during previous Liberty Loan drives his band performed indoors for “the millionaire class of subscribers.” For the Fourth Liberty Loan, organizers have a “much wiser plan” to target “the great mass of the people – those who buy the fifty, one hundred and one thousand dollar bonds.” That “brings the music to more people than could possibly hope to hear it in any other way.”