Area man takes pride in dotting band's 'i'

Marchers flow out to write the word 'Ohio' in the traditional performance.
By JEANNE STARMACK
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
CANFIELD -- It's a big deal, getting to dot the 'i' in the Ohio State University Marching Band's Script Ohio performance at a home game.
Just ask Joe Witkowski, the sousaphone player who's the 'i' dotter in Saturday's 3:30 p.m. game against Illinois at Ohio Stadium in Columbus. He thought it was worth staying at school an extra quarter.
"I probably could have finished school in the spring, if I really pushed it," Witkowski, 22, said in a telephone interview from Columbus earlier this week.
But Witkowski, who has a fan club of family and friends traveling to the game this weekend from his hometown of Canfield, didn't make the band his first year at OSU. Only fourth-year sousaphones are eligible to be 'i' dotters, so he needed a little extra time.
This year, because of a seniority system of how many starts he had, or how many times he got to march, he got third pick out of six fourth-year sousaphones, and he chose to dot the 'i' at Saturday's game.
Tradition
OSU's marching band is a big one, with 28 sousaphones altogether. You need a lot of bodies to do Script Ohio, which, Witkowski says, "has been coined the most memorable band tradition."
"It's unique," he said. "It's the only one where we actually march out to spell it [the word Ohio]. He said that before the first Script Ohio in 1936, bands would perform float formations. "Everyone would float out into a shape," he said.
But to march out the spelling, the band gets into a block -- "a big rectangle, three-people deep," Witkowski explained. The drum major leads the marchers out of the block to spell the word.
And his big moment? From a position at the top of the small 'O', the drum major will lead him out to his spot.
"We strut out. I do a fast bow to the away side, do a kick turn and a slow bow to the home side," he said.
The first Script Ohio used a trumpet player to dot the 'i,' but the next year, the band began the tradition of using a sousaphone player.
"My guess -- it's a lot more flashy," said Witkowski, a music education major who's been playing sousaphone since he was an eighth-grader at Canfield schools. In the fifth grade, he began playing the tuba, the indoor version of the marching band instrument.
Witkowski's high school band director, Dan Neuenschwander, is out of the country and cannot go to the game Saturday, said Joe's mother, Mary Witkowski, from her Canfield home earlier this week. But Dr. Steve Gage, who conducted Joe in the Youngstown Youth Symphony Orchestra, will be there, she said.
Mrs. Witkowski said her husband, Paul, is a 1980 master's degree graduate of OSU. She said she and her husband have been taking Joe to OSU games since he was 2.
Display of devotion
Rocco Fumi plans to be at the game as well. "I've missed one home game in 44 years -- yes, I'll be there."
Fumi, a pharmacist at Buckeye Pharmacy in Canfield, helps people buy and sell tickets to Ohio State games. If people want to, he said, they can pay more than the face value of the ticket to make a donation to the OSU Scholarship Endowment Fund of Mahoning County, which grants three scholarships a year to students from Mahoning County schools.
He said that for the Saturday game, he probably supplied more than 30 tickets. "And maybe 18 went specifically to see Joe," he said.
Family and friends are planning a party at Witkowski's condominium complex near the OSU campus.
After he graduates this quarter, Witkowski plans to substitute teach around Columbus. He hopes he'll end up working "somewhere in Ohio."
The band will do Script Ohio to their traditional song, a French march called "Le Regiment de Sambre et Meuse." At the end, his big moment will come.
Is he excited? "Oh -- very much so."