Launched in 1919 by William Horlick, the inventor of malted milk, Horlick Athletic Field has hosted two NFL teams, the Racine Belles professional women's baseball team (immortalized in A League of Their Own)" and thousands of semiprofessional- and industrial-league games. But it is the drum and bugle corps shows that have made the stadium one of the most iconic landmarks in its corner of the state. From an archive of fond recollection and painstaking record, Alan Karls has pieced together a history of Horlick Athletic Field that justifies the reverence that drum and bugle corps have felt for the place for almost a century."

Alan Karls is a fourth-generation Racine native and was often in Horlick Athletic Field for high school football games, drum and bugle corps shows and semi-professional football games. A member of the Racine Scouts and the Boys of '76, his other drum and bugle corps credentials include instructor, judge and journalist. Steve Vickers has been intimately involved with drum and bugle corps activity for over fifty years, first as a marching member of the Hutchinson, Kansas Sky Ryders and, for the last forty years, as publisher of Drum Corps World. John Dickert has been mayor of Racine, Wisconsin, since 2009.