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Pierce Scholarship
A PIERCE FAMILY LEGACY
BY KATIE PIERCE, ERIC PIERCE, AND DAVID ALLEN
Last spring, Illinois Bands named Mike Tuleo as the first winner of the Sally Emrich Pierce and C. David Pierce Scholarship. The new scholarship endowment was established by David Pierce BME ’54, MME ’55 along with family members and friends in loving memory of Sally Emrich Pierce BME ’53, MME ’55 (1932–2021). Married for sixty-seven years, Sally and David continued their contributions to the worlds of music and education for decades to come upon leaving the Illinois Bands program.
The new scholarship will be awarded each year to an undergraduate student studying music education who works on the Illinois Bands student staff and displays outstanding musicianship.
David and Sally both played in the Illinois Concert Band directed by Mark Hindsley. Sally was placed as principal baritone as a freshman. David, a year younger, started in one of the other bands on trombone. David was moved to the Concert Band his junior year. David and Sally both worked at the original band building. Sally was a copyist, handwriting parts for Mark Hindsley and David worked in the properties department with Eldon Oyen. They first met when David surprised Sally in the hallway with a cymbal crash! David regretting it immediately, seeing how Sally was so startled.
At first, Sally rebuffed David’s requests to go out on a date with him. She replied to him, “No strings attached.” For several rehearsals after hearing this response, David carried a string with him to every rehearsal. During the rests and stoppage in rehearsals, David could be seen playing with a piece of string. Finally, Sally relented. They were married in December 1953.
Sally received the A.A Harding Award in 1953, with her name engraved onto a plaque that is still on display in the hallway of the Harding Band Building. Her other accomplishments at Illinois included her participation and service as president of the Alpha Lambda Delta chapter of Sigma Alpha Iota and her participation in the Oratorio Society. The rest of her music career focused on teaching piano and baritone, while also playing baritone in the Woodstock City Band for a spectacular thirty years. In 2012, composer Timothy Mahr composed “Löwenzahn March” on a special commission by Sally’s family for her eightieth birthday.
C. David Pierce (seated) with son Eric and granddaughters Katie, Meghan, and Margot
(L to R) Katie Pierce, David Pierce (by W.E.G. Thomas Photography), Sally and David Pierce in 1953 (by W.E.G Thomas Photography) caught on television. The game was the first-ever national telecast of a college bowl game. On the return trip from the Rose Bowl, the football band members pooled their lunch money to take a detour to the Grand Canyon—a decision David says was worth every penny.
After getting his master’s degree, David worked in a small school for a year. At the end of that first year, in the was drafted. He served in the United States Army for eighteen months. Upon his discharge, David and Sally moved to Woodstock, Illinois where David taught middle school band and eventually became the director of bands at Woodstock High School. He taught there until his retirement in 1988. David was also the director of the Woodstock City Band for over twenty-five years.
All four of David and Sally’s sons went on to study at Illinois and were in the Illinois Bands. David Michael (BM ’79, MM ’80, DMA ’86), John (BM ’80, MM ’82), and Eric (BM ’83, MM ’85) graduated with degrees in bassoon, voice, and oboe, and Kirk (BS ’86) studied computer science. David Michael joins his mother, Sally, on the wall in the Harding Band Building as another recipient of the A.A. Harding Award.
Almost seventy years later, Kathryn (Katie) Pierce, granddaughter of David and Sally, enrolled in the Illinois music education program and is soon to graduate with the same degree as both David and Sally. She walks by Sally’s plaque on the walls of the Harding Band Building, and plays and works in some of the same rooms where her grandparents met and worked for years. Katie not only strives to uphold the tradition, excellence, and loyalty to her school, but to her grandparents who came before. The world she will enter as a teacher will be vastly different than the one David and Sally entered, but the Illinois legacy is and always will be, steadfast.
David also played in the football band known today as the Marching Illini. The football band went to the 1952 Rose Bowl, where David remembers leading cheers from the front of the band, cheers that were
