Things were very different then. Horn lines in drum corps’ earlier days could be a male domain, especially on the instructional side.

Imagine stepping into that arena as a young woman in the late 1950s, a high school choral teacher who also happened to be a trumpet major.

“I did not want anybody in the drum corps world to know that those kids had me for an instructor because I thought it might be putting them in the hole in the beginning,” said Sandra Opie.

Decades before she was inducted into the DCI Hall of Fame in 1995, Sandra Opie found an avocation and a partner in Great Bend, Kansas. She and husband Glen turned the Argonne Rebels Drum & Bugle Corps into national champions on the strength of a magnificent horn line, but it wasn’t quick or easy.

First, they gave a musical aptitude test to every fifth grader in the school district, then they went door-to-door talking to parents.

“We gave this test and we got a hold of kids who had really strong musical aptitudes,” Opie said. “Plus, I later found out they were all honor students. They were all just cream-of-the-crop kids.”

And those kids were willing to work.

“I gave all of them private lessons every week,“ Opie said. “I practiced with them before school at eight o'clock in the morning, ‘til 8:30 or 9, depending on where they went to school. I practiced with them in small groups, as they learned after school. I lived, ate, and slept drum corps.”

So imagine the buzz when this little-known corps from Kansas started turning heads in the ‘60s with a rapidly-improving horn line. And then word gets out that there’s a woman at the helm.

The Argonne Rebels won back-to-back American Legion national titles in 1971 and ’72 with sizzling horn scores made up of very demanding music. The corps finished fifth overall at the first DCI Championship in Whitewater, Wisconsin in 1972, but was consistently at or near the top of the brass scoring caption in every major contest in the early ‘70s.

Sandra Opie answered another call in drum corps in the 1970s, becoming a DCI adjudicator — the first female brass judge on the DCI Tour.

Gender challenges aside, this lifelong teacher found she didn’t enjoy seeking out errors and taking away points, which is the way the adjudication system ranked and rated performers during this time period.

“I didn't like it,” Opie said of her judging career. “I wanted to be encouraging … That [system] doesn't look at music from a positive standpoint, what it does to work for your whole being. And so that part was not good. I didn't like it.”

Still, she paved the way for other women to follow.

Opie doesn’t consider herself a trailblazer, but what a trail she left.

“The whole experience was something when after it was all over and everything, I thought, “Wow. How did all that happen to me?”