Flashback
90 years ago
UB forms a band
A marching band was one of several students activities deemed “essential for a great university.” Photo: UB ARCHIVES
By 1920 UB had secured a central campus—the current day South Campus—conducted a successful capital campaign and awarded degrees to the first graduates of the new College of Arts and Sciences.
It was now time to address what pharmacy Dean Willis G. Gregory described as the “human” aspect of college life: student activities.
After 15 years of doing no more than “coaxing a few straggling activities,” the Students’ Activities Committee began to foster “activities that were considered essential for a great university.” One such activity—the university’s first combined marching and concert band—was formed in 1920 under the leadership of pharmacy instructor A.B. Lemon.
That same year, the student yearbook, “Iris,” was resurrected after a 10-year absence and was “made an annual book worthy of the University of Buffalo.” “Bison,” the student humor magazine, “was put on its feet as a paying proposition.” The Glee Club and Orchestra, “whose music was heard so long since as to not even stir an echo in memory, was heard from last spring.” Dramatics took on new life, and debating was introduced.
With school spirit on the rise, Irving Templeton, chairman of Students’ Activities Committee, decided that UB needed “a monster parade, big mass meeting and a lively football contest” to instill in the general public “the fact that Buffalo has a first-class college.”
On a Saturday morning in October 1921, “With the blue and white banners of the University of Buffalo flying, the University Band playing, and 1,500 students marching, Buffalo yesterday took on the appearance of a typical college town when the U. of B. parade, the first of its kind ever held in the school’s history, proceeded yesterday morning in its line of march from Townsend Hall, on Niagara Square, to the Teck Theater where a mass meeting was held.”
The Buffalo Evening News also reported that, “It was a colorful procession. The bright green dunce-caps of the freshmen girls mingled with the red ones of the students of pharmacy. Here and there a float was interspersed in the line of the march, or a student in special costume.”
“Both the dental and medics performed ‘float operations.’ On one float two poor students groaned in dentist chairs while unfeeling practitioners pulled and hammered at their teeth. A major surgical, sawing operation was performed on another float, while the rest of the class marched in white operating aprons.”
The rally preceded a football game with Alfred University. The score was UB 14, Alfred 3.
—John Edens, University Archives
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