The Sound Wave
Engineering students named the marching band in the 1950s. The band says it invented something else too.
The marching band at Rockbeach is called The Sound Wave, and it is named that because in the 1950s most of the band were engineering students and they named it themselves.
Three hundred and fifty pieces and more. Band alumni want five hundred. There are not enough sousaphones, which is the kind of constraint that sounds like a joke until you go looking for sousaphones.
And then the claim
Here is what the band says happened, and this book is not in a position to adjudicate it.
When The Sound Wave played, fans stood. They stood the way crowds stand — raggedly, a section at a time, never in unison. And somebody in the press box looked down at a stadium standing up in uneven runs and said it looked like a wave.
Some people at Rockbeach claim that is where the wave came from. Not the Rockbeach wave. The wave. The one done at every stadium on earth.
Other places make the same claim, obviously, and several of them have better paperwork. What is worth noticing is how completely in-character it is that Rockbeach's version of the story runs through a press box remark about a band named by engineers, rather than through anything anybody organized.
Nothing at this school was organized. The colors came from a shop. The mascot's name came from children mispronouncing a mayor. The wave — if it is theirs — came from people standing up badly.
From A Book of Rockbeach History.