We’re going to play Hey Pachuco and Sir Duke and some of the best hits we’ve played on the Fourth of July. “Our town square performance and our parade, we’re going to take more of a pop and rock approach and play tunes people are going to recognize. The band will perform three days in the Normandy region. When we went to Hawaii, we spent about $8000.00 on luggage costs to get all the instruments to Hawaii and back.”
#HEY PACHUCO PEP BAND DRIVERS#
But we’re still getting ready to incur luggage costs and gratuities for bus drivers and things like that. “You know, right now we’ve paid off the actual trip itself. They’ve worked hard for two years and raised money to help pay for the trip. We talked with Bob O’Connor who was the principal of Park City High School at the time and Ember Conley who was the superintendent at the time and both of them said you would be stupid not to go.” We planned on waiting another couple of years. We had not intended on traveling this year. “We were invited to perform at it based on our performance and our student’s professionalism and stuff like that when we were in Pearl Harbor in 2016.
Taking a large group of students to Europe involves significant planning as well as funding. Park City High School Assistant Band Director, Bret Hughes says normally, a band would apply to perform at the D-Day event. It was the start of a long trek across the European continent to defeat Adolf Hitler’s troops and liberate Europe. On June 6, 1944, 160,000 allied troops invaded a 50-mile stretch of the Normandy coast. It’s the only band from Utah that will perform and it’s one of 13 bands invited.
The Park City High School Marching Band will perform in France next month as part of the 75th anniversary celebration of D-Day.