Most Ohio bands that reach the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade get one morning in New York. Defiance got three — spread across three different decades. The parade’s year-by-year band listings record Defiance High School’s “Band of Class” in the line of march in 1976, again in 1986 and again in 1994, a run of invitations that makes the northwest Ohio school one of the most frequent Ohio guests in the parade’s history. This is part of “Ohio at the Macy’s Parade,” NewsForce247’s series telling the parade’s first century through the Ohioans woven into it, counting down to the 100th parade on Thanksgiving morning.
The first trip came in the nation’s bicentennial year. In 1976, as the parade’s listings show the band under the name “Defiance Marching Band of Class,” Defiance’s musicians marched the two-and-a-half-mile route from Central Park West to Herald Square in a year when American pageantry carried extra meaning — the bicentennial Thanksgiving, in a parade that had itself been marching since 1924.
Ten years later they were back. The 1986 parade listings carry the band as the “Defiance Band of Class,” and in 1994 the listings show the “Defiance High School Marching Band of Class” making a third trip. The slight changes in the band’s listed name across the years tell their own story: three different generations of Defiance students, three different bands in everything but name and hometown, each earning the same rare invitation.
That invitation is genuinely rare. Macy’s selects only about ten marching bands a year from applicants across the country, and most schools that go once never go again. Among Ohio high schools, only Pickerington — with four trips — has been invited more often than Defiance. Ohio University also made three trips. That is the whole of the three-timers’ club, and Defiance, a city of roughly 17,000 in Ohio’s northwest corner, sits in it alongside a flagship university’s band and the Columbus area’s most decorated high school program.
The “Band of Class” name itself is part of the distinction. It is a title the Defiance program has carried for generations — not a mascot, but a standard, the idea that the band represents its school and city with polish on and off the field. In New York, three times over eighteen years, that standard was put in front of the largest audience a school band can draw: millions watching on Thanksgiving morning.
Defiance’s three trips also frame Ohio’s parade geography. The state’s parade history is often told through its big college bands — Ohio State’s single spectacular appearance in 2018, Ohio University’s three trips, Miami’s two — but the high school map runs wider and deeper into small-city Ohio, and Defiance anchors its northwest corner. From Defiance County, the road to Herald Square turned out to be a road a band could travel more than once.
No Ohio band marches in the 100th parade this Thanksgiving, and no Defiance band has made the trip since 1994. But the Band of Class’s three invitations — 1976, 1986, 1994 — remain on the parade’s own record, part of the century this series is counting through, one Ohio story at a time.
Consider what the three listings ask of a school. A Macy’s year means raising the money to move a full band, instruments and uniforms to New York, housing and feeding students over Thanksgiving week, and preparing a show that works at parade tempo for two and a half miles and then stops the show at Herald Square. Defiance’s program shouldered that burden in three separate decades — under different directors, different students and different listed names, for the classes of the seventies, the eighties and the nineties alike. Programs that do it once call it the trip of a lifetime. Defiance built it into the band’s identity: three lifetimes’ worth.
“Ohio at the Macy’s Parade” continues through Thanksgiving Eve, when it concludes with “Akron Built the Balloons” — the Nov. 25 finale telling how Akron’s Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. designed and built the parade’s giant balloons from 1927 into the early 1980s, including every Superman balloon the parade ever flew. The 100th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade steps off Thursday, November 26, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on NBC and Peacock.