The Great Rocket-Powered Tricycle Caper

One of the great joys of my life was to have been in the Band Office the day that call came in.  It must have been a slow news week, and the Daily Atheneaeum, desperately looking for stories, called to find out what our show was going to be for the Penn State game.  Mr. Wilcox was seldom stuck for good ideas, but somehow the calendar and previous invention had gotten the better of him, and this time we had no plan for the upcoming week. (At least, if he did have a plan, he never told me, and so I got pranked too.)  Anyone who knows Don Wilcox well knows that he always has a ready assemblage of hyperbolic phrases to point out the folly of a particular situation, but even I was surprised at what came next.  The person on the other end of the line was insistent on getting a story, and in apparent frustration at being unable to give them a detailed answer, he blurted out, "Oh we're going to jump a tuba player over the Band on a rocket-powered tricycle!"  Then, without waiting for a follow-up, he hung up the phone.  Thus was born one of the most unique and hilarious shows in Mountaineer Marching Band history, as well as a knock-down, drag-out fight in the media that took many twists and turns.

This little tidbit had serendipitously appeared in the Dominion Post on Sunday, October 20, 1974

That note became thoroughly ironic after all that transpired throughout the week. Apparently, the guys at the DA didn't expect us to generate pride as much as disaster.  Displaying their usual lack of affinity for humor/irony, they reacted to Mr. Wilcox's response to their phone call with this masterpiece on Tuesday...

...and sadder still that common sense and a sense of humor are absent from editorial departments.  (At least at major universities.) Well, no one attacks the MMB and gets away with it, so we called to clear up their foolishness, only to generate more vitriol for Wednesday's edition.

Now, in the first place, they lied.  We didn't call them; they called us.  The "bleacher-clearing" line was, in fact, used in response to their follow-up call, in a clear indication that the entire stunt was an absurdity, not to be treated as genuine.  The "further investigation" amounted to nothing more than calling back and essentially asking, "Are you guys serious?"  To which the response was something like, "This could not POSSIBLY be serious, you idiot!"   (OK, Mr. Wilcox would probably not refer to somebody as an "idiot", but that's the way I want to remember it.) Ironically, the editor could have saved himself a world of grief by claiming that Tuesday's item was only a misunderstood attempt at humorously building up suspense for the game.  Instead, he attacked the band and Mr. Wilcox's character, and this calumny could not go unchallenged. The "Boys in the Band" reference, by the way, implied a 1970 movie by William Friedkin, in which most of the characters are gay.  At the time, the phrase was often used to imply that all band members were gay.  It was a cheap shot, and beneath the dignity of the DA (if they had had any). To add insult to injury, some half-wit scribbler of a cartoonist (SUE) threw in this little gem.

I can't draw a lick, but (A) I don't call myself a newspaper cartoonist, and (B) I can still do better than that. Thursday's paper contained the first printable responses to the DA's foolishness.  To their (very minimal) credit, the DA did publish them, but as you will see, they also showed some bias.  At least the first one was from the aforementioned tuba player himself.  That one was followed by assaults on their professionalism and gullibility.  To anyone who attended WVU at the time, the former was seldom imagined to exist, and the latter widely known.

I should also mention that outside the realm of newspaper printing, several other pranksters were hard at work.  One clever thinker had "accidentally" left detailed blueprints on the Mountainlair steps that purported to show the extent to which engineers in the Band had carefully plotted Brad's trajectory.  The extent to which these were viewed as likely to occur is not known, but the creators should have received an "A" project grade for their thinking skills. Additionally, someone also sent the DA a photo of "Brad" crashing into the Monongahela River during a practice run.  The picture was actually created by thowing in a cinder block (a direct insult to Brad's true weight), but the pic never ran in the paper. Friday brought the DA more grief in the form of letters, though they (not surprisingly) attempted to salvage some self-respect by having one of their staff defend them.  (Major mistake.) [Hopefully you will pardon my hand-written notations from the time.  I was pretty irritated at that one guy.] At the time, it was a little scary how close Jim Reger came to actuality. For some reason, the DA did not publish MY letter, which was somewhat caustic.  Though it is lost to history, I made similar points in a later letter that did get published. n.b. Greg Durig, who wrote the final letter, was one of my high school friends, a year behind me in school.  It was nice to have a pal come to our defense.

On the other hand, Hoppy Kercheval, in the full blush of his Wacky-Journalist-About-Town period turned in this enjoyable piece to finish off the week.

Incorporated into that nice report was another piece of "art" by SUE.  (Which in no way actually represented Brad, by the way.)

The next week, the DA acted as if none of it had happened.   Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Band performed its Halftime show, capped with a field-length line (sans instruments).  Helpers had dragged out a plywood ramp to assist the "jump".  Brad came hurtling out of the tunnel (at a pace that could be measured with a sundial), smoke billowing from behind his trike (generated by a CO2 cannister).  Barely managing to climb the ramp, he tumbled, rolled, and collided with the end of the line, beginning our favorite stupid game: DOMINOES!  As the line of band members toppled from one end of the field to the other, the crowd went wild.  We all laughed 'til our sides ached, leapt up to grab our instruments, and played the Looney Tunes tag line.  A pretty memorable occasion for everyone present. How'd the game go?  We lost, of course, by a score of 12 to 21, and for the 16th consecutive time in a series of losses that would eventually last through 1983.  All in all, more people probably remember the Band's performance than any details of that particular loss.