A Thousand for One Thousand:
Bringing the Music Home
An exterior rendering of the 28,000 square-foot facility proposed as the future home for the Minuteman Band.
The Minuteman Marching Band is fundraising for a much-needed facility to house the best homeless marching band in the country. Right now the band is scattered across campus, and its changing room is the Grinnell Arena parking lot.
The plight of our renowned, 143-year-old band is best symbolized by the current “display case” for the Sudler Trophy, presented to the Minuteman Band in 1998 by the John Philip Sousa Foundation to honor it as the best in the country. This “Heisman Trophy of marching bands” is currently gathering dust on a cluttered shelf in Minuteman Band Director George Parks’s temporary office at the University Apartments. The marching band has been without a home since shortly after this distinguished trophy was awarded.
“The band was moved out of our longtime home in the Old Chapel when the tower began to fall apart in 1998,” says Parks. “And now it’s not feasible to move back in because it would take something like $14 million to bring the chapel up to code. It makes more sense to build a new facility that meets all the band’s needs in a state-of-the-art way.”
Those needs include staff offices, instrument and uniform storage, locker rooms, rehearsal areas for percussion, brass, and wind players, and “a place for band members to practice, rehearse, congregate, study, network, and become a cohesive unit,” says band alumnus Barry Pilson ’81, now director of marketing for the American Association of Museums.
Pilson and the other 3,000 band alumni will be the key players in funding the new facility, and preliminary plans have been developed for several possible sites near Grinnell Arena or the Mullins Center.
“We’re just barreling ahead,” says Parks, “and trying to get as many people aware of the project as possible.”