Like most of the state’s most colourful tales, the story of Texas’ Big Bertha and a decades-long rivalry over the largest drums in college football began with the bravado of a wealthy oilman.
In 1954, Longhorn Band benefactor Col. D. Harold “Dry Hole” Byrd, a person who had earned an unlucky nickname for drilling wells that produced nothing before eventually making a fortune within the East Texas oilfield, directed UT band director Moton Crockett to acquire the biggest drum he could find.
Like Byrd, Crockett started off on his own expedition before striking it big. Really big. His discovery of certainly one of the biggest drums on this planet languishing in an Indiana warehouse and his subsequent acquisition rekindled certainly one of the good off-field rivalries in sports history between Purdue and Texas.
Purdue had the World’s Largest Drum. Texas had Big Bertha. Each claimed to be the largest, with Purdue claiming its dimensions were a “trade secret,” willfully and somewhat fancifully obscuring the actual dimensions to maintain the mystery alive.
But on Oct. 15, Texas declared an emphatic victory when the Longhorn Band introduced Big Bertha II, a worthy successor to their 100-year-old gargantuan bass drum. Bertha II — a fair Larger Bertha — was unveiled to the world during a centennial celebration for its predecessor, announced at a hefty 9 ½ feet tall and 55 inches wide.
The Longhorns issued a press release headlined: “Big Bertha II, Largest Bass Drum within the World, Debuted at Texas-Iowa State Game.” Texas’ drum was larger than the World’s Largest Drum. It was larger than Missouri’s Big Mo, introduced in 2012 (which, incidentally, was the Rodney Dangerfield of drums, dwarfing each of them at 9 feet tall and 54 inches wide, but never really claiming a spot in the controversy).
Obviously, Bertha II is a booming source of pride for Longhorn Band director Cliff Croomes, himself a former snare drummer within the Texas band.
“Absolutely,” Croomes said. “After we say every part’s larger in Texas, we mean it. Texas had the tallest drum and Purdue had the widest drum. There was a claim to be made on either side. And that has now been settled with Big Bertha II being each taller and wider than either of those drums.”
Bertha II’s surprise debut was a blow to a rivalry a century within the making, reverberating since 1921, when Purdue’s band director, Paul Spotts Emrick, enlisted the Leedy Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis, Indiana, to construct a drum of “inconceivable proportions” in response to newspaper reports. The result was a behemoth often known as the World’s Largest Drum, about 8 feet tall and 48 inches wide, at a value of $800. The drum made its debut when Purdue visited the University of Chicago for a Big Ten game pitting the Boilermakers against legendary coach Amos Alonzo Stagg and the Maroons.
But as is the case in college football, there’s at all times a booster seeking to do something larger and higher for his or her school’s bragging rights. A Chicago alum, Carl D. Greenleaf, who was the president of a rival Indiana music company, C.G. Conn, Ltd., had a son named Leland who played within the university band. He launched into a plan to construct a much bigger drum for the Maroon Marching Band. In 1922, Big Bertha was born, named for a famed German howitzer from World War I. Very similar to at Purdue, it became an enormous attraction at football games and parades.
So how did Texas enter the combo? It involves a saga that began with Chicago dropping football and leaving the Big Ten in 1939, the drum being mothballed in storage within the stadium that eventually became the house of the Manhattan Project experiments by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, the architect of the atomic bomb, resulting in concerns the drum could’ve been radioactive.
“There is no evidence that the drum was any more contaminated than the rest that was stored in that stadium,” said J.P. Kirksey, Texas’ Bertha historian, who noted that it will definitely passed a Geiger test.
The drum was ultimately abandoned back at C.G. Conn before Texas rescued it.
As Texas celebrated its latest showpiece, the drum debate went from regional to national. Fans of each schools have bantered forwards and backwards for years, including a planned 1961 fraternity meetup to come to a decision once and for all whose drum was larger. The Boilermaker contingent arrived in time with their drum while the Longhorns didn’t, allowing Purdue to assert a mythical title. Meanwhile in 2012, Missouri introduced Big Mo, and Texas band officials even claim to not know much about its dimensions.
Purdue, whose drum is so big that they weren’t in a position to fit it through the visitors’ tunnel for a game against Notre Dame last yr (and weren’t allowed to make use of the house tunnel to bring it in, raising the Boilermakers’ hackles), didn’t engage on Texas’ latest claims. But they did have one message for the brand new Larger Bertha, keeping the spirit of petty rivalries alive.
“Tell them our good friends at Notre Dame would like to see it,” said Aaron Yoder, spokesman for the Purdue “All-American” Marching Band.
First, we should always note, that there are larger drums that will also not slot in either tunnel at Notre Dame. The Guinness Book of World Records gives that nod to a “traditional Korean CheonGo drum” in Simcheon-Meon, South Korea that is eighteen feet, 2 inches in diameter, 19 feet, 6 inches tall and weighs 7 tons. A scientific study, meanwhile, says the biggest drum within the universe is definitely the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth, calling it a “complicated musical instrument.”
But this debate is about bass drums. Not space magnets or giant Korean bongos. Thus, Purdue won’t be changing the name of their drum anytime soon. It’s all a part of the fun. The Boilermakers have long tried to deflect and obscure the actual dimensions of the drum, only giving out measurements when it’s mounted, saying it’s over 10 feet tall on its trailer.
“Purdue won’t tell anyone the scale of the drum,” said Neil Boumpani of Boumpani Music Co. in Georgia, who built Missouri’s Big Mo in addition to a six-foot drum for the Harvard band. “They simply keep claiming the largest drum on this planet and so they’re stuffed with it — now, especially.”
Hayleigh Columbo knows the reality. In 2013, as a 23-year-old newspaper reporter in Indiana, a city editor named Dave Smith indulged her curiosity in regards to the mystery of the scale of the Purdue drum, setting her off on a quest to search out out why nobody would tell her its size.
“Why are you saying it is the World’s Biggest Drum if you happen to don’t need to be asked about it?” Columbo said. “It says it on the drum.”
She wrote a story that ran within the Indianapolis Star with the headline, “Purdue’s ‘World’s Largest Drum’ claim an enormous exaggeration.” It was meant to be a lighthearted “investigation” to uncover the reality, but Purdue denied her Freedom of Information request for the drum’s dimensions, claiming they were exempt from records that contain “trade secrets.” After using several unusual methods and sources to calculate the scale, Smith dispatched her to the Tippecanoe County Public Library, where she found a 1921 newspaper with an article on the front page the day after the drum was unveiled, with it spelling out right there that it was “Seven feet three inches in diameter and three feet nine inches wide.”
She was delighted she had gotten to the underside of the case. The readers weren’t.
“We were like, ‘Oh, that is so clever. Individuals are gonna take this in good fun,’ she said. “And that’s not … people were so offended by it. Someone made a parody Twitter account of me saying, ‘I enjoy long walks on the beach and slandering universities.’ It got really intense.”
Purdue fans had been playing defense since 1922, when Bertha I used to be inbuilt Chicago as a challenge to their title. It was tough to go much larger, because Greenleaf bumped into the identical issue as Leedy did when attempting to construct a much bigger drum: The “heads,” or the fabric on the surface of the drum, were constituted of cow hides on the time, and thus you had to search out a cow large enough.
“Our purchasing department made a visit to the Union stock yards of Chicago,” certainly one of the corporate’s officials told an Illinois newspaper within the Twenties, saying the drum cost $1,100. “[We] spent three days on the stock yards looking over the cattle for these hides, and because the bass drum had two heads, it was vital to search out two just alike. … The skin which was used for the pinnacle of this drum measured, when trimmed ready for mounting, 102 inches.”
And yet, the rivalry only lasted for 17 years before Chicago bailed out of major college football and sent the drum packing.
That’s, until Crockett set out to satisfy Byrd’s vision of a showpiece for the band, and heard talk of a really large abandoned drum in Elkhart, Indiana. He visited Greenleaf in C.G. Conn’s warehouse later that yr — 32 years after Greenleaf had built it — and worked out a blockbuster deal.
“He told me he wanted the biggest university in the biggest state to have the biggest drum on this planet,” Crockett wrote in an essay published in a centennial booklet by J.P. Kirksey, a former member of the Longhorn Band and Bertha’s unofficial historian. “He said he couldn’t give it to me. But he could sell it to me — for $1.00. I used to be pleased to pay him the dollar and he wrote out a receipt and gave it to me.”
Crockett rented a U-Haul trailer, covered the drum in a tarp and towed it behind a borrowed 1954 Ford Fairlane all the best way back to Austin, a three-day December road trip. The following summer, Crockett restored Bertha, removing the unsightly maroon lettering and replacing it with the Texas seal painted on the unique heads.
Bertha became a fixture at Texas, serving the Longhorns from 1955-2022. She was utilized in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural parade, saw three AP national championships in 1963, 1969 and 2005 and is taken into account as much a Texas icon as Bevo or the UT Tower.
She was often known as “The Sweetheart of the Longhorn Band,” and despite its picket frame and the wear and tear and tear of being wheeled around, spun on its trailer, and with generations of scholars wailing on it, she held up for a century. It even survived the unique leather heads being slashed after a last-second 7-3 win over Arkansas in 1962 and an accident on I-35 between Austin and Dallas when the vehicle towing Bertha in a trailer was involved in a rollover crash. She emerged unscathed, but future travel was severely limited.
Bertha was endlessly linked with Crockett, who directed the Longhorn Band from 1950 to 1955 and the Longhorn Alumni Band from 1983-1994. He loved the drum a lot, he arrange an endowment for care and maintenance and sorted her the remaining of his life, until his death in 2019.
“Mr. Crockett paid $19,000 in 2007, sent the drum to Remo Drum Company in California and had it completely restored,” Kirksey said. “I mean, every part on it was redone. A number of the wood was replaced since it failed and was rotting. Moton’s comment to me was, ‘I would like to get her ready for an additional 100 years.'”
In 2017, Texas reached out to Ramy Antoun, a longtime drummer who had moved to the Austin area from California and was constructing drums at a studio next to his house. As someone who played drums — he had just finished 4 years of touring with Seal — and studied the evolution of drum manufacturing, including when the Purdue and Chicago drums were built, he was thrilled to get to work on a bit of history.
But he was nervous about what he saw, particularly the outside wood construction, saying there was “ovaling” of the drum because of the straps pushing it right down to hold it on the trailer, causing the wood to flex. While the renovations had given Bertha latest life, Antoun was still concerned any crack within the outer shell could cause it to collapse inward, and was more than likely to occur in front of 100,000 people during a game.
“I just truthfully kept praying that that drum would survive, that nothing could go flawed on the sphere,” Antoun said. “It could occur any day. If you happen to hit it hard, if you happen to spun it weird. And it could occur on the sphere. So I told them you would possibly want to have a look at perhaps a latest option.”
Antoun began dreaming big of one other Bertha. But drums this big don’t come low-cost. Nobody will say what the substitute cost of Bertha II was, but donors saw their “Sweetheart” as a worthwhile cause. The Bertha Centennial Fund was launched to send her off in style.
“Anybody who’s 100 years old deserves to retire,” Croomes said.
In January of this yr, Antoun got the official go-ahead to start constructing Bertha II. He had fallen in love with Texas in his five years within the hills outside Austin. Antoun’s house and the A&F Drums studio where he built Bertha II are situated near Willie Nelson’s ranch, Luck, and are built on plots of land that were formerly owned by Nelson. As well as, Antoun has played drums on just a few of Nelson’s studio recordings.
That may’ve been enough to qualify him as an full-fledged Texan. But now, by constructing the Longhorn Band its latest signature showpiece, that is not doubtful.
“I just felt like we actually got adopted by Texas,” Antoun said. “We will not let Texas down. We will not let Bertha down. We have got to do that in a way that this drum will last one other 100-plus years.”
Boumpani, who formerly was the Duke band director for a few years before creating his own company, says drums this size are extremely difficult to construct. Ten years ago, when he got the decision to construct Big Mo, the one bass drum on this planet that approaches the scale of Bertha II, he thought it will take him six weeks. He had the shell fabricated from fiberglass, which was an expensive shipping nightmare to maintain it from getting bent out of practice. He ended up working all of it out, but there was a number of trial and error, eventually meeting locals who could help him fabricate their very own materials, and got the shell painted at an auto body shop.
“It took me near six months,” Boumpani said. “All the pieces that might go flawed went flawed.”
Antoun said within the five years since he began working on Bertha, he’d already begun imagining and experimenting with how he’d construct a latest one, which allowed him to hit the bottom running along along with his friend Eric Spille of Kentex Metals, a fabrication shop only a bit down the road from him. Together, they studied a video about how Leedy built Purdue’s drum in 1921.
“They speak about their team of engineers that got together. This right here is our team” Spille said, laughing and gesturing to himself and Antoun. “It’s like, ‘Hold my beer. Let’s engineer.'”
First, they developed a proprietary aluminum just like the materials used on airplanes and rockets for Bertha’s outer shell.
“We selected a quarter-inch aluminum,” Spille said. “If you happen to were to put a sheet out it might be 4 feet wide by 30 feet long. Then wrap it right into a circle and that is inevitably the way it became Bertha II’s shell.”
Then Spille built an especially low-profile trailer that carries the drum, complete with handles as wide because the drum that appear to be the horns of a Longhorn steer, and a gearbox designed to appear to be the UT Tower that enables the drum to be rotated on its side to stop incidents like Purdue’s at Notre Dame.
“Possibly Purdue will call and ask us to construct a trolley for his or her drum so it could go sideways,” Antoun joked.
Luckily, the carriage was low enough that Texas did not have to transform the so-called “Bertha door” within the university’s band hall.
“We have got a door that is 12 feet tall that was built for Big Bertha to suit through,” Croomes said. “Big Bertha is 10 feet. Big Bertha II, is correct at 12 feet [on the trailer]. So we were concerned that it wasn’t going to slot in the door. Nevertheless it clears the door by perhaps an inch.”
Boumpani and Antoun each used heads made by Remo, a California company began by drummer Remo Belli, described in his 2016 Recent York Times obit as “a precocious musician who was credited with developing the primary commercially successful synthetic drumheads — saving the hides of countless animals.” The evolution within the materials meant that they may go even larger than the unique drum makers did 100 years ago.
Boumpani said it was a challenge to get Remo to make a head as large as Big Mo’s, at 108 inches, which was the biggest they’d ever made. Antoun, who was signed to the corporate as an artist, needed to do his own cajoling to get them to go even larger.
“I told them, ‘It is time to make history,’ Antoun said. “‘We’ve got a chance to create one other 100-year-old legacy. You wish to be an element of this. I’m telling you, as a friend, as a business I feel in and because the only people on this planet that may do it.’ They usually figured it out, man.”
At 114 by 55 inches, it’s the biggest drum head the corporate has ever created, a no-doubt signifier it’s the largest bass drum on this planet.
For Spille, who’s originally from Kentucky but has been in Texas for greater than 20 years, it was a likelihood for his own love letter to the Lone Star State.
“One in all the thrilling things for me is my wife of 24 years graduated from UT,” Spille said. “So up until this point, I actually wasn’t that cool, but now I’m somewhat cooler in her book. “[Bertha I] was Chicago’s drum. This wasn’t 100% meant for Texas,” he added. “This drum was built here in Texas, with Texas connections, built for Texas.”
Apart from being the largest, Bertha II strikes one other claim: It could play the bottom note ever played on a drum. And with a latest wireless microphone inside it connected to the stadium speakers (one other first), it’ll shake things up.
“The larger the diameter, the lower the note. That is drums,” said Antoun. “If that is the largest bass drum on this planet, then it’ll be the bottom note. I do not know what type of subwoofers they’ve in that stadium. Nevertheless it has the power to interrupt windows. Everybody’s gonna be feeling like there’s an earthquake in there. It’ll rumble.”
Holden Logan, a Longhorn Band member at Texas who’s the section leader for “Bertha Crew,” shall be the guy doing the rumbling for the TCU game this weekend when he swings away for Bertha II’s first appearance in pregame festivities and in the course of the national anthem.
“It’s just such a cool honor to be on this position when it is the 100-year anniversary of a drum that has a lot history with the varsity,” Logan said. “I’m only going to get two home games along with her but I’m hoping that she’ll make some latest memories identical to the old Bertha has loads of memories of her own.”
Bertha I has moved to a everlasting home on display in the varsity’s Athletics Hall of Fame under the north end zone at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium.
Kirksey, who played within the Longhorn Band within the Sixties and was good friends with Crockett, the person who bought, delivered and maintained Big Bertha I for therefore a few years, is a bit wistful in regards to the old drum being a museum piece.
“I’m glad that Mr. Crockett shouldn’t be alive today simply because that was his baby and he would really like to have seen that drum used endlessly and that is why he paid the cash 15 years ago,” Kirksey said. “But that is all history now. I’m OK along with her retirement.”
Even when he still would really like to settle one old rating.
“[The original] Bertha clearly still is the largest drum ever built using leather heads,” Kirksey said. “I do not think there’s any doubt about that amongst anybody anywhere except Purdue with their foibles and fakery.”
Croomes is happy for the brand new era, including that fans can once more see the unique Bertha on display.
“We’re extremely pleased to have each girls within the family,” he said.
So far as the previous champ, Boumpani heard the news last week from a reporter that Big Mo had been eclipsed. As a member of such a small fraternity, he wasn’t upset a lot as he was excited to know all the small print and dimensions, and was impressed that it was fashioned from metal.
But, after his own experience successfully learning to construct big drums on the fly — including hand-delivering Harvard’s latest drum just 45 minutes before their celebratory concert to unveil it — Boumpani hopes the drum wars never end.
“Possibly any individual will want me to make a much bigger one now,” he said. “Tell ’em I’m willing to take the challenge.”