"The Finger" 1969
I was a freshman in the fall of 1969, and joined the BRB (Rank 4, clarinet) as soon as I got to campus. The all-male band maintained the proud tradition of marching from formation to formation as we executed theme shows planned out by the Show Committee made up of band members. A key feature of these theme shows was that each formation was meant to represent something, i.e., it was not merely a geometric formation. Our first away game that fall was at Rutgers, and the show theme was student life. One of our formations was a giant hypodermic needle, with the sousaphones inside the barrel of the syringe. The narrator (Bob Anspach '70) talked about Gannett Clinic as we marched into formation. After we played out piece (sorry, I don't recall what it was), we marched into our next formation, and the way we did it was that the men forming the movable part of the syringe marched so as to push the "plunger" down, and the sousaphones marched (or, I think, ran) out the needle. Pretty neat!
However, one alum who was at the game didn't think so, and he was Jansen Noyes '06 (as in Noyes Lodge, Noyes Student Union [now gone]) -- you get the idea. He wrote a letter to President Corson claiming we were advocating use of drugs, and of course this brought down the wrath of the administration on Professor Stith, the band advisor. Well, now a confrontation was set up between the band and the administration, and as you know from your ancient history, that time in America in general and Cornell in particular was nothing if not confrontational. The Daily Sun played it up big, and the band was seen as just the latest victim of official oppression. So what do victims of oppression do? They stick it to The Man -- and that's what the show committee decided to do.
The last home game of the season was Fall Weekend, then one of the big three social weekends on the annual student calendar. The band had done some practicing in secret, away from the view of Prof. Stith. When we took the very muddy field that November Saturday afternoon, a huge roar went up from the stands as we kicked off our show, which was a salute to the Ivy League. One of our formations was a big fist (knuckles toward the Crescent, wrist toward the West Stands), and the narrator saluted Harvard for its riot the previous spring. Our next formation was a chapel, representing Dartmouth, with the steeple tip toward the Crescent. Standing in the fist, the sousaphones formed the lines representing the clenched fingers. As we played "The Chicago Police Band March", the band marched in position while the sousaphones started to march to the next formation -- forming a giant raised middle finger. The stands went absolutely wild. I never heard such a noise in my life. The whole thing was beautifully captured on film by Nick Krukovsky '65.
Needless to say, the shit hit the fan after that. From that day to this, the Big Red Band has generally confined itself to geometric formations. In my personal opinion, Greg Pearson was brought on as assistant director precisely to see that this sort of thing never happened again.
As for me, I played in the band the next year and became head manager in my junior year. An interesting postscript happened in the summer of 1980. My wife and I were visiting Cornell en route back from a business trip and stopped in at my old fraternity, Kappa Delta Rho. I went up to my old room and there was a brother there studying. We got to talking, and I asked him if there were many brothers in the band, as there had been in my day. Yes, he said, he was in the band himself. I proceeded to tell him this story, and as I got to the punch line, he stopped me and said, almost in tones of awe, "You were in The Finger? We watch that every year at the band banquet!" He ran into the hall and called, "Hey, Ted! C'mere! Here's a bro who was in The Finger!" "What? You were in The Finger! Cool!" It's the nearest I've ever come to being famous.
- Paul Cashman '73
