What is this place?
This site is about the history of the Marching Royal Dukes. It is part of an effort being made by the Alumni Band (an alumni chapter of JMU) to record and assemble the history of the Marching Royal Dukes.
Our (likely impossible) goals:
- to record first-hand histories of the MRDs
- to build a list of all alumni of the MRDs
- to build a list of all performances of the MRDs
- to gather all published audio recordings of the MRDs
- to build a list of all tunes performed by the MRDs
- to find the earliest moving-film image of the MRDs
In two years, it will be the 50th anniversary of the pep band. (The MRDs will turn 50 two years after that.) This seems a good time. We're right on the cusp of where we still have original members to talk to and get memories from, but probably not for much longer.
So that's what this site is. I think the end goal is a book of the history of the MRDs. I hope to start having crowd-sourcing work here, and rough cuts of the history as I assemble it.
If you have photos, audio or such you'd like to share here, let me know and I'll post them. That way other folks can enjoy trips down memory lane, too.
Oh... and this is me:
