Submitted art from WGH Fleming Legacy Band director Robert Fleming is shown during one of the Warren G. Harding High School band practices.

WARREN — Taskmaster, militant and musical genius are some of the terms former students use to describe band director Robert Fleming, who led the Warren G. Harding High School band from the late 1950s through the 1960s.

Fleming, who died on Christmas day 2011, became band director in 1958, alongside assistant director Clinton E. Foster and John S. Kobasiar Jr., and elevated the Panther Band into a musical powerhouse that achieved both statewide and national fame.

Fleming’s staunch leadership, shaped from an Army background, is credited with creating a culture among his students that demanded nothing short of exceptional instrumentation.

“We learned a work ethic that we carried for life,” former band member Jim Brodell said.

Another former band member, Rick Bartunek, added: “Fleming was knowledgeable and knew how to put together a band from scratch, a disciplined person, but he was able to balance that with caring about each student and making sure they got the most out of their experience, and helped them develop a passion for music.”

Bartunek and Brodell said they owe their careers in music to Fleming’s influence. They are among a large class of former students who went on to pursue successful careers in music.

During Fleming’s time as director, the Panther band performed for crowds in the thousands at home, and was invited to perform for tens of thousands at NFL halftime shows for the Cleveland Browns and Buffalo Bills, and at the College All-Star game in Chicago.

“We felt like rock stars,” Brodell said, recalling the band’s performance at the all-star game. He said not a single person was seated during the performance.

LEGACY GROUP

Brodell, president of the Warren G. Harding Band Historical Association: The Fleming Legacy, along with vice president Bartunek, are working with several former band members to preserve the history associated with the Fleming era, some 50 years later.

The group came to fruition in late 2021.

Joyce Ormsby Meyer and Jean Neidhart Hood, both directors of collections and communications for the organization and members of the band in the late 1960s, had the idea to reunite their former bandmates to find, preserve and protect the legacy of what some call the “greatest high school band that ever lived.”

The committee began with a few members in January and February but as word of mouth spread of what the group is doing, the project quickly expanded in membership by March of this year — culminating in the committee’s first meeting in June, which Brodell said really lifted the project off the ground.

“Our committee has invested thousands of hours and dollars breathing life into a band that deserves to be remembered,” Brodell, a saxophonist, said.

HELP WITH HISTORY

When Meghan Reed, director of the Trumbull County Historical Society, was approached by the group to form a partnership, she said as an organization that views itself as the keepers of Warren’s identity, she was excited to take part.

“Going through band members’ high school experience — the formations, instruments they played — also from a cultural standpoint of what high school bands were doing at the time — the clothes, the dynamics — it was something special what they accomplished,” Reed said.

So far, she said, most of what’s been collected has included newspaper clippings, pictures and other artifacts kept by family and friends over the past few decades.

Going live with a Fleming Legacy website has sparked an outpouring of people who kept items, such as a Harding Panther bass drum head, a signed photo of Fleming and even a black-and-white marching band uniform complete with a hat and plume.

LOOKING FOR FILM

But the key, Brodell said, is to find the marching band films he called “a visual testament to the greatness of Fleming and his musicians.”

Former band member Tony Marshalek recalled Fleming observing a man who would record football games on 16mm film, and deciding to utilize the footage to go over past performances with Foster.

“They would show them to us. But talking to Rick in the early days of them doing this, it didn’t happen very often. They just artistically wanted to see the vision from high up in the stadium as a visual tool to see how their shows looked, how our formations came out, to prepare for the next show,” Marshalek said.

These recordings were done on film in the early 1960s but Marshalek said eventually in the 1970s the median for filming switched to videotape.

“Those were so expensive back then that people typically recorded over tapes when they felt they didn’t need the previous footage,” Marshalek said.

To this day, he questions how much footage may have been lost as a result.

Finding such footage would prove to be a tough task.

“Twenty years ago, we were told our marching performances had been destroyed in a building flood,” Brodell said.

Sometimes, slowly, footage was recovered just by pure luck.

In 1994, Marshalek was working as a media coordinator in Warren City Schools. The department was readying for a move that summer when he discovered “droves of boxes” filled with 16 mm footage.

“Looking through them one day, I grabbed the film and placed it on the projector. I was shocked to discover a silent copy of our 1964 band performance during the ABC-broadcast Chicago All-Star Game,” Marshalek said.

Marshalek kept the footage as a memento. He put it on VHS videotape to share among former band members and eventually placed it on YouTube.

“Finding the silent footage was great, but it’s no way to explain the sound of the actual announcer doing the game. It makes a difference to hear him touting the new uniforms, our 14,000-capacity stadium back home, the way the community supported us. When I saw it initially, I was happy that I didn’t just pitch it in the dumpster.”

Eventually, when the committee was formed, he brought the footage to the group.

IS THERE MORE?

There were, however, lingering questions about the existence of even more performance footage.

Rumors circulated that films were stored in various buildings near the old fairgrounds on Panther Avenue, once a popular place to stash old boxes.What could be uncovered would surely come by grace of surviving decades of building moves and demolitions.

A box of tapes marked “Send to Lynn Marlin,” a band director at Harding in the 1990s and now a committee member on the restoration project, later resurfaced.

The footage sat collecting cobwebs, after previously being moved from the old Washington Elementary School building on Niles Road that was used for storage.

“Rick (Bartunek) knew a lot of people in the music world and started asking around. Roughly a year ago, they showed up in a box at the historical society and another box given to Tony Ferderber, that was found in an old building that was torn down on the school property. It was given to Marshalek for review, which unearthed a version of the 1964 Chicago All-Star Game with sound.

The next step was salvaging more than six hours worth of footage. After some research, Marshalek took batches of films to Stilson Video in Chagrin Falls, which digitizes film. All in all, 25 pieces of footage depicting WGH halftime shows from 1962 through 1969 film was cleaned, spliced and digitized frame-by-frame.

But Marshalek said the majority of the films do not contain audio — making it hard to tell what exactly was being played during the performances.

Still, the films did feature title cards that showed the performance dates of each tape, which Marshalek was able to piece together by thumbing through archives of Tribune Chronicle articles to gather a list of songs.

One of the most notable performances was found — a Cleveland Browns halftime show in 1969.

Some audio, he said, was salvaged after having a worker tweak the noise levels and adjust the audio. This, along with several of pieces of archived film, can be found on the committee’s website: https://sites.google.com/trumbullcountyhistory.org/warren-g-harding-alumni-band/home?authuser=1.