By Ruth Ford — Correspondent
Benjamin Sprague has history in his bones.
His paternal grandfather was a Navy pilot, and his father was in the Navy Reserves. But for Sprague, a Concord native, learning about the Naval Academy from a scout leader cemented his interest in serving his country.
Today, Sprague, 20, is a junior midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy. He is also a member of the Naval Academy Drum and Bugle Corps, created in 1914 and performing about 100 times a year — for football games, parades, pep rallies, and every day while 4,500 Naval midshipmen, from freshmen to seniors, form a brigade and march into lunch.
“We’re very much a public-facing group,” says Sprague, who plays the xylophone, along with the tenor drums, for the corps.
Sprague describes the 20 percussionists in the Drum and Bugle Corps as a family within a family. “It’s very tight-knit,” says Sprague. “These are the people I know the best.”
Coming home
Next year, Midshipman Sprague will join the Naval Drum and Bugle Corps and perform in Concord’s 250th revolutionary anniversary parade on Saturday, April 19, 2025. For the Concord-Carlisle High School graduate, it will also be a homecoming: He’ll be marching in the corps he used to applaud in his youth.
“Growing up watching the parade as a kid, I was really struck by the history of the town I was living in and all these historic events that we learned about in school,” he said.
History and military services have long been essential in Sprague’s life.
During the Vietnam War, his grandfather flew an S2 Tracker on reconnaissance missions. Sprague remembers being allowed to dress up in his grandfather’s flight suit and helmet as a child.
Though his grandfather was always reluctant to discuss his time in the Navy, Sprague’s father was willing to share stories about being an air crewman in the Navy Reserves, flying on helicopters and training missions from San Diego, and daring one another to land on smaller and smaller plots of land down the border of Mexico.
Dropped-off drums
When he was in elementary school, Sprague started playing the piano and joined the Cub Scouts. After the piano, he switched to the viola. One day, as his scout troop was helping at Concord’s annual drop-off-swap-off event, he saw someone dropping off a pair of drums. Sprague claimed the drums, his parents set them up in the basement, and he started taking weekly lessons with the Instrumental Music School of Carlisle-Concord.
At CCHS, Sprague joined the concert band, which performed sold-out holiday shows every December. One moment, the musicians would be playing a piece from the 1600s; the next minute, they would be doing a cover of a pop song written the previous year.
“That’s what made the concert fun,” he recalls.
This Thanksgiving, Sprague made plans to visit his old Boy Scout troop and four local high schools to talk to students about applying to the Naval Academy. He was also scheduled to record a public service announcement for WIQH, CCHS’s radio station.
Then, he’ll be back to march in Concord’s Patriots Day parade on April 19.
Sprague says he is looking forward to the parade and joining his fellow corps members in marching through his hometown. The last time he did so, in 2023, “it was a little overwhelming,” he recalls. But at the same time, he felt a lot of pride representing the Naval Academy, marching with students “from a school I worked so hard to get into.”
