Alumni help Ursuline celebrate band’s 75th anniversary

By DENISE DICK

denise_dick@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Ursuline Alumni Band

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The Ursuline alumni band performed during the Mooney Ursuline football game.

Mooney vs Ursuline

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It’s been a long time since Tom Cavanaugh was a drum major for the Ursuline Fighting Irish Marching Band.

Cavanaugh returned Friday for the band’s 75th anniversary when alumni joined current band members on the field during the pregame and halftime shows at the game against archrival Cardinal Mooney.

“They say this is the 75th anniversary. That would mean the band started in 1939,” said Cavanaugh, of Niles. “I started here in 1942, so that would make me almost a charter member.”

Before becoming a drum major, the 1946 graduate played trumpet. He met his first wife, who was a majorette and a year behind him in school, in the band.

He planned to join the band on the field but not play.

The school looks a lot different now than it did when he was a student, but not everything is different.

“It always had that spirit of camaraderie — and it still does,” Cavanaugh said.

John Peplowski, Ursuline band director, expected about 60 alumni to pick up their old instruments and join the band’s 37 current members on the field, but 100 are coming back.

The oldest who planned to play graduated in the 1960s, he said.

“Most of them graduated within the last 10 years,” Peplowski said.

Planning for the big anniversary started in August, and invitations to alumni were sent via mail, email and Facebook.

To supply instruments for all of the alumni, Ursuline had to borrow some from other schools.

“We borrowed drums from Girard,” Peplowski said.

Marilyn Hamrock Pagliaro of Winter Springs, Fla., played clarinet in the Ursuline band when she was a student from 1960 to 1964. Today, her class will celebrate its 50th class reunion, so the timing of the band’s anniversary fit perfectly with her trip.

Like Cavanaugh, she planned to stand on the field with the band during Friday’s event but not play. She worries her musical skills are too rusty.

“I haven’t touched it since 1964,” she said of her instrument.

Pagliaro enjoyed her time in band, but all these years later she has a confession.

“It was difficult for me to march and play at the same time,” she laughs. “I’d much rather stay still and play. I was better at playing than at marching.”

Christian Pinto, 14, is a freshman in the band and appreciates that he’s part of this important anniversary of the band. He said he decided to go to Ursuline because of the band.

“Mooney was an option, but I wanted to be in a bigger band,” he said.

Christian looked forward to playing with the alumni, too.

“Some of my teachers are going to be playing,” he said. “It should be fun.”

Jennifer DePizzo, an Ursuline teacher and chairwoman of the school’s science, health and physical education department, played clarinet in the band when she was a student. That was 1991 when she met her husband, Brian, a trumpet player. He was a junior and she was a sophomore.

The couple lives in Liberty.

“That was Pep’s [Peplowski’s] first year, and we didn’t go away for band camp that year,” Jennifer DePizzo said. “We had band camp at school and Brian had a truck. We would all cram into Brian’s truck and he would take us to lunch.”

That’s how they got to know each other.

Both planned to pick up their instruments and hit the field for the fight song and the alma mater.

Brian, an Ohio State Highway Patrol trooper, plays trumpet about once a month with the patrol’s drum and bugle corps. Jennifer, however, hadn’t picked up her clarinet in years.