![]() A Dinkle, to paraphrase Freud, was just a shoe. The trip to Pennsylvania, it seemed, had been a fool's quest. Their family had tapped into something elemental, they said - a piece of old-fashioned, innocent small-town Americana that had hung on somehow despite all the changes of accelerated modern life, but they really couldn't say for sure why any of it was so. For example, the booming 1990's were salad days for the top-of-the-line leather Dinkle Vanguard, which sells for nearly $30, while tougher times have marked a shift to the $20 Glide.īut in the end, they had only a piece of the great marching band story: their own. They certainly knew about shoes, and how economic life is reflected through band footwear. It was becoming quite clear by then that the Savocas had no answers to the metaphysics of marching band existence. Trains periodically roared past, rattling the windows. Out in the factory, the 10 employees - 6 more work in a leather-sewing shop in Scranton - were gluing and cutting. A small sign out front simply says ''Up-Front Footwear,'' and only when you step inside do the distinctive smells of shoe leather and adhesive make it clear you're in the right place. The factory is in a century-old bakery building hard by a railroad track in this depressed old mill town about three hours west of New York City, and it's easy to miss. As in the scene when Dorothy had her moment of truth with the Great Oz, a curtain would be pulled aside and there - ipso facto, sis-boom-bah - the secret beating heart of marching band would be revealed. So I was ready for epiphanies on the Dinkles factory floor. Sometimes, a whole tree would be decorated with laced-together shoes, hung like fruit. For many years the seniors in Syracuse University's marching band, for example, have been bound by custom to abandon their band shoes in some spectacular, public way after the last performance of their careers as a rite of passage. Shoes, logically enough, also carry a greater symbolic weight for bands that travel by foot. If anyone possessed the knowledge of what marching band is about, I thought, it would be the people at Dinkles. ![]() Asian-made imports dominate.īut Dinkles are the last major band shoe still manufactured in the United States - though the company's cheaper lines are now imported, too - and for my sons, Paul and Anthony, who marched in Dinkles every year but one, the name became a defining symbol of their experience. It's a cutthroat business, with nearly 23,000 high school marching bands across the country, and perhaps 1,000 alone within a three- or four-hour drive of Manhattan, each with 90 to 100 players, on average. There are other obscure marching shoe brands - Drillmaster, Style Plus and Director's Showcase among them. ![]() If the universe hums a deep B flat, as cosmologists contend, then the underlying tone of all those Fridays and Saturdays on the gridiron and the uncounted hours of practice - at least in my boys' school - was the muffled heel-toe step of a Dinkle. Most people have probably never heard of Dinkles shoes, but in the marching band culture - though in truth you can probably just shorten that to ''cult'' - Dinkles are a mysterious, omnipresent constant. ![]() So I made a pilgrimage here, to the land of the Dinkle. As the closing grace notes of that moment grew near, I found myself looking for the source of what had touched them. My twin 17-year-old sons will march their last roll steps in a Thanksgiving Day football game after five years in a suburban New Jersey high school band that shaped their teenage years. No technical manual exists to describe the faraway look you can sometimes see in a drum major's eyes as he or she salutes the crowd, or the burning intensity of the low brass section, its members so focused and suffused with the fire of being 16 that they can make you cry just for the beauty of it.īut those larger, deeper questions - the why of marching band - somehow became more meaningful this November. Why such a shoe needs to exist in the first place is another matter. ![]() For marching under the lights on a Friday night, glossy with a patent-leather sheen is best. It might be black if your band is prone to sloppy footwork, because dark colors can mask many a mistake, or white if you have the chops. The perfect marching band shoe pitches the toe forward to foster the seamless, balletlike movement called the roll step. ![]()
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