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Leominster HS band director marches in Tournament of Roses Parade, a career and personal highlight

LEOMINSTER — Playing sousaphone in the world-renowned annual Tournament of Roses Parade in sunny Pasadena, Cali., on New Year’s Day as part of a special Band Directors Marching Band will certainly go down as both a career and personal highlight for Leominster High School Band Director Robert Bergeron.

“The Rose Parade in the marching arts world is the granddaddy of parades,” he said. “It has character to it, and it isn’t easy to get a spot. This was perhaps one of the biggest honors of my entire life.”

Bergeron was one of 289 people who received a coveted invitation to participate in the band through the Michael D. Sewell Memorial Foundation.

“We represented every U.S. state, parts of Mexico, and I even met an individual teaching in Germany,” he said. “On top of this, I was surrounded by some of the most incredible people I have ever met in my entire life.”

Sewell was a band director who brought his band to the parade many times. After Sewell died in 2017, Bergeron said the foundation “went to work putting together the largest tribute to band directors ever” with the float “Saluting America’s Band Directors: We Teach Music. We Teach Life,” which the band accompanied.

“Everything was perfect, everyone was so friendly and supportive,” Bergeron said. “I never met Michael, but I stand for what he stood for.”

He said 76 members of the band directors group were Teacher of the Year recipients and that many of the larger group were retired band teachers who happily marched along the 5-mile parade route. Coincidentally, “Seventy-Six Trombones,” the signature song from the 1957 musical “The Music Man,” is the tune the band performed on television during the parade.

One woman marching behind Bergeron in his block in the large-scale band was Amy Heist, a retired band teacher from New York in her late 60s who also played sousaphone.

“She and I sat on the bus together, telling stories and she shared so much wisdom,” Bergeron said of his new friend. “A great music teacher once told me, ‘Surround yourself with people who are better than you.’ and that is exactly what this band was. I am so grateful for that.”

He said that besides two high school marching bands representing their schools’ football teams who played in the game after the parade and a couple of high school honor bands made up of students from around the country that requires an audition, every other marching ensemble in the parade are hand selected by a committee in Pasadena.

“These groups can be high school bands, college bands, military bands, or drum and bugle corps,” Bergeron said. “Up to this point, I had never been in a group that was invited to this parade. My college band got invited to go but the performance was well past my year of graduation. I was fortunate to be able to march in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2013, but never got the chance to do the Rose Parade. This was a first for me.”

The multitalented band director who plays an array of instruments including tuba, trombone, saxophone, drums, guitar, piano and sousaphone, which is a marching tuba, said it is a “funny story” when it comes to how he first heard about the opportunity to be in the parade.

“Back in 2019 I was at a Leominster High School basketball game with a colleague, Nick Smith,” he recalled. “The game hadn’t started yet, and I was scrolling through Facebook and saw an ad ‘Band Directors wanted for Rose Parade Band’ or something along those lines. After reading into it some more, I realize that this was being supported by some pretty legitimate names in the band leadership community. I was skeptical at first whether it was worth it, but Nick convinced me there was no harm in at least applying. So, I did, and the rest is history.”

Bergeron and the rest of the director band had been lined up to participate in the 2021 parade, but it was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For take two, he flew out of Boston Logan International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport late Christmas night ahead of this year’s parade.

“Most members flew out much closer to the time we started work later in the week, around Tuesday night, Wednesday morning,” he said.

Bergeron’s girlfriend Eva Grimm is originally from southern California and flew out to the West Coast separately to meet him. The couple took advantage of the extra time and spent a few days with her family to celebrate the holidays and then enjoyed some quality time together at Disneyland the day before they left for the parade. Bergeron said the band met for the first time on Dec. 29 in a hotel banquet hall “and from that point forward we got to work.”

“The prep and rehearsal for this is where things start to get interesting,” he said. “We were expected to show up already being familiar with the music. Weeks leading up to this, I began playing sousaphone in any free time I had before or after school and got the music down.”

He said once they got there, they only had about 10 hours of rehearsal time total together as a band.

“Mind you, many of the groups in the parade have been rehearsing since August for this,” Bergeron said. “We had three days before the parade. Three days to put the music and the marching together. To make things more complicated, we were the first band in the history of the parade to be integrated with a float. There were actual formations we had to learn and create to allow the float to pass through the group, something that had never been done before.”

On top of those logistics, Bergeron said they also participated in performances before the parade, including an appearance at a band festival which was a showcase of all the bands “performing something similar to a halftime show.”

“We got to show off the music meant for the parade, and it sounded fantastic doing it,” he said, adding that the only had two rehearsals before that gig. “The next big performance was at a float judging the day before the parade. As we were part of the float, we got to be part of that judging. If that wasn’t enough, our time got cut short because to everyone’s surprise, it rained for two days in southern California.”

Despite the challenges, Bergeron said the parade and experience overall from his point of view “seemed very back to normal.”

“Of course, we always had our masks and took precautions to keep each other as safe as possible,” he said of the typical pandemic regulations that have become second nature. “Within the bubble we were in, we didn’t have any time to really explore LA while we were there so our group was very isolated with each other for the duration of our stay.”

When asked what the experience means to him both personally and professionally, Bergeron had a lot to say.

“So much has been brought to the table for my professional career,” he said. “I just made friends with some of the best band instructors from all over the United States and they have already sent me ideas, clinics for professional development, and even opened up the ideas for collaboration. I feel like it puts me and the Leominster band program into a very special network that I will be utilizing in the future.

“Personally, this brought me so much,” Bergeron continued. “First, standing there on TV, knowing I had friends, family, teachers, colleagues, administrators, students and millions of others sharing that moment with me is something I will cherish for the rest of my life. Band is a huge part of my life, and this parade was also the first time I got to share that part of my life as a performer with my girlfriend Eva who hadn’t really had the chance to see me perform before. What a way for her to see that! She got to sit about halfway down the parade route so that was very special for me to have her there on that day.”

Bergeron’s band origins are fairly modest, so this was a whole new world for him. He attended “a very small school down by Cape Cod” and his high school band had 16 kids in it when he graduated.

“That kid from a small band near the Cape has now marched in the two largest parades in the United States and has his dream job of directing the amazing students of the Leominster High School music program,” Bergeron said proudly. “That just fills me with so much joy and I hope that each and every one of my students get the chance to experience something like this in their lives.”

When it comes to what he enjoyed most about the once-in-a-lifetime experience, Bergeron said “everything.”

“We made history,” he said. “First band of all band directors, first band and float, and on top of that, we are kinda going viral. On Marching.com’s Facebook page our performance video hit 500,000 views in just three days, making it that site’s most popular video. All while representing this great town, community, of course the students of LHS. It was also pretty awesome getting to be on the other side one more time. Felt like being a kid again for so many of us.”

Bergeron said he will treasure the memories made during his time in California and that is proud to have been part of the tribute to Sewell, which earned the band directors group a well-deserved Showmanship Award for most outstanding display of showmanship and entertainment.

“I am proud that I got to put Leominster on the map in honor of all the music teachers who have served here,” he said. “This job isn’t easy, especially the last few years, and to be part of such a wonderful moment in music education history is something I will proudly carry with me forever.”