Thirty-nine years is a long time between encores. Centerville High School’s band led the entire Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1982 — and then, in 2021, a Centerville band marched down the route again, closing a gap between appearances longer than the performing students had been alive, twice over. 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 1982 appearance came with the parade’s highest band honor attached. The school’s band history records that Centerville marched that year as the Centerville High School Marching Band & Coed Drill Team — and served as the leading band of the procession, first in the line of march, ahead of every balloon and float on Thanksgiving morning. Leading the parade is the slot Macy’s reserves for a band it wants to open the show; in 1982, that band was from a Dayton suburb in Montgomery County.
Then the decades rolled by. Other Ohio bands took their turns — Pickerington built its record of four trips, Defiance completed its three, Strongsville, Kenton Ridge and Lakota West each took a morning in New York — while Centerville’s 1982 march receded into the band room’s institutional memory, kept by the program’s own histories.
The return, when it came, arrived in an unexpected uniform. Centerville’s invitation was originally slated for the 2020 parade, but the pandemic disrupted that year’s event and the appearance was deferred to 2021. And the ensemble that finally marched was not the marching band at all: it was the Centerville Jazz Band, which, as Marching.com’s account of the 2021 parade lineup records, performed “The Twelve Days of Christmas” at Herald Square. Parade magazine’s coverage of the 2021 parade likewise counted the Centerville musicians among that year’s performers — a jazz band, playing a Christmas standard, in a slot earned by a marching band’s tradition.
The two appearances frame the range of what an Ohio band’s parade story can be. In 1982: the full marching band at the very front of the procession, the classic image of a school band’s Thanksgiving. In 2021: a smaller ensemble, a deferred dream finally kept a year late, and a performance that reached the television audience from Herald Square all the same. Between them — 39 years — sits almost the entire modern history of the parade itself.
Centerville’s double appearance also puts it in select Ohio company. Only a handful of Ohio schools have been invited more than once — Pickerington four times; Defiance three; Centerville, Miami University and Strongsville’s parade acts twice over — and no Ohio school waited longer between its first and second mornings in New York.
No Ohio band marches in the 100th parade this Thanksgiving. But Centerville’s story is the series’ standing reminder that a parade invitation is never quite finished with a school: sometimes, nearly four decades later, it comes back around.
The 1982 honor deserves one more measure of its rarity. In a century of parades, only three Ohio bands are recorded as having led the procession: Centerville in 1982, Pickerington in 2001 and Ohio University’s Marching 110 in 2005. The lead slot is the parade’s opening statement — the first full band the television audience sees — and Ohio schools have claimed it in three different decades. Centerville claimed it first, and did it with a coed drill team marching alongside the band, in an era when the parade’s pageantry still belonged to another century’s traditions.
And the second appearance rewrote what a return could look like. A jazz band playing “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is about as far from a 1982 marching band’s show as a school music program can travel — yet both were Centerville, both were earned by the same program’s reputation, and both are in the parade’s record under the same school’s name. That is the thread this series keeps pulling: in the Macy’s parade’s Ohio history, the second invitation is the true compliment, and Centerville waited longer than anyone to receive it.
“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.