Today they are retirees, but in 1936 they were the members of the Boys Alliance Club Concert Drum and Bugle Corps, champions at that year’s Illinois State Fair.
Despite growing up in the Depression, they have rich memories of winning competitions, uniforms that made them stand out, a taskmaster who had them practicing sometimes five days a week and parents who gave their last pennies to keep the boys out of trouble through the corps and its activities. Those reminiscences will be shared when members reunite for the club’s 65th anniversary celebration next month.
The Boys Alliance Club was founded in 1932 at the behest of parents in the Polish enclave surrounding the steel mills in the South Chicago neighborhood. They enlisted Stanley Pinski, an electrician and self-taught musician who died in 1968, who handed out horns and drums that were on loan from a business to a ragtag group of 39 boys ages 5 through 14; the youngest ones served as drum majors.
Pinski drilled them in routines he devised, and he taught them music, from Sousa marches to his own compositions.
“He taught us all. No one among us was a musician,” says Alvin Lichner, 73, of Tinley Park, who started as an 8-year-old drummer.
“I played the drums for all the years I was in,” says Bob Bednarek, 73, of Lansing, organizer of the anniversary party. “We’d drill at the South Chicago (YMCA), and then on Saturdays I’d go to Pinski’s house. I enjoyed it.”
In 1933, they marched in street clothes in their first parade, down Commercial Avenue, the heart of the South Chicago business district. Soon they were the pride of the neighborhood. The merchants of the South Chicago Business Association worked with parents to outfit the boys in sturdy shoes, white pants and shirts accented by red silk caps and matching capes.
Lichner, who remembers when his father’s hours at a steel mill were cut back to one day a week, says that, although times were tough, he can still picture his dad proudly marching alongside the corps.
“Everyone was struggling,” he remembers. “It was really the businesses that carried us along.”
The fundraising events were endless.
“We had a big hall below our place, and my mother ran a bunco party for 200 people,” Bednarek says. “I remember penny-a-chance raffles. There was one time when a quilt with the (club) emblem was raffled, and the winner gave us an extra $50.”
The treasury helped fund the Boys Alliance Club’s activities, which included not only the drum and bugle corps but also sports activities organized at the South Chicago YMCA. (The club paid the YMCA to store equipment and for sports facilities.) The fee, $10 a year, was waived for those who worked in the steel mills because the mills helped subsidize the YMCA.
“Being at the `Y’ kept us off the streets,” Lichner says.
But it was the corps that stood out. The group performed at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933; the drum and bugle corps international competition; the opening of new bus service at 71st Street and South Shore Drive; and a host of competitions that took them to Kenosha, Wis., Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, Iowa, Holland, Mich., and Springfield.
“It was the first time we were leaving home,” remembers Art Jaronski, 71, of Orland Park, who started as an 8-year-old bugler. “You teamed up with your buddies.”
Corps membership rose to 70 by 1936, and the group’s awards piled up. Besides the state fair title, it won the South Chicago Centennial championship. For several years, the corps won the Chicago Tribune Chicagoland Music Festival juvenile division championship. And in 1938, the corps took first place in international competition at the Naval Armory in Chicago.
As the years passed, the boys grew up and joined the Sea Scouts through the YMCA, an activity that took them out on Lake Michigan to learn boating safety and sailing skills. That left vacancies in the corps, and girls were invited to join. With the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the boys of the Boys Alliance Club, then young men, enlisted in the service. When they returned home, they tried to regroup as the B.A.C. American Legion, but their time and attention shifted to family obligations and work.
Now as retirees, they have the time, and they are searching for other B.A.C. members. So far, Bednarek and his team have found former drummers and buglers in New Jersey, Florida and Ohio; in San Diego and Hot Springs, Calif.; and throughout the Chicago area. Special guest at the Sept. 28 party will be Stanley Pinski’s brother, Joe, now in his 90s, who lives in Glenwood.
“You just don’t hear about 65th reunions,” Bednarek says. “We were so young then. That’s why this is possible.”
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Anyone interested in the reunion ($30 a person including dinner), scheduled for 4 p.m. Sept. 28 at the Lansing Country Club, can call Bednarek at 708-474-0059.
