Strongsville’s parade story starts with a marching band and a rock-and-roll anthem. In 2006 — the parade’s 80th edition — the Strongsville High School Marching Mustangs marched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and, as the parade’s record of that year shows, performed “Roll Over Beethoven” at Herald Square. 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 song choice was a wink at history, whether or not the band intended it that way. “Roll Over Beethoven” is Chuck Berry’s 1956 declaration that rock and roll had arrived to push the classical world aside — and Berry’s song, like so much of rock’s founding catalogue, has Ohio echoes up and down this series. For a high school band on the biggest stage in its world, it was a Herald Square performance built to be remembered: a blast of brass announcing that the kids from Cuyahoga County had come to play.
The 2006 parade was a milestone edition — the 80th running of a parade that began in 1924 and lost three years to the Second World War. The Mustangs’ trip put Strongsville on a map that year that few Ohio communities ever reach. Among Ohio high schools, the roll of Macy’s bands is short: Pickerington, Centerville, Defiance, Lakota West, Kenton Ridge and a scattering of others across a century. Strongsville’s name stands in that company on the strength of the 2006 march.
A Macy’s invitation asks everything of a school band program. The route runs about two and a half miles from Central Park West to Herald Square; the band performs for the street crowds the whole way and for the television cameras at 34th Street, where each band gets its featured moment. Bands are chosen from a national field of applicants — in the years Ohio universities have gone, they have been one of about ten bands picked from more than a hundred hopefuls. For the Mustangs of 2006, the reward for clearing that bar was a Thanksgiving morning that a generation of Strongsville students has measured itself against ever since.
What makes Strongsville’s parade story unusual is that the band was only the beginning. Most towns in this series appear once — one band, one morning, one cherished piece of local history. Strongsville appears twice. Seven years after the Mustangs marched, a second Strongsville act — the J.U.M.P. jump-rope team — performed in the 2013 parade, and returned in 2015. That story is told tomorrow in this series; together, the two give one Cuyahoga County suburb a parade footprint no Ohio community its size can match.
The Mustangs’ morning also sits in the middle of Ohio’s modern parade era. Defiance’s last trip was 1994; Pickerington’s run of invitations ended in 2009; Kenton Ridge and Lakota West followed in 2012 and 2013. Strongsville’s 2006 appearance is one of the links in that chain — proof, decade by decade, that the road from Ohio’s band rooms to Herald Square stays open to programs willing to earn their way down it.
No Ohio band marches in the 100th parade this Thanksgiving, and the next invitation belongs to Mason in 2027. When Mason steps off, it will join a lineage that runs through Strongsville — where, for one morning in 2006, the Mustangs rolled over Beethoven in the middle of Manhattan.
The 2006 parade holds one more distinction the Mustangs shared: it was the year Macy’s Great American Marching Band — the nationwide audition band that has carried individual Ohio students into the parade ever since — was created for the parade’s 80th anniversary, co-founded by Ohio State’s own band director, Dr. Jon Woods. The Mustangs marched in the parade that launched it, one more thread tying Strongsville’s morning to Ohio’s wider parade story.
“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.