Archive for the ‘Erwin Band Memories’ Category

A Blast From the Past: Denise Dykes

Denise Dykes was the head Erwinette in 1974. She always had an exotic sort of beauty…

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Denise Sanders recently popped up at an impromptu reunion in Blount County, still looking good after all these years…

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Erwin Band Memories: The ‘Dumb’ Drum Line

Some of the most fun memories I have of Erwin in the 1970s - and adolescence in general - was playing and marching in the drum line in the Erwin Eagle Marching Band.

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The Erwin Eagle Marching Band, 1976 at Disney World

The only other members of the drum line I recognized at the 2006 reunion were Byron Ackerman and Scotty Glover. I’m told Scotty also left the band at some point after a dispute with the band director, Ronald Widener.

A heck of a trumpet player but a heavy smoker, Widener hated drummers. He would stop the band right in the middle of practicing a song and scream at us and call us the “dumbest” beings on the planet.

But we ignored him for the most part and went on about having fun.

I was there at a separate drum line practice in August 1974 when Ricky Knowles and Mike Ponder and the rest of us wrote the famous FALSTAFF beer cheer and cadence. I understand that cheer lived on until the Moral Majority took over early in the 1980s.

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