Emerging from the pandemic, Northport High School’s Tiger Marching Band has come roaring back to life

If there ever was, or ever were to be, an authentic distillation of the Northport-East Northport community – a sound, presence and spirit so indicative of Northport-East Northport that it could simply be from nowhere else – one could nominate the Northport High School Tiger Marching Band and have the entire town in consensus.

The Northport High School Tiger Marching Band was created in 1957 by Robert W. Krueger, nine years before construction was completed on 154 Laurel Hill Road, where Northport High School resides today. The band found community prestige rather quickly, performing as New York State’s official marching band at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Flushing, Queens. An estimated 51 million foreign and domestic patrons flooded the New York State Pavilion, all eager to celebrate technology, culture, and “man’s achievement on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe.”

The Tiger Marching Band, adorned in varying shades of red (they had yet to adopt their quintessential pinstripes of blue and gold), performed under the shadow of the Unisphere, an immense stainless steel representation of Earth that has become synonymous with the borough. A fitting beginning this was, as the band soon after drafted a similar relationship to its home community.

Born in Adrian, Michigan, Krueger came to Northport High School in 1957, filling the newly created position of Director of Music Education. As the Baby Boom and the growth of suburbia expanded the high school’s halls, many students took refuge in the highly choreographed instrumentation of Krueger’s creation.

In 1962, Krueger innovated yet again, helping to found the Newsday Marching Band Festival, a competition which the Tiger Marching Band has won innumerable times over. Nowadays, Northport High School is asked to give the final, showstopping performance every festival – a clear manifestation of the phrase, “save the best for last.”

In 1981, Krueger brought his Tiger Marching Band out onto the national stage, where members performed at the opening game of the World Series at Yankee Stadium. A raucous and star-studded event, Pearl Bailey sang the National Anthem, and Joe DiMaggio threw out the first pitch. A year later, Krueger would retire from his position at Northport High School, dedicating his remaining years to the Northport Community Band, which he founded in 1959.

Krueger would direct the Northport Community Band for 55 years, until his death in 2013. Both the fully renovated Northport High School auditorium – now known as the Robert W. Krueger Center for the Performing Arts – and the Northport Village Bandstand have been named in his honor.

Though Krueger composed the original blueprint, the Northport High School Tiger Marching Band, as it stands today, has undergone a significant metamorphosis since the late 1950s. Perhaps the most significant, and certainly the most notable, is its unprecedented growth – it’s now roughly 330 members strong.

Nowadays, the seasonal calendar of marching band, Tigerrete, or Flagline member is lengthy and ever-changing. A typical year for the band will look something like the following: the season will begin with a three-week summer program (referred to as “Pre-Clinic” and “Band Camp,” the latter taking place at Farmingdale State College), during which all music and motions are learned and perfected; as the school year progresses, the marching band will perform at half-time in all Northport football home games; the band will then march in the Cow Harbor Day Parade, a yearly event gathering an estimated 10,000 spectators; the fall season typically culminates at the Newsday Marching Band Festival; the winter hiatus then sets in, where students may audition for various indoor ensembles such as Freshman Band, Concert Band, or Symphonic Winds; the spring season will then open with various Memorial Day Parades, and the cycle continues onward.

In addition to this routine of familiarity, many unprecedented performances will variably come into being. Examples include the Jets Pre-Game Field Show at MetLife Stadium, in which a monstrous J-E-T-S was spelled by the bodies of all Tiger Marching Band members; or the National Memorial Day Parade in Washington D.C., in which Northport was asked to march down Constitution Avenue – past the National Mall and the White House – in the largest yearly Memorial Day event in the nation.

Despite such events being intrinsically irregular, Northport High School, members of the Tiger Marching Band, and the Northport-East Northport community at large had all come to see these showings as mainstays of the group themselves. The spontaneous had become the routine. That is, until March of 2020, when everything became quite nonroutine.

With Covid regulations coming far and wide from the Health Department and beyond, the Tiger Marching Band all but stopped: a busy schedule was wiped clean, a tired faculty saw no students eager to learn, a student body found itself inside at a time when they were supposed to be outside. After a year of hybrid education, the traditions that had been forged 64 years prior seemed virtually nonexistent.

Lynn Cromeyn, the current head director of the Northport Tiger Marching Band, told the Journal, “This band is based on tradition, something that’s passed down year after year after year. We missed a year last year… It feels like we went back to basics.”

While much of the school year was vastly different, with two separate cohorts arriving on two separate days, the Northport-East Northport school district was able to pull off a quasi-Band Camp experience, something no other school district was afforded. “Northport did an incredible job allowing our marching band and music department to do music,” Ms. Cromeyn stated. “A lot of other places didn’t. We were able to have a Band Camp experience last summer. No one else had that. That was incredible.”

Though the institutions remained, the experience of Pre-Clinic and Band Camp last summer was far from normal: “What we normally do with all 300-plus of us, we did in seven cohorts. We did a show at twelve feet spacing, where usually we are at four feet,” said Ms. Cromeyn. “In the end, we chose to focus on curriculum because marching band is part of the curriculum here. We chose to focus on some aspects of that, when in a normal year, we rush right through. So, we fixed notes and rhythms in pep band music, and we were able to look more closely at our parade music for Memorial Day… I think we will be stronger for that.”

This year, the marching band has been reconstituted, and is back for the better. The Pre-Clinic and Band Camp summer experience has been revitalized back to its fullest extent, with the only difference being the location of the latter: instead of the dormitory settings of Farmingdale State College, Band Camp will now take place at East Northport’s Veterans Park, excluding the week-long room and board typical to all other years.

While, as they stand today, it would be unfair to characterize the mid-pandemic operations of the Tiger Marching Band as routine in comparison, the organization has gotten just as close as it can get to normalcy, even as safety remains a critical priority.

“I think this year is going to be a great year for our band,” said Northport High School rising senior and Band President Braden Ciszek – the band’s 50th president to date. “We worked hard through the difficult conditions of last year, and we are thrilled to have a chance to perform for the community again.”

With high school sports swinging back to life, the Tiger Marching Band will now have an audience and arena to perform their community-lauded halftime show. Speaking of these halftime performances, Ms. Cromeyn said, “We’ve worked really hard here to become woven into the fabric that makes up the community. People associate the marching band and halftime football games as part of what our community stands for. We were missed this year… We have really become an important beacon for school spirit.”

As well, with Northport’s Cow Harbor Day Parade taking place on September 19, the band now has a much-awaited crowd to march for.

To Ms. Cromeyn, the Northport High School Tiger Marching Band represents one thing: pride.

“Geographically, Northport is a big community, and the band is a little bit of everyone,” she said. “It’s not just people from Northport or East Northport, it’s generations of people that went through here. Students that I’m teaching, their parents went here, or their aunt and uncle went here. It just stands for community pride in every way. I’ve been around a lot, and I’ve never found such a rooted community.”

“It is my hope that every person here understands they are part of a family,” she continued. “It’s about all the kids, and that they have a home. That is my philosophy: that every single person in here has a place, and we all matter.”

Photo after photo of years past line the walls of Northport High School’s A-Wing, where the marching band practices, performs, and resides. Invoking this vast collection of photographs, Ms. Cromeyn explained, “The pictures that are plastered all over the wall, I think it’s so important when the students walk down the hallway and they see themselves. Everybody. We are all the Tiger Band.”

All this, and much more, should echo one message across the hilly landscape of our fair town: the Northport High School Tiger Marching Band has come roaring back to life, and it’s bringing the entire community with it.

Harrison LeBow is a Northport High School rising senior and Co-Drum Captain of the Northport High School Tiger Marching Band.