History

Formal Dances

The big dance of our time at VPI was the Junior Ring Dance of 1961.
The sketches of the class ring above came from a Josten's VPI 1962 Ring
Committee poster. Our band classmate, Lee Goss, was a member of that
committee which designed our ring. The War Memorial Gym was decorated by students for the event
and it included the large mock-up of the ring as a central feature. The group
photos below were reproduced from The Virginia Tech. The Four Lads
sang to the music of Woody Herman's orchestra. Depicted to the right is the
cover to the formal portrait taken of each couple during the evening.

Members of the Highty Tighties played in several dance bands during our time at VPI. For several years, Lee Goss directed the Southern Colonels. Members of our class, besides Lee, shown in this photo are Dan Dudley (left-most sax), John Slaughter (right-most sax), Bob (Cozy) Coulbourne (drums), and Pete Peterson (right-most trumpet). Steve (Rat) Brodie can be seen next to Dan.

Lee shares the following interesting history of the Southern Colonels: “The Southern Colonels had a rather long history with some rather strange turns. As the Nazi movement was forming in Europe, the band got hired to be the staff band for an Atlantic ocean liner. Apparently they made several trips across the Atlantic and some of the members became involved in the young Nazi groups. Eventually, several of the members stayed in Germany, and the band split up as a result. It did not function at all until several years after the war.

In addition to the normal purchased arrangements, we had a number of original 'charts' that we played from. They were arrangements by former members of the band. Two of them were Boyd Rayburn, who became an outstanding jazz musician and did some broadway musical direction, and Charlie Byrd who was an outstanding guitarist and had a club called the Bird's Nest on Mass. Avenue in DC.”

When they could not book a 16-17 piece band, they booked themselves as the six piece Stardusters (see photo below).

This photo of the Buddy Morrow band was taken from a 1961 Cotillion Club advertisement in the Tech paper. The photo used in the ad was as the band appeared at the Cotillion Club 1959 Winter Formals.

Do any of you still have mementos or photos from these or any other formal dances?

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