Continued...

     Those were the years when young people across the world were shaking society, not only with sit-ins and rallies, but also with activism and a new idealism that found its voice in music. That idealism splintered into a plethora of forms and expressions, far beyond the “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” clichés. It was the beginning of the Peace Corps, and it included the youth at the Michiganc onferences who were embracing the challenge of “Modernizing America.” There was much in society that needed to be remedied, and at a time of “Down with this,” and “Down with that,” the idea of “Up with People” resonated.
     David Allen (no relation to Herb), a talented songwriter, wrote about the show in Up with People’s Musical Inheritance (2000): “They sensed they had created a promising musical review. Yet none could foresee that Sing Out ‘65, soon to be renamed Up with People, was destined within a year to become a runaway hit on three continents. Nor did any of them dream that, from its opening performance on August 7 in Stamford, Connecticut the show would be in continuous production for the next thirty-four years, making it one of the longest running musical productions in America, and possibly the world, in the 20th century.”
     By the time Pete Rozelle telephoned in 1974, Paul Colwell was creative director, Ralph was production director, Steve was director of admissions, and Herb Allen was music director of a program that annually was taking more than seven hundred college-age students in multiple casts on a one-year tour to stage the production and learn about themselves and the world.
     Steve telephoned four people that night: Paul, Ralph, Herb, and Blanton Belk.
Belk, a naval officer in World War II, had chaired the student leadership conferences.
When Up with People incorporated in 1968 as a nonprofit educational
company, he became its president. A meeting was called for the next morning.
     Ralph recognized that a radically new Super Bowl halftime concept was
called for. Typically, marching bands played and created formations, and sometimes
floats appeared. “We were not a marching band and obviously needed to
invent an entirely different kind of production,” he recalled.
     To get a handle on what lay ahead, Ralph and Steve flew to New Orleans in January 1975 to watch Super Bowl IX. The halftime show was a tribute to Duke Ellington with Mercer Ellington and the Grambling University bands.
     “The game was at the old Tulane University stadium, an iron relic from early in the century,” Ralph said. “The halftime was not particularly memorable, but the size and scope of the event was huge. Producing a spectacular program that would showcase Up with People with a bicentennial theme seemed daunting, to say the least.”
     “We knew it would take exceptional creativity and imagination,” Steve
recalled.
     As it turned out, the initial imagination came from the National Football League. The NFL’s technical manager enthused to Ralph in an early planning session, “My dream is to have musicians, singers, and dancers blanket the field with color.”
     A two-hundredth-birthday composition had already begun to germinate in Paul’s mind from a thought of Ralph’s: “Two hundred years and just a baby.” The production team was soon in place. Herb Allen would conduct the cast and orchestra. Steve Rokowski, who had joined Up with People at age seventeen four years earlier, would be the technical director. And dancer/choreographer Lynne Morris, who arranged the dance corps for the Dean Martin Show and had just designed the Broadway musical Mother Earth, would create a completely new concept for the very first Super Bowl halftime spectacular.
     Morris had become Up with People’s choreographer in 1971. Recognized as an entertainment genius, she had the ability to utilize large numbers of people in seamless movement on stages. Yet this was a stage beyond even her experience, so she contacted a young director of a championship drum and bugle corps to help her design the movement of hundreds of performers on a football field. Lynne and Ralph concluded they would need two stages: one at the midfield sideline for the musicians, and one at centerfield for the featured dancers.
     What happened outside the Super Bowl was as dramatic as the show itself. Typically, Up with People casts toured half the year in North America and the other half overseas. But during the bicentennial “season,” a performance schedule blanketing America was arranged. Nine casts with members from forty states and seventeen countries were on tour in the United States that year. Into that mix came the preparations for the Super Bowl.
     “We divided the field into sections,” choreographer Morris explained, “so that wherever they were, a cast could rehearse. It was like fitting puzzles together in different parts of the country and then coming to Miami to put all the little puzzles together into one great big one.”
     “We were attempting two revolutionary concepts,” Ralph said. “One was to choreograph the free movement of four hundred performers using an entire football field; the second was to use super amplified sound to bring the power of the music to the stadium. The whole show would be without tape, nothing recorded.”

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