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Bethel Park celebrates 50 years of hoagies

By Katherine Mansfield staff Writer mansfield@observer-Reporter.Com 8 min read
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Courtesy of Shelley Crowe

Band director Chad Thompson and Jeff Knell oversee the Bethel Park Marching Band band camp in August. Thompson, a Bethel Park graduate, sold hoagies as part of the music boosters 50-year-old fundraiser, and now oversees those hoagie sales.

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Photos: Courtesy of Shelley Crowe

The Bethel Park Marching Band takes the field during the annual Bethel Park Band Festival last October. The festival generates some revenue for the boosters, but it’s the hoagie sale that really makes the music program possible.

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Courtesy of Shelley Crowe

Percussionists perform a daring musical act at last year’s Bethel Park Band Festival, hosted at the high school stadium. The festival generates revenue for the Bethel Park Music Boosters, but the most lucrative fundraiser is the 50-year-old hoagie sale.

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Courtesy of Shelley Crowe

The Bethettes cheer their way through Disney World in May, during a band trip made possible through the Bethel Park Music Boosters hoagie sale, which turns 50 this year. Along with the parade, the Bethel Park band attended workshops, networked, and even strapped into rides during their educational Florida trip.

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Courtesy of Shelley Crowe

The Bethel Park Marching Band parades through Disney World during a hoagie sale-sponsored trip to sunny Florida in May. Along with participation in the parade and music workshops, band members networked and enjoyed free time exploring the park.

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Courtesy of Shelley Crowe

The cost of trips to Disney World and other educational experiences are covered by the Bethel Park Music Boosters hoagie sale, which turns 50 this year. Here, the Bethel Park Marching Band parades through Disney World in May 2022.

Roll out the red carpet and strike up the band: This year marks the golden jubilee of Bethel Park Music Booster’s annual hoagie sale.

“Bethel Park is a community that expects excellence in music, and they support it. And that’s why we sell an obscene amount of (hoagies) every year,” said Chad Thompson, Bethel Park marching band director. “When I tell colleagues of mine at other schools we sell somewhere between 15,000 and 17,000 hoagies at each sale, they think it’s the total for the year. I’m like, no. When you factor in how many people live in Bethel Park … half the community could be getting a hoagie every one of those sales.”

That’s because the hoagie sale, which accounts for more than 95% of the music boosters revenue, is more than just a fundraiser, Thompson said. It’s tradition.

Hoagie sales began 50 years ago this year. Back then, small groups of students performed in neighborhoods before taking orders from residents, and proceeds benefitted the marching band (they now benefit all of Bethel Park’s music programs, including chorus and orchestra).

Then, hoagie assembly took hours. Parents shredded lettuce by hand before drip-drying the leafy greens, and students themselves cut the foil in which a few thousand handcrafted sandwiches were wrapped.

Today, the music boosters purchases pre-shredded lettuce from suppliers, but students and parents still slice fresh tomatoes, and hoagies are handcrafted. Though music boosters sells several times the number of submarines it sold in the 1970s, hoagie assembly takes only a few hours.

“It’s kind of a well-oiled machine,” said Thompson, a Bethel Park graduate who himself sold hoagies. “To be brutally honest, I don’t think the hoagie sales have changed very much. Now, you know, instead of calling somebody on a landline to say how many hoagies you ordered … we use a Google form. But the actual sale itself: 200 kids show up to form assembly lines to make the hoagies. How we structure and set up the cafeteria at our middle school has been pretty much the same for those 50 years.”

More than 1,000 Blackhawks in grades 5 to 12 are enrolled in band, chorus, orchestra or a music elective, and most look forward to sophomore year, when they can participate in the excitement that is hoagie selling.

Each student is responsible for meeting a sales quota, which changes year to year. Students establish their client bases in 10th grade by making connections in the community or inheriting a customer list from siblings and friends.

“We all have our hoagie lists, and all the seniors, they find a freshman who’s up and coming and getting ready to sell hoagies. We’ll pass on that hoagie list that we created,” said student director Rebekah Tupper, whose BP band experience prepared her for college music auditions. “I know my brother got a hoagie list from one of his friends who graduated. I got a hoagie list. So then we had two hoagie lists and so we were able to pass off customers to people who needed it.”

Tupper said students and hoagie customers forge relationships, and names of repeat buyers fill most lists. Often, legacy customers and their children sold hoagies, and now they place orders to support music programs – like the annual Bethel Park Band Festival – which they still attend.

“It’s a sense of community that I have never seen, not growing up here, and teaching in a different district,” said Janice Brusoski, proud band mom and president of Bethel Park Music Boosters.

Brusoski said her son, Keegan’s, hoagie list dates back to the sale’s foundation.

“My hoagie list is 50 years old, from my neighborhood,” she said, adding her older sons passed their hoagie lists on to her youngest. “Keegan’s doing it. (Customers) ask questions about Liam and Decklan. They ask, is it still done the same way? Everyone who eats a hoagie is just flabbergasted at the quality. It tastes just like they remember, and that’s so nostalgic.”

When hoagie sales first began, Bethel Park Music Boosters offered one “regular” sub stacked high with with bologna, ham and salami. Offerings have expanded to include a special sub, perfect for freezing, and a turkey hoagie.

More than a decade ago, the music boosters introduced its best-selling “mission hoagie.”

“A number of years ago, a student … posed the idea of a mission hoagie,” said Thompson. “We had a lot of the legacy customers who wanted to continue to support the music program, but didn’t necessarily want to eat the hoagies or get them … for health reasons. They floated this idea of selling a mission hoagie, where someone could buy a hoagie and then we would work with a local food bank and then donate that hoagie to the food bank.”

Mission hoagies are purchased by customers and donated to local charities, including the Washington County Food Bank and City Mission.

“That’s a great thing, you know, because it’s feeding the community, literally,” said Thompson.

Community and tradition are the threads that bind 50 years of hoagie sales. Camaraderie within Bethel’s music program is the third tenant of the annual fundraiser. Students compete to sell the most hoagies, Brusoski said, but they’re fiercely supportive of fellow music mates.

“We’ll have a number of kids that sell well over their quota. And if they do, and they know a friend of theirs is struggling, then they’ll share a customer to help them out,” said Thompson. “That speaks to the family atmosphere.”

The band is a family that sells and assembles hoagies together, practices together, performs and travels together. The annual fundraiser sends students to Disney World every three years, where the band plays in a parade, performs for adjudication (formal judgment from third parties) and workshops with students from around the country.

In between Disney trips, the band travels to a beach one year and a city the next – lately, that city is Chicago – so students can connect with music peers and industry leaders, and gain experience performing before audiences of strangers.

“Being really honest, when we play a concert here, we’re playing for our friends, and our parents are going to love it no matter what. When you get to go outside of the community’s walls, the comfort of the community and make somebody who didn’t know you before feel something, that’s special,” Thompson said. “That’s a very realistic experience.”

That real-world experience led Thompson to a career in music.

“I remember sitting on Heinz Hall Stage – again, I’m outside of Bethel Park – standing next to the PSO principal percussion. Feeling that exhilaration. And I was like, this is what I want to do,” he said. “I so vividly remember that moment. I tried to picture my life without that, without feeling that thing that we feel when music comes together, when it strikes something, it provokes an emotion. (I thought,) this is what I have to do.”

The experience gained through trips and workshops sponsored by the hoagie sales gave Tupper confidence that she, too, can have a successful career in music. She recently auditioned for spots at colleges, and credits her band education at Bethel Park for the wonderful college application experiences.

“When I started as a freshman, I was terrified of playing in front of people,” Tupper said. “The more you do it, the more comfortable you get with it. It’s such a supportive environment. Nobody’s going to laugh or make fun of me if I play a wrong note. Everybody teaches differently. (Band) just provides that opportunity to learn from different people and see other people’s different point of view on music. The hoagie sales, they make this all possible.”

To thank the community for 50 years of hoagies, the music boosters is slipping golden tickets Willy Wonka-style into 50 orders per sale. Folks with luck like Charlie Bucket will receive one free hoagie the following sale (there are five sales total).

Those whose winning ticket arrives tucked between the foil and their sandwich during the last sale of the 2022-23 school year have the option of cashing in for either a free hoagie next year or a commemorative T-shirt.

“This 50th anniversary of this hoagie is not for us, it’s for the community,” said Brusoski.

“We want to do something to say thank-you for 50 years,” added Bob Doman, publicity outreach for Bethel Park Music Boosters. “It’s crazy the bond that this music department has with this community. The music program means so much to our community.”

Orders for the first hoagie sale of the school year closed Sept. 11. Folks who missed the first round of hoagies can place their order between now and Nov. 5, with delivery slated for Nov. 12.

“(The community), they’re an essential component to what we’re doing. That hoagie, as meaningless as it might look on the surface, it’s so, so important to continue providing what we do,” said Thompson. “The single most valuable thing is that it breeds authenticity in the music program” by affording students opportunities to learn both within and without the classroom.

For more on the hoagie sale or Bethel Park Music Boosters, visit https://bpmusicboosters.com.

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