Monthly Archives: June 2008

Stories

Some suggestions have been brought to my attention regarding the future of the website (thank you to Steve Scherer and Adam Sporluck).

As much as we hate to admit it, we’re all getting older; an idea that was made much more tangible with the recent passing of another beloved member of our Knights family. One of the purposes of this website is to allow people to remember the past through contact with friends from years gone by, remembering the sights and sounds from those years, and making everyone feel like they’re 18 again. Because of this purpose, we will be starting a new project, partially involving the website, but more than just the website.

Stories.

Stories of the days when you marched, when you picked up your horn, strapped on your drum, taped up your flag or rifle. Stories of when you rode the bus all night across the midwest and slept on gym floors, just to get up the next morning, practice for hours, and perform for 100, 1000, 10,000 people in stadiums across the country. And you loved every minute of it. We all have stories from when we marched, good and bad, some were told to friends and family, some are simply remembered in our own minds.

What we would like to do is to gather together these stories; as many as possible; and store them for the future. Some of these stories will be displayed on the website, but if you have stories that you want to be remembered, but maybe not necessarily posted on the site for the whole world to see, we can store those too. We can keep them for the future, password protect them, or however you would like them kept.

How many stories have already been lost with the passing of so many of our Knights family? Bringing these stories together into one place will help to ensure that people will know and remember who the Knights were.

Being one of the last members of the Knights has it’s upside and it’s downside. The downside was that when I marched, the glory years of the corps were long gone, and we were just a small division III corps, barely getting by. The upside is that it makes me one of the youngest of the Knights, which means that I (hopefully) have a long time that I can keep this website going. I promise that, as long as I am able, I will continue to keep this site up and running, and the images, sounds, and stories available, so that your children, grandchildren, and future generations can know at least a small part of what we all experienced.

So, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to start writing down stories that you feel should be remembered from when you were a marching member of the Knights. Include as much as you feel comfortable sharing, as well as the year it happened (if you remember), any other people involved, or anything else I can use to help categorize your stories. Send them to me at scott@knightscorps.org and I will start saving them. At some point, hopefully soon, I will put together a page for these stories, which will allow people to view them by year, search by people’s names, and other categories yet-to-be-determined.

Ideally, this will be the first step in creating something much greater than what we currently have. A good friend of mine, Adam Sporluck (Baritone/Euph ’93-’94), has quite a few great ideas, in addition to what I’ve got on tap, and between the both of us, I think we have the tech knowledge to be able to do it. If you have any questions or suggestions for this project, please email me at scott@knightscorps.org and we’ll see what we can do.