HISTORY BITS:

LAUGHTER AND TRAVEL:  For every road trip or performance, there's a signature hilarious moment no one forgets.  A sampling:

Salt Lake City, ca. 1980:  A frantic pilot bursts from the cabin to see what on earth is wrong with his airplane.    His instruments had not explained that the rhythmic lousing up of his flight was caused by Highland Dancers performing the sword dance in the aisle.

Albuquerque New Mexico:    Scheming happens best in distant motel rooms.  John Wharrier's wedding was coming up, and EVERY SINGLE PERSON bought, wrapped, and presented a toaster.   What a party!   (All bought from the same store and with receipt enclosed, it was an easy exchange.)

Santa Rosa California Games, ca. 1975-1985:  These were years of wolfing dinner, before the Long Arm of P/M Mark Ryan could flash out and clean your plate after suctioning off his own. Trying to save a last piece, one piper placed it squarely on his own head, assuming Ryan would never eat pizza so contaminated...........But you guessed it. 

Sidney Nebraska, ca. 1985:  Famous sport store Cabela's sells lifelike rubber bait--worms, scorpions, bugs.   One lone piper sneaked into every single motel room and hid a whole bucketful of the creepy creatures.  They turned up in pajama pockets, tape decks,  sleeves, mittens, panty hose, and one, five years later, inside a rotting pipe bag.  (Years later, at his wedding, a few of the little fellers were tossed along with the rice.)
  
Sidney Nebraska, 2006:      Witty Sidney organizers sneaked life-size masks of Drum Major Don McKee to each dancer and musician at the end of a show, so that when the D/M turned back from the microphone, he faced a huge chuckling crescent of.......Himself.

Endinburgh Scotland, 2000:  Millennium Parade: Ten thousand pipes & drums  marched in great phalanxes of color and din around the castle.  Dozens of bass drummers pounded and laughed and danced and simply went nuts ducking from the sunshine into a deep Victorian underpass.  It was the echoes.  Nobody had ever heard anything quite like it.

Vail, Colorado, every July 4th since 1971:    Endless teasing of a piper from sheep-rich Wyoming culminated in the stealing of his wallet from a motel room.  A long plastic accordion-type photo sleeve was planted in it, filled with pictures of Paul with his woolly "relatives" which unfolded as someone returned it, saying, "Hey, Paul, is this YOUR wallet?"

Stone Mountain, Georgia,  1994:     The elegantly uniformed CDPB performed a hula to a 40-accordion band on the field.
  
Memphis in May, ca. 1987: British Army Captain James MacFarlane came directly from the Edinburgh tattoo and directed our rehearsals.  His balcony bellow for silence could so terrify a coliseum floor's worth of pipers that the shadows of their tassels didn't even twitch.

Kirby Vacuum Convention, ca. 1985:  Sly pipers acquired the logo fabric of the famous Kirby vacuum cleaner bags and sewed up pipe bag covers..  The festive dinner crowd thought  they were being somehow serenaded by their own vacuums, and went quite mad.  (Distasteful comments on the similarity of the two sounds followed.)

Bus Trips:  1970's and 2004:   Somewhere along I 25 near Colorado Springs, an early band bus died, and  passersby honked and howled to see 30 kilted men pushing a bus along a freeway.    Yet real band bonding really only happened when the the broken AC on the bus to Gering, Nebraska provided us with a rest room that measured 110 degrees Fahrenheit. 

IN THE BEGINNING, A DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: 
While the City of Denver Pipe Band droned along in the late 60's, the neighboring Colorado Black Watch suddenly realized it had to change its own name.  One of its founders had silently run up horrific debt in Scotland with various shops, and its name was besmirched.  The Black Watch got the Blackball.  So P/M Andrew Planck changed the name to the 42nd Highlanders of Colorado, and cleaned up the action. 
This worked.  At least, it did until the guy who had been left in charge of the Black Watch uniforms tried to charge rent to each member for his outfit.  Told NO, he decamped in a Highland Huff with the uniforms.  The band regrouped as the Sutherland Highlanders, adopting that tartan, and then amalgamated with The City of Denver Pipe Band to increase the ranks of each.
When you see that dark flashof Sutherland tartan or hear "42nd Highlanders" on the march, it's all part of an evolution that's been going on since halfway through the last century.

TERRIFYING STATISTICS:
There were one hundred thirty one tunes in the first CDPB Pipe Band Settings collection.  Including Piobaireachds.
The first and only "world famous turtle race" was held at the second Finnegan's Wake in 1970.
Astonishingly, classes were given in fife, fiddle, accordion, country dance in both Irish and Scottish styles, Highland bagpipe, snare and tenor drum, and Irish Step and Scottish Highland dance in 1971. We even had a ceilidh band.   To be a fly on the wall would have been, er, crowded.
The first bass was a rope drum, later sold to the Estes Park band, and the snares had drag ropes.  

THE DEMON RUM,  Ins and Outs:
Take a look at the first "Finnegan's Wake" production in 1970.  Mixed drinks were 50 cents  and beer was "three for a buck," and there was a chug-a-lug sporting event featuring six international teams.  The North American Indian Dance Team, Edelweiss Schuplattler Dancers, and the Irish Fellowship Club dancers added to the McHullabaloo.  And as the beat went on down the years, the band was sometimes not such a sure-footed or -fingered marching unit.
  It was during Andrew Planck's watch in '87 that the band agreed not to drink until "the last note was played", and the musicality improved enormously.  Who else could have commanded enough affection to pull off such a regulation?
It worked.  By about 2005, the proscription was lifted under Lise Nelson, except, emphatically, for minors.  It simply hasn't been a problem since.

Charter members of CDPB, by the way, included Stu Brann, Ed Caren, Mike Connell, Tony Ciufo, Sam Grier, Joan Hart, Howard Long, and Chris Woodbury.  Pipe Majors have included Sam Grier, Tony  Ciufo, Bob Young in 1974,  Ciufo again in 1975, Bob Lawrie in 1976, Mark Ryan 1977-1986, Andrew Planck, Rob Spurrier, Andrew Planck again, Sean Martin, and today's Lise Nelson.  Susan Castro was Irish dance mistress in '71, and Heather McDowell's name appears as an early Highland Dancer. Cristy Wisehart Jones lead them today.  Irish dancers having disappeared for a while, Heidi Holmes in 1988 brought back the Irish team that is still so strong today under Melissa Slagter.  Drum Majors have included John Lorimer, Stuart Crawshaw, and presently Don McKee.