A service for former Mustang Band Director Irving Dreibrodt will be held today at 2 p.m. in the Highland Park United Methodist Church. Dreibrodt, who died Monday, was the director of the band for 25 years.
“He was really an innovator,” said Assistant Band Director Tommy Tucker. “A lot of the stuff he did here … nobody was doing it anywhere.”
Dreibrodt, or “Coach” to most of his students, came on as director in 1958. It was under his tenure that the Mustang Band became known as “The Hub of SMU Spirit.” He retired in 1983 after helping teh band win numerous awards.
“One of his sayings always was … ‘Catch their eye first and the ear will follow,'” said Mustang Band Director Don Hopkins.
Tucker added that “anybody who either played in his band or worked with him … he made an impact on,” and that “he was very determined to get the results he wanted from his band and from everybody that worked with him.”
Dreibrodt also oversaw the recording of the band’s first album, the introduction of the Pony Battle Cry, and the honor of playing for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
“He really believed very strongly – even though he wasn’t an alumni – in the traditions of the band and the whole school,” said Hopkins.
Both Tucker and Hopkins graduated from SMU and were in the band during Dreibrodt’s time at SMU.
“I came back specifically because I wanted to work with this group,” said Hopkins. “It [the band] meant that much to me when I was here and I wanted to give back,” he said.
Tucker said other band alumni have a similarly strong connection.
“We’ve heard from a lot of alumni who haven’t been around for quite some time who are making the time to come back to Dallas just to pay tribute to him,” he said.
And that doesn’t mean just sitting in the pews for his service.
“The band and alumni band members will be singing ‘Varsity’ during the service and then doing kind of a mini-concert afterwards outside the church,” said Tucker.
And if you’d like to pay your respects, he recommends you get there early.
“I’m not trying to discourage people from coming,” he said, but “it’s going to be a pretty full service so I don’t know that there will be a lot of extra room.”
The crowd should also be a spirited one. According to Hopkins, Dreibrodt educated his students extremely well on the ins and outs of SMU spirit.
So well, in fact, that Hopkins knew more than the leaders at his orientation program when he came back to SMU to work.
“I was telling them more than they knew,” he said. “That was real important to us that we know our lineage and our university’s as an organization.He made sure we knew that and it was important to him,” he said.
