Only one Ohio college band has ever led the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade — and it did it with the whole country watching a band from Athens, Ohio, take the front of the line. Ohio University’s Marching 110 marched in the parade three times — 2000, 2005 and 2017 — and in 2005 it was given the first position in the line of march, the honor band of the day. 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.
Ohio University’s own account of the band counts three Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades, a record that puts the Marching 110 level with Defiance High School’s band for Ohio trips and behind only Pickerington’s four among high schools. Among Ohio’s universities, nobody else is close: Miami has been twice, and Ohio State — for all its fame — has been exactly once.
The first trip came in 2000, when the parade’s band records show the Marching 110 performing Frank Zappa’s “Dancing Fool” — a choice entirely in keeping with a band whose identity has always mixed precision with mischief. The Marching 110 built its reputation in Athens on a high-stepping, high-energy style that treats a football Saturday like a rock concert. New York got its first taste of that style at the turn of the century.
The second trip was the landmark. In 2005, as Ohio University’s student newspaper The Post reported at the time, the Marching 110 was selected to lead the holiday parade — the first band in the line of march, stepping off ahead of every balloon, float and celebrity in America that morning. The band’s Herald Square performance, per the parade’s records, was “Red Light” from Fame — another wink, a song about wanting to live forever, played by a college band at the front of the country’s most-watched parade.
The third trip completed the set in 2017. The Associated Press reported, in coverage carried by the Vindy, that Ohio University was selected from 175 applicants as one of only ten bands in the 2017 parade — and director Richard Suk noted it would be the band’s third appearance. Three trips, three different decades’ worth of students, one band: by 2017, marching in the Macy’s parade had become part of what the Marching 110 simply does — a standing line in the program’s biography.
The 110’s record also sharpens the picture of Ohio’s parade geography. Athens is the parade’s southeastern Ohio outpost — a reminder that the state’s parade history was written as much in its college towns as in its cities. When the Marching 110 led the parade in 2005, the front of America’s Thanksgiving belonged, for one morning, to Athens County.
No Ohio band marches in the 100th parade this Thanksgiving, and Athens’ next turn, whenever it comes, will be hard-earned — the 2017 selection rate, ten bands from 175 applicants, says why. But the Marching 110’s three trips stand in the parade’s own records: 2000, 2005 at the front of the parade, and 2017. Nobody else from Ohio’s universities has a line like it.
Set the 110’s record beside Ohio’s other college bands and its shape sharpens. Miami University went twice — 2003 and 2011 — and held the opposite end of the parade both times, marching last in the line, clearing the way for Santa’s arrival. Ohio State went once, in 2018, in a parade this series opened with. The Marching 110 went three times and took the front. Lead, anchor, lone appearance: Ohio’s three great college bands have between them covered nearly every way a band can march the Macy’s parade — and only Athens’ band did it three times over.
“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.